5. Anti-Gender in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Yet Another Instrument of Ethnonationalist Mobilization?

The persistent dynamics between heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ethnicity are starkly apparent in the reactions of the ethnonationalist and religious elites to Pride parades. The latter have been especially important moments for the LGBT + and feminist struggle in BiH, as they have shaken up to a certain extent the hegemony of ethnopolitics as well as challenged the heteronormative and patriarchal structure of society. Prides have therefore also provided ethnopoliticians with a welcome opportunity to re-affirm the intersection of ethnopolitics, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, particularly since one of them, the SDA, has been losing power to more liberal parties.

The attitude towards Pride/LGBT + rights expressed by Stranka Demokratske Akcije (SDA), the major political force in Federacija BiH, which mobilizes the Bosniak population, is an ironic ‘the SDA is not homophobic, but …’ (Jerković, 2022). Its leader, Bakir Izetbegović, had some years earlier, in the context of the Queer Sarajevo Festival, himself spread hate speech (Barreiro & Vasić, 2012, 24). However, he did not comment on the more recent Prides—or at least not in any of the analysed articles. This might have been a strategic decision, as Izetbegović oscillates between the ethnonationalist discourse and an orientation to the EU, in which he does not want to be perceived as ‘radical’ but as statesmanlike, a strategy also seen for instance in Serbia (Slootmaeckers, 2022). However, this has not prevented other SDA representatives from displaying their homophobia (Bašić & Rener-Smajović, 2019). One example is Representative Samra Ćosović Hajdarević, who before the first Pride in 2019 called on Facebook for the isolation of LGBT + from ‘our children and society’, while arguing that LGBT + activists’ goal was to ruin the country and its peoples (Krajišnik, 2019). While this is a display of the inherent homophobia of SDA representatives, other examples illustrate the dilemma in which the SDA finds itself, which is that, while it follows Muslim religion and values, it also wishes to at least appear to be ‘respecting’ European values/laws. Thus, in 2022—a particularly interesting year as it was also that of a general election in which debates on Pride were instrumentalized—another guardian of morals and values from the SDA, Mahir Dević, the head of the SDA in the Sarajevo Canton, stated that, ‘parades’ are ‘not in accordance with God’s laws’, which are ‘above all human laws’ (Jerković, 2022). Haris Zahiragić, another SDA Representative, emphasized that when the SDA was in power there had never been a Pride march and he suggested discussions about restricting the right to assembly for reasons of ‘public morals’. Already in 2020 Zahiragić had reacted to the Pride by using the right-wing populist frame: although the right to assembly is protected by the European Convention of Human Rights, so is freedom of speech (Drnišlić, 2020). The SDA hence legitimizes its homophobia both with religion—as God’s laws are portrayed as superior to any humanly created laws, and by instrumentalizing the right to freedom of speech for its mobilization against LGBT + rights—thus appealing to both the conservative and moderate parts of their audience, which mainly consists of the Bosniak population.

Narod i Pravda (NiP), which since 2018 has been in a coalition government with Naša Stranka and the Socijaldemokratska Partija (SDP) in the Sarajevo Canton, and since 2023 also in Federacija BiH, also opposed Pride on moral grounds. Its leader, Konaković, a former SDA representative who founded the NiP in 2018 as a direct competitor to his former party, argued that he was against the promotion of homosexuality and thus against the Pride march, while also contemplating the restriction of the right of assembly (Dnevni list, 2019a; Stav, 2021). As the NiP is one of their biggest competitors, the SDA used the NiP’s position to argue that the latter party was a traitor to Bosniak values, because they had ‘enabled’ the Pride by being in government in the Canton of Sarajevo when the march was organized.

