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Activists protesting against the glorification of war criminals. Photo: BIRN.

The Youth Initiative for Human Rights, YIHR, was joined by other rights groups at a protest in Belgrade on Thursday evening against the misdemeanour convictions of eight of the campaign group’s activists and against state support for war criminals.

Several dozen protesters blew whistles and held up placards with slogans like “Women Against War Criminals”, “Not Our Heroes” and “Always the Whistle, the Gun Never Again”, which was the slogan of the protest, in a park outside the Serbian presidency building.

The immediate cause of the protest was a court’s decision, published on Tuesday, to fine YIHR activists who blew whistles during Veselin Sljivancanin’s speech at an event organised by the ruling Serbian Progressive Party in Beska in northern Serbia in January last year.

As they did during the original protest in Beska, the protesters on Thursday unfurled a banner with the message “Criminals should shut up so we can talk about victims”.

Sofija Todorovic from YIHR said that the main message of the protest was that war criminals should not be presented as heroes.

“We want the Defence Ministry to stop playing the role of PR service for convicted war criminals,” she said, referring to the ministry’s decision to publish books by Yugoslav Army generals Nebojsa Pavkovic and Vladimir Lazarevic.

Both were convicted of war crimes in Kosovo by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.

Todorovic added that the nationalist Serbian Radical Party leader Vojislav Seselj, who was convicted of war crimes in April, should have his status as an MP terminated by law.

One of the convicted activists, Jovana Prusina, who is now a coordinator for BIRN’s Balkan Transitional Justice programme, said that the Serbian judiciary was “unexpectedly efficient” in their case.

“I wish our institutions, the Serbian state and the general public, would invest at least a third of energy they spent on this ‘war on whistles’ into facing the past, or the matter of refugees,” she said.

The director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Human Rights, Milan Antonijevic, said that the conviction of the activists did not send a good message.

“They were first condemned by the state leadership, then by the courts,” Antonijevic told the media.

Serbian court fined eight YIHR members 50,000 dinars each, or about 420 euros, while one was acquitted.

The YIHR said the activists will file a complaint to the Constitutional Court claiming the violation of the right to a fair trial and freedom of expression, and will take their case to the European Court of Human Rights if necessary.

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