The Prime Minister of Republika Srpska (RS), the Bosnian Serb-majority region within the country, said on Monday that media has paid too much attention to Sunday’s gathering of Chetniks in Visegrad, saying the country has to regulate such gatherings.
Dressed in black and wearing Chetnik insignia, some 200 members of the so-called Ravna Gora movement commemorated the day their WWII leader Dragoljub Mihajlovic was caught in 1946 and executed.
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They laid flowers in front of a monument dedicated to fallen Serb soldiers from the 1992-95 war.
According to Yugoslav demographers, Chetnik forces killed in WWII at least 33,000 Muslims and 32,000 Croats in one of the most gruesome episodes of Yugoslav history.
During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, Serb nationalists wearing Chetnik insignia expelled 14,000 Muslim residents of Visegrad and killed some 1,700.
Bosniak and international officials condemned the event and called for steps to be taken for such gathering not to occur any more. Some called it fascism.
Bosnia has no law foreseeing the ban of such gatherings because lawmakers could never agree what constitutes a fascistic symbol. Bosnian Serb politicians prevented every attempt to include Chetnik insignia.
“I think that this so-called ‘problem’ is receiving too much attention from the media, said RS Prime Minister, Radovan Viskovic.
“Believe me. In the end, I am in favour of Bosnia and Herzegovina adopting a law which will solve this issue for everyone equally,” he said.
Such cases exist “on all sides,” he said, referring to Bosnia’s three majority ethnic groups – Bosniaks, Serbs and Croats.
Viskovic said he advocates the same regulation as is in place in Austria.
“A gathering cannot turn into a political message, into glorifying hatred or into something that causes animosities,” he said, adding that this is an opportunity for the new Council of Ministers and Parliament to regulate the issue. “Republika Srpska will respect it, but above all, I think it needs to be regulated equally for everyone with clearly defined procedures for everyone.
Security Minister Dragan Mektic said he met with representatives of competent institutions to discuss the Sunday gathering.
“We agreed to completely document the event, especially regarding certain messages and everything that could be heard in Visegrad yesterday,” said Mektic, announcing that this documentation will be forwarded to the State Prosecutor’s Office.
“But the fact is that the Prosecutor’s Office must decide if it wants to initiate an investigation or not,” he added.
He also called for a regulation to be adopted. The Ravna Gora Chetnik movement is registered as a citizen's association in Bosnia, which many see as a problem.
“If the Justice Ministry issues a permit or adopts a decision allowing the registration of an association into the citizen’s association registry (…) then I have no way of influencing such a decision,” Mektic said, explaining that if the Interior Ministry issues a permit for an association that is registered according to procedure to organise an event, then the Security Ministry cannot prevent it.
If any association expresses certain forms of extremism, be it nationalist, religious or based on anything else, then it must be banned and removed from the citizen’s association registry, he said.
However, Mektic added that this is not within the scope of competencies of his ministry.
According to the Bosniak Vice-President of Republika Srpska, Ramiz Salkic, the gathering is a reflection “of the situation and the atmosphere in the RS entity, which is for more than a decade being created by the government and certain media there through the glorification of war criminals and the denial of crimes committed against Bosniaks, including the genocide the armed forces and parts of the Interior Ministry of the RS have committed.”
While the families of the victims are still waiting for the war crimes committed in Visegrad to be prosecuted, “the followers of criminal ideologies” are spreading fear among citizens with impunity, he said, adding that “such events and organisations must be sanctioned and stopped urgently.”
“Accepting and cherishing fascist organisations, as well as securing their gatherings, is harshly punished and sanctioned in Europe,” Salkic said.
“Because of everything that happened in Visegrad, most of all because of the voiced messages of hate and calls for new war crimes to be committed, we expect concrete action by the competent institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” he said.
