Word: serbia
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...Last weekend should have been a time of celebration for Serbia's gay and lesbian community, the first time it's been able to hold a gay-pride parade in the capital since 2001. But the parade, scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 20, was abruptly cancelled at the last minute after police said they would not be able to protect participants from attacks by ultranationalist thugs. In addition to promoting gay rights, the parade was supposed to show that a decade after the end of the Balkan wars, Serbia is a functional democracy, ready to join the European Union. Instead...
...cancellation shocked gay-rights activists and foreign observers alike. "I was disappointed to hear that the parade had been cancelled," Stephen Wordsworth, Britain's ambassador to Serbia, wrote in his blog on the embassy's website. "Those people who had wanted to demonstrate peacefully had lost. Those who were prepared to use all means to stop them had won." Some Serbian politicians were even more forceful in their condemnation: "The state has capitulated under threats of fascists," Zarko Korac, a parliament member from the Social Democratic Union party, was quoted as saying by the Serbian news website Pescanik...
...Organizers blamed the government for doing nothing to try to restrain ultranationalist groups as threats against the parade intensified in recent weeks. Apart from covering city walls with menacing graffiti, members of the far-right groups 1389 (named for the year when Serbia lost to the Ottoman Empire in the Battle of Kosovo) and Obraz (the Serbian word for face) also made ominous comments to the media. "Everyone knows what will happen if they go ahead with that parade of shame, and the responsibility for that will be of those who organized it," Mladen Obradovic, a leader of Obraz, said...
...Police arrested several dozen extremists, including some ringleaders of the 1389 and Obraz groups, after the attacks, but they have mostly been charged with misdemeanors. Serbian Attorney General Slobodan Radovanovic has said he is considering banning both groups, along with some of the more violent soccer fan clubs in Serbia. But some Serbs wonder whether the government has the resolve to do anything, considering it has tolerated such groups for years. "The state has clearly lost this battle, but it can still win the war," says Zoran Dragisic, a security analyst and professor at Belgrade University, "provided our politicians finally...
...Perhaps pressure from the rest of Europe will help. "We haven't heard anything from Brussels yet, but I am sure that the European Commission will express concern in its annual progress report [on Serbia's E.U. membership] in mid-October," Milica Delevic, the head of Serbian Office for European Integration, tells TIME. "Europe expects us not just to pass antidiscrimination laws but also to implement them and to create a political climate where you don't need 10,000 cops to protect a minority...