Bosnia’s antifascists and WWII veterans urged authorities on Tuesday to ban the “shameful” gathering of members of the Serb ultra-nationalist ‘Ravna Gora Movement’ in Visegrad announced for April 13 and said that if it takes place, antifascists from the entire region will be invited to a counter-gathering.
“The gathering and lining up of members of the Ravna Gora Chetnik Movement is shameful for all of Bosnia and Herzegovina, but also represents a slap in the face to the tradition of anti-fascism in Europe,” the Union of Antifascists and veterans of the People's Liberation War of Bosnia and Herzegovina (SABNOR BiH) said in a press release.
RELATED NEWS
The Ravna Gora Movement, better known as the Chetniks, was a Serb nationalist movement in WWII. During the 1992-95 Bosnian war, Serb nationalists wearing Chetnik insignia committed numerous crimes against humanity against the non-Serb population in the country – including the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. In Visegrad, those wearing Chetnik symbols expelled 14,000 Muslim Bosniak residents and killed some 1,700.
“Various quasi-historians and politicians may try to revise history but the bloody trail the Chetniks have left on the soil of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and not only in Bosnia, are still so fresh that no revision can erase it. Each new gathering of their followers represents a glorification of fascism, spreading fear and hate and an attack on Bosnia and Herzegovina,” SABNOR BiH said.
The organisation argued that there ae legal mechanisms to ban the gathering and sanction the organisers in place and called upon ambassadors of countries that were part of the antifascist coalition during WWII to condemn the planned gathering and help stop it.
If authorities do not ban this gathering, “nothing else is left to us anti-fascists of Bosnia and Herzegovina other than inviting all antifascists from the region to Visegrad on the same day at the same time so we, through civilised behaviour, loudly and clearly express our stance toward fascism which authorities seem to be tolerating,” SABNOR BiH said.
