Online Hate Speech Erupts Ahead of Bosnian LGBT Pride March

Sarajevo Pride March in 2021. Photo: EPA/FEHIM DEMIR.

After the announcement that the seventh Bosnian LGBTQ+ Pride March in the capital Sarajevo will take place on Saturday, hate speech comments calling it a “march of the sick” and a “march of shame” have again proliferated on social media, organisers said.

Lejla Huremovic, a member of the Pride March organising committee, told BIRN that such hate-filled rhetoric is repeated year after year. Direct threats have been reported to the police, although no response has been received, she added.

“I think it is very important to draw society’s attention to the fact that people are responsible for spreading hate speech, that laws regulating hate speech and threats exist in Bosnia and Herzegovina, that this should not go unpunished, and that society and people in Bosnia and Herzegovina should understand that their words carry weight and can lead to serious consequences,” Huremovic said.

Huremovic warned that online hate speech and death threats can spill over into everyday life and lead to violent attacks on LGBTQ+ people.

“Society is just as responsible for that as [state] institutions are,” she said.

This year, the Sarajevo Cantonal Court issued its first final verdict for discrimination against LGBTQ+ people. It convicted a former member of the Sarajevo Canton Assembly, Samra Cosovic-Hajdarevic, over a post on her Facebook account in 2019 about the announcement of the first Pride march in the country.

According to the verdict confirmed by the Cantonal Court, Cosovic-Hajdarevic wrote a public post on Facebook saying that Pride marches “aim to ruin the state and its people”.

She added: “I want such people to be isolated and kept as far away as possible from our children and society. Let them go somewhere else and build their own city, state, laws, and rights that no one will contest. But not here!”

Earlier this year, the Basic Court in Banja Luka handed down a first-instance verdict declaring that top Serb political leader Milorad Dodik discriminated against LGBTQ+ people in some of his public statements in 2023.

Dodik, who was serving as the president of the Serb-led Republika Srpska entity at the time. The verdict prohibits Dodik from taking any further actions that violate or could violate the right to equal treatment of members of the LGBTQ+ community.

This year’s LGBTQ+ march in Sarajevo will be held under the slogan “Sve nam boje dobro stoje” (“Every Colour Suits Us Well”) to convey a message of diversity.

“In a time of divisions, this message brings us back to the basic truth that only together we can build a fairer, more open, and safer society for everyone,” the organisers said in a statement.