Chairman of Council of Ministers of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) Denis Zvizdic said on Monday in Sarajevo that he will initiate all necessary activities in accordance with criminal and other laws and prevent any further development of national and religious hatred that was seen yesterday at the gathering of the Ravni Chetnik Movement in city of Visegrad.
He added that in all BiH security reports for the last three years, a special segment devoted to the action of this movement, warning of the danger of his messages.
“Unfortunately, this movement is registered in Republika Srpska as an association that promotes cultural and national values, and there are sixteen such associations,” Zvizdic said.
He stressed that such associations should be banned, as expected by the RS institutions as a step towards respect for the victims from 1992 to 1995, which were caused by the members of these movements.
To recall, on March 10th a gathering of the ultranationalist Serb Chetnik Movement in the Bosnian town of Višegrad has sparked a wave of condemnation from inside Bosnia and from the international community.
Some 200 members of the movement of former Nazi collaborators gathered at the town, on the Drina river, which marks the border between Serbia and Bosnia. They were marking the anniversary of the arrest of their WWII founding leader Draza Mihajlovic.
A video broadcast by local media, showed them singing about how “River Drina will be bloody again”. Višegrad was the scene of the massacres of Muslims in 1992, at the start of the Bosnia War.
The event sparked strong reactions inside Bosnia and abroad, Euro Activ reports.
“The assembly of the Chetniks within the military formation and threats with ‘hell and a bloody Drina river’, which could be heard, unambiguously represent the crime of inciting national and religious hatred,” Sefik Dzaferovic, member of BiH Presidency, said.
Denis Zvizdic said that the gathering was “anti-civilizational” and that it brings back memories from the 1990s, when the “Chetnik ideology, racism and hegemonism were the basis of the brutal aggression” on Bosnia, which was followed by “a planned and violent exodus and mass war crimes committed against the non-Serb population and which culminated with the (1995) genocide in Srebrenica.”
