Under the guise of patriotism, at least 19 online stores in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) sell clothes that glorify war criminals and extreme-right ideology, Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) research reveals.
Transfer of ideology across the Drina
Similar to the cooperation with “Serbon”, “Junak” also cooperated with the humanitarian organization “Krajina za Srpska” in the Republika Srpska (RS).
Since 2019, under the flag with the name of the song used by the nationalists “Next year in Prizren”, these two organizations launched humanitarian actions and sold ”Junak” (“Heroes”)products.
“Krajina za Srpska” today also sells its T-shirts, and it recently got a space in Celinac.
“The common goal for us and our brothers from RS is to convey that ‘Junak’ T-shirts are worn there and that ‘Junak’ is known, just as they are known here,” says Dragan Grmusa, from the organization “Junak”.
In the center of Banja Luka, not far from the “Boska” mall, “Bastion Boutique” has opened, a shop selling “Avangarde” T-shirts, an already well-known brand.
Some of the T-shirts in “Bastion” have inscriptions “Next year in Knin” and “Next year in Prizren”.
“Avangarda” complains that social networks delete their posts.
“Our pictures are constantly being deleted. Posts‘ visibility is lost. Maximum censorship. And in the picture there is a sweatshirt with the words ‘Banja Luka’ and a panorama of the city,” this page states in a post from 2021, when Instagram removed certain posts for violating guidelines.
From this shop they did not respond to the request for an interview, from “Krajina za Srpska” they said that they did not want to talk.
“Princip brand”, which has more than 60,000 followers on Facebook and Instagram, does not have the problem of removing content from the networks, and delivers its clothes all over the world.
The “Hatebook” report by the United States (U.S.)-based Coalition for a Safer Internet and the United Kingdom (UK)-US Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) states that Facebook offers extreme extremists and neo-Nazi groups a “shop window” that gives them access to a mainstream audience and a place to advertise neo-Nazi merchandise that helps finance their activities.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, an American sociologist, in the book “Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right” explains how clothing acts as a transmitter of extremist ideas into mainstream society by exposing others to the same messages, and states how extremist ideas are introduced unexpectedly.
“The growing use of social media and digital platforms for extremist communication and recruitment has allowed the emotional appeals that support far-right-extremist communication to be carefully stylized and adapted for their visual and cultural appeal to vulnerable youth,” she stated and added that in this way, aesthetics and style becomes a “door” to the extremist scene and subculture, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
