SARAJEVO: More than two thousand people turned out in Sarajevo Sunday for the city’s first Gay Pride march to protest hate crimes suffered by the LGBT community in Bosnia.
More than 1,100 officers, including riot police, sealed off the route of the march through the city centre to protect participants from a counter protest by about 150 people.
Activist Lejla Huremovic celebrated the fact that members of the LGBT community had been able to make themselves more visible. “Today, we say louder than before that we will fight with bravery and dignity for our lives (to be)…free of fear and violence,” she said.
“More than 2,000 people took part in the march and it passed off without incident,” police spokesman Mirza Hadziabdic told AFP. Members of the LGBT community and others walked for 1,500 metres starting from a monument commemorating the liberation of the city at the end of WWII. Among those taking part were ambassadors from several western countries, including Britain, France, Italy and the United States.
Demonstrators carried the gay community’s rainbow flags, blew whistles, played drums and shouted slogans along the route. The march ended with a rally in front of the Parliament.
“We demand a society in which we will together fight against violence, hatred, isolation and homophobia,” said Branko Culibrk, another marcher. There were gay festival s Sarajevo in 2008 and again in 2014, at which radical Islamists and thugs attacked people taking part. But this was the first Gay Pride march in the Bosnian capital.
Bosnia, a country of 3.5 million people, officially bans discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, but it does not recognise partnerships between people of the same sex.
“We cannot have civil unions,” 21-year-old Matej Vrebac noted to AFP.
“The day we will speak of adopting children is still far off. But today is the first Bosnian Gay Pride and we hope in the future to speak about all that,” he said. Some Muslim associations and political parties representing Muslims had urged the organisers of the march to call it off.
On Saturday, a few hundred people took the same route in a march in favour of the traditional family, while on Sunday, around 150 people gathered in a park
to protest the Gay Pride march. – AFP
