Hunt on Queer Festival Participants Continues

Sarajevo-x

28 September 2008

After the violence during the opening ceremony of the Festival last Wednesday, caused by a group of radical Vehabi Islamists and football hooligans from Sarajevo, the open hunt of all people connected, in one way or another, to the Festival continues to this day.

According to our sources among the organizers, groups of Vehabis have dispersed all over Sarajevo, in an organized and coordinated fashion and follow the movement of local and foreign citizens that visited the Festival. All day yesterday the organizers received threats over the phone, while those who moved around town were constantly followed. For that reason, the Police assistance was secured to guard even the people who stayed in certain hotels.

Information from police sources and other authorities speak of increased intensity of activities among the Vehabis in Alipasino Polje quarters of Sarajevo (the neighbourhood has the largest concentration of Vehabi followers in the city) and that Alipasino was the centre of coordination of all actions, physical attacks and persecution, aimed to intimidate the participants of the first QSF.

A rumour, which we weren�t able to confirm, has it that radical Islamists and football hooligans from the other parts of the BH Federation are expected to arrive in Sarajevo (by organized bus transports) to organize protests against the Festival.

Yesterday, a video clip was posted on YouTube, edited out of the official promotional video for the Festival, depicting the decapitation of Svetlana Djurkovic, President of the Q Association, with a large knife. The video was quickly taken offline and the user that posted it disappeared, although the video was recorded and has been submitted to the authorities.

The Islamic Community in Bosnia and Herzegovina has not yet condemned or distanced itself from the violence last Wednesday, in spite of its instigators invoking religion and the Holy Month of Ramadan as justification of that violence. The web-sites of the Rijaset (the leadership of the Islamic Community) has so far published a single question of a visitor who wanted to know what he or she should do to prevent the Festival from taking place. An unnamed representative of the Rijaset answered that `�we believe that individuals and institutions from the civil society should raise their voice against this promotion of deviant social behaviour and actions directed against the common interests that these actions of an assortment of homosexual groups undoubtedly constitute`.

Having in mind the serious threats against the participants and the organizers of the festival, there are no information about what will happen with the festival programme, after the festival was closed for the public and continues by invitation only, after the violence on the opening night.

The organizers of the Festival already announced plans to take all legal measures, especially against the media that contributed to this atmosphere of lynch and awoke the extremists that took to violence.