Since Pride marches have so far only been organized in Sarajevo, located in Federacija BiH, politicians from Republika Srpska (RS), the country’s second entity, did not really comment on the first event. They probably did not regard it as an issue of concern even though LGBT+ activists come from all over BiH, including the RS. However, the announcement by BH Pride of a film screening of the movie ‘Pride’ and a panel discussion on the 18 March 2023 in Banja Luka, the de facto capital of the RS, inspired several Serbian Orthodox religious and civil society organizations to write an open letter to Milorad Dodik, the then President of the RS and leader of the SNSD, and Draško Stanivuković, the Mayor of Banja Luka, from the Partija Demokratskog Progresa (PDP), urging them to prohibit the screening (ATVBL, 2023). Reacting to Milorad Dodik’s threat that he would forbid it should local authorities not prevent it from happening, the police banned the screening due to ‘security reasons’. When, after the screening was cancelled, some of the members of the committee met informally on the premises of Transparency International to discuss further steps, they were attacked by ‘hooligans’, while two of the journalists present were injured (Dnevni list, 2023a). This escalation was a result of the fact that the police, although aware of the ‘hooligans’, did not intervene. This outcome can be seen as linked to the discourse promoted by both Dodik and Stanivuković before the event. Stanivuković stated that he did not see any reason why ‘we as Republika Srpska do not have the right to articulate our stance’, meaning traditional and patriarchal values, adding that ‘Sarajevo has a different kind of values’ (Dnevni list, 2023b; Hadžović, 2023). Stanivuković’s statements show how he assumes that he knows and represents the values that everyone in the RS shares. They are also a good example of how gender and sexuality issues are instrumentalized by the ethnonationalist elites to divide further the ethnic groups and entities of the country. Republika Srpska, or as Stanivuković said in the aftermath of these attacks, ‘Banja Luka will remain a traditional bulwark of patriarchal family values and I’m proud of that’ (Dnevni list, 2023a), implying that Federacija BiH and Sarajevo are not. This frame was also used to draw a line between the RS and the EU during the rally in April 2024, entitled ‘Srpska te zove/Srpska calls you’ which was organized by RS administration with the support of the government of Serbia in Banja Luka, as a response to the preparation of the UN General Assembly resolution on genocide in Srebrenica. Darko Banjac, one of the speakers and a member of the National Assembly of the RS, agitated against the resolution and its supporters by stating that ‘Srpska’ should not bend no matter how hard the sanctions would be, that he did not want to enter this ‘gay European organization called the EU’ and he did not want a ‘parent one and a parent two and to abandon his tradition’.¹² Again, this implies that the RS and Serbs in general stand for a tradition not to be found in the EU.

The HDZ—the Croat ethnonationalist party—had little to say about Pride, although its leader, Dragan Čović, stated that, while he was a supporter of diversity, he knew that everyone thought differently, and this was also part of diversity. This was clearly a strategic move designed to please both the moderate as well as conservative parts of his electorate (Radio Sarajevo, 2019).

Religious institutions similarly saw it as their duty to point out the ‘immorality’ of Prides and continue to promote their stance on homosexuality and LGBT + rights. The official reactions of religious institutions to the first Pride in BiH are discussed by Tanja Grabovac (2021) who shows that while the Serbian Orthodox Church—like the ethnonationalist parties in the RS—did not comment on the Sarajevo Pride at all, the Catholic Church and the Islamic Community argued from a religious standpoint—backing up the ethnonationalist politicians’ view that homosexuality is a sin, that it is not part of ‘our’ respective morals and cannot be supported by either community (Dnevni list, 2019b). However, the Islamic Community—probably in an attempt to distance itself from the attacks by Wahhabi groups that took place in 2008—urged believers not to support Pride, but also to not forget that violence of any kind is not allowed. Thus, when one Imam, Muhamed Velić, openly targeted Pride on Facebook, the Islamic Community distanced itself from his statement, arguing that this was not the official position of the community (Kešmer, 2020).

Although the above discussed reactions from the ‘old’ guardians of religious and moral values both in Federacija BiH and Republika Srpska vary in intensity as well as in consequences for the LGBT + community, they all represent a continuity of the instrumentalization of gender and sexuality for ethnopolitics. In this context it is also not surprising that ethnonationalist politicians in Federacija BiH, particularly Izetbegović and Čović, have toned down their openly homophobic attacks more than their counterparts in Republika Srpska, since the former generally like to present themselves as more oriented towards the EU than Dodik does. This, however, should not be mistaken for a change in their values, as statements from their second-tier party colleagues show.

Although anti-gender mobilization in BiH is still on the margins, the media analysis undertaken in this paper shows that it exists and is represented by the Catholic Church in BiH, civil society organizations and the STAV magazine. In what follows, I will discuss the newly emerging anti-gender actors and argue that they introduce ‘new’ frames that rely on the transnational phenomenon of anti-gender mobilization but also show a continuity in instrumentalizing it for ethnopolitics.

