SARAJEVO (AFP) — Bosnia's first-ever gay festival opens this week amid fears of violence, with homophobia overriding usual divisions among the country's wartime foes -- Muslims, Serbs and Croats.
The Muslim majority is particularly upset about the four-day Queer Festival because it will open in Sarajevo on Wednesday -- during the holy month of Ramadan.
Many others including members of various ethnic political parties have gone as far as declaring homosexuality an illness and the behaviour deviant.
Parliament member Amila Alikadic-Husovic drew widespread criticism after declaring that such an "illness should be cured and not supported" but remains unapologetic.
"I demand my right to religious freedom, my religion prohibits it," Alikadic-Husovic told AFP, adding she had just recently learned that homosexuality was no longer classified as an illness.
"If the law gives them the right to do that, let them do it," the lawmaker said.
"But if my children were homosexuals, I would be as desperate as if they were kleptomaniac, schizophrenic or otherwise seriously ill."
Such statements have been accompanied by a broader campaign of hate which has seen posters declaring "Death to Homos" appear in the capital and a torrent of abuse on Internet forums.
They have been met by condemnation and calls for tolerance from rights groups like Amnesty International and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
The OSCE said that it "strongly condemns attempts to incite violence against any group within Bosnia. Posters appearing in and around Sarajevo are intended to do just that."
The fears of violence are not unfounded in the Balkans, where homophobia is a shared prejudice regardless of ethnicity.
At Serbia's first public Gay Pride march in 2001, activists were pelted with stones and beaten up by several hundred ultra-nationalist skinheads in the streets of Belgrade before the attacks were quelled by riot police.
In a sermon during Ramadan's first Friday prayers, the leader of Bosnia's Islamic community, Mustafa Ceric, called the festival a "provocation" while urging tolerance among the faithful.
"In line with the message of peace we are sending both to those with whom we agree and those with whom we disagree on moral issues, we should also be left to live in peace, free to practice our religion and to respect our moral values," said Ceric.
A 2007 United Nations report classified sexual minorities among the most marginalised groups in Bosnia, where a gender equality law prohibits discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.
But Queer Festival organisers, the Q Association, stress the support of groups like Amnesty and the OSCE is founded on concerns that minority rights are not the only thing at stake.
"There is (also) the issue of civil liberties. This is a secular state," says the association's Svetlana Djurkovic.
"Our plan was not to provoke. Had we understood during the planning phase that the festival will fall during Ramadan, we would have probably rescheduled," she told AFP.
However, Djurkovic said she believes that Ramadan is being used as an excuse.
"These people say in the same sentence that we are sick and mentally disturbed and that they would have nothing against us if we were not doing this during Ramadan."
Djurkovic also reflected on the power of nationalism in a region where inter-ethnic wars claimed tens of thousands of lives in the 1990s.
In Serbia, where a gay festival has been organised in secret locations for the past five years, gay rights have shown some signs of gaining ground as in some other parts of the former Yugoslavia.
"The situation has improved since 2001. We are visible, homophobes can no longer ignore us, they cannot pretend that we don't exist in Serbia as is the case in Bosnia now," one of the Serbian festival's organisers who requested anonymity told AFP.
Zagreb marked its seventh consecutive gay pride parade in June with the support of Croatian President Stipe Mesic and four political parties.
However, one of the parade's organisers, Marko Juricic, says it would be wrong to use Croatia as a positive example.
"This is also a post-war, clerical and transitional society. It is true that being homophobic is now perceived as shameful unlike in 2002 when it was something to be proud of," Juricic told AFP.
"But we are still being attacked. The difference is that they now wait until the crowd disperses, they wait for police to leave."
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