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The mural of Ratko Mladic in Belgrade has the wording: “General, your mother should be thanked.” Photo: N1.
The Youth Initiative for Human Rights, a Belgrade-based NGO, filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Serbian Interior Ministry after it banned rights activists from organising a public gathering to paint over a mural of Bosnian Serb wartime general Ratko Mladic on the wall of a residential building in the capital.
The rights group announced on Friday that it would remove the mural of convicted war criminal Mladic on November 9, the International Day of Anti-Fascism and Anti-Semitism, and invited supporters to attend.
But the same evening, it received notification from the Interior Ministry that the gathering will not be permitted.
The ministry said in its decision that it “has the knowledge that there may be a gathering of a large number of people who would express dissatisfaction and opposition to holding a public gathering organised by the Youth Initiative for Human Rights, which is why there is a danger of mutual physical conflict and public disorder on a larger scale”.
After the ban was announced on Friday, Interior Minister Aleksandar Vulin described the rights group’s plan to hold the gathering as “vile and led by evil intent”.
Marko Milosavljevic of the Youth Initiative for Human Rights said that the rights group filed its case against the ministry to the Administrative Court because its decision was not in line with Serbia’s law on public gatherings and that it did not explain the reasons for the ban properly.
“We do not know where statements that there will be some kind of conflict between several opposing groups come from, and on the other hand we know that the Interior Ministry is very capable of protecting citizens when high-risk , demonstrations or any other type of gathering ,” Milosavljevic told BIRN.
He added that the rights group will not attempt to remove the mural on Tuesday because “we do not want an atmosphere of civil war to be created”.
But he said that it will continue to challenge the ministry’s decision to impose the ban and “find a way, together with other organisations, to continue working to remove this mural”.
According to Serbian media, the mural appeared on July 23 on the wall of a residental building in the Vracar municipality, near the city centre.
The building’s residents tried to get municipal utility companies to remove it, but they did not.
Milosavljevic argued that “what has now been shown is that this is a practically unofficial/official monument to Ratko Mladic”.
In June this year, the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals in The Hague upheld Ratko Mladic’s life sentence for the genocide of Bosniaks from Srebrenica, the persecution of Bosniaks and Croats across the country during the war, terrorising the population of Sarajevo with a campaign of shelling and sniping during the siege of the city, and taking UN peacekeepers hostage.