The Catholic Church in BiH (the Archdiocese of Vrhbosna) explicitly problematized so called ‘genderism’ [dženderizam] or ‘gender ideology’ [rodna ideologija] in 2015, years before the first Pride march in BiH (Dani, 2021). Tomo Vukšić, before becoming Archbishop in 2022, had himself in an Archdiocesan document targeted ‘gender ideology’, which, according to him, poses a special threat to the ‘Christian concept of family that is founded on the Bible’ (Vrhbosanska nadbiskupija, 2015, 30). Furthermore, the Catholic Church in BiH has been commenting on this issue through the Archdiocesan official media portals of Katolički tjednik and Nedjelja.ba. In this context the editor in chief of both, Josip Vajdner has been particularly active in spreading anti-gender frames, for example in an interview on the prospect of the legalization of same-sex marriage in BiH. Here, he stated that people in BiH are subjugated to the ideas of ‘gender ideology that through perfidious financiers has become the dominant concept in the European Union and is presented as something advanced’. He wishes furthermore that BiH would not be in such a hurry to implement something which is ‘morally wrong from the West’ (Dnevni list, 2018). Vajdner sees gender ideology as promoted by the EU, and, like other anti-gender actors, also by a financially strong, transnational lobby, and thus he instrumentalizes an alleged ‘immorality’ of the West that should not enter BiH. In BiH, as in many other countries (Tranfić, 2022; Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017b, 9), the Catholic Church seems to have paved the way for anti-gender mobilizations and one can say that the Church in BiH certainly ‘learned’ from the Catholic Church in Croatia with regard to anti-gender framing. However, its limited influence, with only around 10% of BiH’s population declaring itself as Catholic,¹³ as well as the ethno-religious divisions among the religious and political elites, may be why anti-gender mobilizations, in the sense of an explicit targeting of so-called ‘gender ideology’, have not been able to spread as widely in BiH as has been the case in, for instance, neighbouring Croatia.

Civil society organizations, some of them promoting religious values, have jumped on the bandwagon in the context of Prides. However, they do not explicitly refer to the discourses promoted by the Catholic Church in BiH. In 2022, Udruženje Iskorak, through its leader/spokesperson Sanin Musa,¹⁴ agitated in the name of the ‘traditional, normal family’ against a ‘LGBT population that violently and radically introduces its values into our homes and minds’ (Dnevni list, 2022). Musa often argues that he does not fight homosexuality but does not want the LGBT + community to become the ‘new’ normal, which is why he thinks it is important to defend the ‘normal family’. Furthermore, in the context of the 2019 Pride, Udruženje građana Svjetlo brought together around 300 participants the day before the march under the title ‘Day of the Traditional Family [Dan tradicionalne porodice]’. Although both organizations did not mobilize explicitly around ‘gender ideology’, their activities can be seen as inspired by anti-gender movements elsewhere that refrain from direct homophobia, focusing instead on guarding and promoting ‘real’ family values.¹⁵

Moreover, these and other organizations—just like the political parties described above—also instrumentalize these events for ethnopolitics. One of the speakers at the ‘Day of the Traditional Family’ argued that ‘we will never allow a way of life and customs foreign to our people and our country to be imposed on us’, while it was recalled that ‘Muslim martyrs [šehidi] did not fight for this city [Sarajevo] so that a Pride parade can be organized’ (Beširević, 2019). In this context Musa stated:

We, as people, as a society, do not have the tradition of protesting […]. Bosniaks as people wait for evil to come to their door […] and then we get active (Face TV, min. 43).

With this, he on the one hand attempts to define what is and is not part of Bosniak identity and on the other hand, by referring to the war in 1992 that came to ‘our’ door and then ‘we’ got active, implies that for Bosniaks Pride marches are as ‘evil’ as the war. While the ‘Day of the Traditional Family’ did not take place in the following years, Sanin Musa has been actively involved in organizing counter-gatherings to Prides almost every year, from 2019 to 2023 (Dnevni list, 2021, 2022).

As already mentioned in relation to the violent attack on the film screening organized by the BH Pride committee in the RS in March 2023, the mobilization against this event was initiated by civil society/religious organizations¹⁶ via an open letter. Communication via an open letter can be interpreted as a strategy that presents itself as ‘not radical’ in contrast to violent attackers or, as they are also often called, ‘hooligans’, implying an uncontrollable, violent group of wild young men who often engage in fights (e.g. after football games). The letter argues that these organizations, meaning the BH Pride committee, from ‘Sarajevo and Banja Luka, are financed by foreign agencies’ and undermine ‘traditional, Christian, real human and civilizational values’ and pose a threat to the society, particularly as regards ‘our’ children. Furthermore, the letter states that ‘the very dangerous ideology and practice of these movements […] needs to be prevented in our city and Republika Srpska’ (ATVBL, 2023). This further instance of anti-gender mobilization explicitly targeting an alleged gender ideology also maintains the continuity of the ethnopolitical instrumentalization of gender and sexuality, as had the like-minded organizations that came together in Federacija BiH. More recently, in January 2024, some of these organizations also sent an open letter to the National Assembly of the Republika Srpska calling for the rejection of the Draft Law on Protection from Domestic Violence and Violence against Women, unanimously adopted by the National Assembly of Republika Srpska in October 2023. These self-proclaimed religious/patriotic organizations argue that the introduction of the term ‘femicide’ and ‘gender’ within the law will introduce a ‘gender ideology into our family legislation’ and will lead to the ‘destruction of the traditional family’ (Roditelji za prava djece, 2024). Following this, the ruling parties in the National Assembly of the RS and others submitted furthermore an initiative to change the Criminal Code of RS, aiming to remove the terms ‘gender’ and ‘gender identity’ from the Code. As a direct result of this, the mentioned draft law was not further processed in the National Assembly—despite the initial support—and, the term ‘gender identity’ was deleted from the Criminal Code in March 2025—which is certainly a setback with regard to the slow implementation of the Istanbul Convention.

