Peter Tatchell looks at the effect of the Balkan bloodbath on the lives of gay people in Serbia and Kosovo.
The military war against Slobodan Milosevic may be over, but the cultural war against queers – and between queers – continues. In the nations of the former Yugoslavia, peace for lesbian and gay people remains, at best, ambiguous and uncertain, both politically and personally.
Sex, love and friendship between Serbs, Kosovars, Bosnians and Croats is, to say the least, difficult – even dangerous. Ethnic hatred still runs deep and the memory of recent genocide lingers vividly.
Gay life in the Balkans is not as we, in Britain, know it. Guns are more common than condoms. Lovers may be military torturers. Cruising is a minefield of ethnic animosity and violence, When Kosovar and Bosnian Muslims are circumcised and Serbs are not, picking up the wrong man can have frightening consequences.
In his book, Serbian Diaries (GMP, 1996), a gay Belgrade university lecturer, writing under the pseudonym Boris Davidovich, tells the tale of a friend, Branko, who was nearly murdered by a member of the Serb special forces.
During the conflict in Bosnia, Branko met the soldier while visiting his brother at the Belgrade Army Hospital. After wild, passionate sex, the Serb special forces agent suddenly noticed Branko was circumcised and went beserk. Grabbing a gun from under the pillow, he put it to Branko’s head and threatened to blow out his brains, accusing him of being “Muslim scum”. It was only Branko’s quick-witted ability to convince him otherwise that saved his life – such are the perils of gay sex in the fratricidal strife of the ex-Yugoslavia.
As we saw on the battlefields of Kosovo – and previously Bosnia – the jingoistic, hysterical patriotism of wartime can turn routine homophobia into something even more sinister and evil. The Balkan bloodbath was no exception. Home-sadism became a weapon of war. While the rape of women was widely reported in the press, the rape of male prisoners passed almost without mention. Why?
The widespread sex abuse of men has been publicly acknowledged by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson. What motivated journalists to suppress information about these monstrous sex crimes? The media did, after all, report every other inhumanity with a reasonable degree of honesty and impartiality.
Accounts collected by UN observers from ethnic Albanian refugees and former detainees confirm that many male prisoners were raped at gun-point and sexually tortured under interrogation by Serb forces in Kosovo. In some conquered villages, Serb soldiers rounded up the men and boys, stripped them naked, and forced the boys to fellate their fathers, and the fathers to sodomise their sons. These are the rarley reported homophobic humiliations of the terror in the Balkans.
The Belgrade-based gay rights movements, Arcadia and the Campaign Against Homophobia, say the Nato bombing strengthened Serbian nationalism, which is notorious for its strong streak of anti-gay machismo. There is no place for queers in the nationalist vision. Homosexuals are dismissed from the Yugoslav armed forces on the grounds of “abnormality”. Serbia’s patriotic hero is the virile, masculine soldier defending his family and homeland. Those perceived to be weak, effeminate and unmanly are vilified as traitors and fifth columnists.
During the war, some Serb television stations denounced homosexuality as a “perversion” and “disorder” that is alien to Serbian culture, accusing gays of subverting national defence. Western governments, such as the British, were condemned by sections of the state-controlled press as “homosexual”, and homosexuality was caricatured as a “western disease”.
This manipulation of anti-gay sentiment for propaganda purposes led to a sharp rise in homophobic violence and police harassment.
“Anyone who does not fit the standard model of the strong man defending his native land until the last drop of blood, is a possible victim of discrimination, ranging from verbal insults to physical violence and even murder”, according to Dusan Maljkovic, a 23 year old gay activist in Belgrade.
He reports police raids on gay venues and cruising places, and the compilation of police files on known or suspected homosexuals. Even worse, the Serbian version of skinhead gangs – the dizelasi – are targeting gays in their violent attacks on “social decadence”.
Homophobia is also a political weapon. The Civic Alliance of Serbia is the only movement that has spoken out in support of lesbian and gay human rights. Most other parties and factions use allegations of homosexuality to discredit their opponents.
Anti-war students have denounced President Slobodan Milosevic with the chant “Slobo is a faggot”. The rightist deputy prime minister, Vojislav Seselj, is pilloried by left- wingers as the “Serbian Ernst Rohm” (a reference to the gay Nazi chief).
Extreme nationalist-fascist parties advocate the “extermination” of gays to cure the “homosexual sickness”. During the western bombing raids, anti-Nato demonstrators in Belgrade carried placards with the slogans: “Clinton, Blair & Schroeder = Fags”.
Not surprisingly, many lesbians and gays felt threatened. Early in the war, western donations to the Campaign Against Homophobia were frozen, and the group’s offices closed. Some prominent organisations and activists went undergound or fled abroad, fearing for their safety.
These fears were not unfounded. President Milosevic manipulated Nato intervention as justification for wartime emergency measures, including a crackdown on all dissent in the name of “national security”. Critical voices on any issue were, and still are, denounced as unpatriotic, and risk vigilante violence from ultra-nationalists.
The war and its aftermath remains the number one issue of public debate in Serbia. Human rights for gays – and for everyone else – are dismissed as an irrelevant distraction.
Outcast, No 2, October 1999
Another version of this article was published as “Queer Serbia! Queer Kosovo!”, QX. 231, 26 May 1999
Copyright Peter Tatchell 1999. All rights reserved.