Another ‘new’ anti-gender actor, the political magazine STAV, also mobilizes around both anti-gender and ethnopolitics. A weekly magazine¹⁷ founded in 2015, STAV follows an ethnonationalist editorial line displayed through open support for the strongest Bosniak ethnonationalist party SDA. The magazine is owned by a Turkish company, Simurg Media. In addition to STAV, Simurg Media also runs an online news portal in BiH, Faktor.ba.¹⁸ It is not clear how influential the magazine is, as the company does not report any details on its circulation. However, as it targets the Bosniak community, particularly the supporters of the ethnonationalist SDA, it has the potential to reach at least their followers and voters.¹⁹

The magazine’s editor in chief at that time, Filip Mursel Begović, often wrote about gender and sexuality. While in the analysed articles ‘gender ideology’ [rodna ideologija] is not often mentioned explicitly, the surrounding frames give voice to the well-known anti-gender discourses. For instance, the magazine runs articles targeting the alleged promotion of alleged blurred gender identities that will supposedly result in a ‘world of androgynes, people without a sex, on the edge, people without emotions, without a soul’ (Begović, 2018). The articles often integrate anti-trans frames warning about the alleged threat of the trans community to children (Šećerović-Kaşli, 2019a, 2019b). Furthermore, and as mentioned in relation to the other actors, STAV targets a distorted notion of Europe or the West as well as the Left, which in the case of BiH is seen by STAV as represented by Naša Stranka and the SDP. Moreover, with regard to Pride marches, STAV implies that an immense power lies behind them, arguing that it is not a minority’s fight for human rights but, on the contrary,

an attempt to push the boundaries of the allowed and acceptable in order to gradually lead to the change of […] not only the cultural, but also the entire system of values and norms of Sarajevo and the rest of the country (Drnišlić, 2022).

This ‘cultural revolution’ and ‘socio-political coup’ are allegedly pushed by foreign powers through their local agents—a reference to Naša Stranka, the SDP and the NiP—who supposedly want to de-traditionalize and de-Islamize Sarajevo (ibid.). Some of the arguments cleverly incorporate a critique of Balkanism (Todorova, 2009) and the anti-Muslim racism prevalent in the West, such as, for instance, when it is argued that ‘European funds for human rights are testing the democracy of Balkan societies via the LGBT population’. ‘Europe’ wants in particular to test how the Bosniak/Muslim parts of society will react to Pride marches. Violence would lead to the portrayal of all Muslims as ‘radicals’—which is why in the text Begović argues that it is best for Bosniaks/Muslims to ignore Pride (Begović, 2019a).

However, STAV does not refrain from instrumentalizing Pride and the LGBT + community for ethnopolitics either. The magazine argues that it is not LGBT + , but Bosniak/Muslim people who really suffer. It presents several examples purporting to show how their suffering is reinforced by Pride and the LGBT + community. Firstly, it is argued that LGBT + are less at risk of being attacked than a woman in a hijab: ‘nobody cares for her safety, while for LGBT + the whole city is shut down so the ‘Parade’ can take place’ (Šećerović-Kaşli, 2022). Secondly, the fact that the NiP, Naša Stranka and the SDP with the help of ‘foreign powers’ allegedly preferred to make Pride possible rather than fight for Bosniak rights in Republika Srpska shows that, without the SDA, the ‘only true’ representative of Bosniak interests, those interests would be in unprecedented danger (Begović, 2023b). Thirdly, they argue that the ‘blockade’ of the city (streets) during Pride was even worse than during the war siege of Sarajevo²⁰ (Drnišlić, 2022). Through such frames, Pride and the LGBT + community as well as its supporters are linked to the truly terrible experience of all those who survived the siege of Sarajevo, and are simultaneously identified with the aggressors of the Bosnian Serb Army with a twofold aim: firstly, to delegitimize Pride not only with arguments about moral and religious values, but also by identifying them with the ‘ethnic other’ and instrumentalizing the fear of war in the same way as ethnonationalist parties do (Bojičić-Dželilović, 2015); and, secondly, to re-enforce the picture of the ethnonationalist SDA as the only ‘true’ guardian of Bosniak, patriarchal, and heteronormative values.

Against this backdrop, in the context of ‘new’ emerging anti-gender actors, this analysis shows that in BiH, too, there are actors targeting an alleged ‘gender ideology’. However, due to BiH’s ethnopolitical specificity, anti-gender mobilizations are still on the margin and maintain a close continuity with the ‘old’ and known instrumentalizations of gender and sexuality issues for ethnopolitics.