Serbia’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community certainly thought so. In July 2001, they made the brave decision to host Belgrade’s first ever pride parade, an event that they hoped would symbolise how a country that had spent the previous decade riven by extreme religious nationalism could progress, could heal, could forge for itself a new and inclusive future.

Even before the parade, though, it was clear that such healing was far from universal. Nationalist groups leafletted Belgrade, declaring the marchers “degenerates” and “whores”; threats of violence and murder were made against the parade’s organisers. They organisers were unbowed, however. These were precisely the attitudes they were trying to counter: they would not be coerced into halting their march by the very extremists who had marginalised them for so long. There would be an outcry, of course, but wasn’t that inevitable as Serbia came to terms with its own diversity?

Even the most paranoid among the organisers, though, could not have predicted the scale and intensity of the disapproval that lurked within Serbian society. On the day of the parade almost 2,000 thugs converged on the crowd, charging at them with a terrible violence. “Serbia is for Serbians, not for homosexuals!” came the chants, as fists and feet sent the parade scattering, searching in vain for cover.

The police presence was virtually nonexistent: just fifty officers, none of whom were equipped with riot gear, were deployed to protect the parade. When the marchers found sanctuary in the student cultural centre, the building was assailed with a barrage of rocks and concrete; so too was the headquarters of the Socijaldemokratska unija (“Social Democratic Union”) party, one of the few in Serbia that then supported gay rights. Only when the anti-gay protesters turned on them were the police willing to use force.

In the aftermath of the parade and its destruction, the response from Serbia’s politicians and public figures was virtually nonexistent; those who did respond did little to dispel the notion that they, implicitly at the least, sympathised with the actions of the anti-gay protesters.

Boško Buha, Belgrade’s police chief, was forthright in his disapproval: not for those who disrupted the parade with violence, though, but for those who had organised the parade in the first place. “As a society we are not mature enough to accept such demonstrations of perversity,” he said, in a remark that betrayed a distressing self-awareness.

Even Zoran Đinđić, the then-Prime Minister and a centrist, could not bring himself to decry outright the anti-gay forces. “It’s too early to stand this test of tolerance in a country that has been in isolation for so long, and which has… a repressive patriarchal culture,” he said. “I’m afraid it will take us some time to reach [the] highest level of tolerance.”

In 2009, protesters tried for the second time to host a pride parade in Belgrade. The political climate had changed much since 2001: Boris Tadić, the president, was far more moderate and tolerant than the president of the FRY in 2001, Vojislav Koštunica; the wars of the 1990s were less vivid in the public consciousness, and political continuity from the 1990s had essentially faded.

At first, things looked hopeful. Interior minister Ivica Dačić promised publicly that the police would protect the parade and ensure that the events of 2001 were not repeated; Belgrade’s mayor, Dragan Đilas, spoke of the necessity for “everyone to feel safe” in Belgrade, and announced that homophobic graffiti would be targeted for removal by council workers.

As the day of the parade drew closer, though, the situation deteriorated. Posters and graffiti appeared across Belgrade; the most popular slogan bore the ominous warning “We are waiting for you”. Extreme nationalist groups like Obraz and Movement 1389 printed thousands of fliers and posters, and threatened to recreate the events of 2001 in even greater numbers. The church issued a statement comparing the parade to “Sodom and Gomorrah”.

Fearful for public safety, the previously supportive authorities backed down; the event was moved from the centre of Belgrade, which in practical terms meant cancellation. Though no blood was spilled, the anti-gay forces had achieved as decisive victory as in 2001; eight years later, Serbia’s attitudes had not, it seemed, progressed at all.

To understand Serbia’s attitudes towards homosexuality is, ultimately, to understand Serb identity itself. Notions of Serb identity have always formed around the notion that Serbia is an independent and self-reliant bastion, surrounded by perfidious foes—whether those foes were the Ottoman Turks of 1389, the clerical-fascist Croatian Ustaše in World War II, or the Bosniak and Kosovan Muslims in the 1990s. This notion of being surrounded by external enemies means that national identity has typically emphasised Serbia’s own unique features in contrast to its neighbours—i.e. that is ethnically Serb, and that it is religiously Orthodox.

This interweaving of religion and nationalism is as old as Serbia itself: after all, the early rulers of Serbia’s founding Nemanjić dynasty, still revered by Serb nationalists, were all canonised as Orthodox saints as a result of their extensive monastery-building and support for the church. When Serbia was subsumed by the Ottoman Empire, partially absorbed by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and when it later became a part of Yugoslavia, the Serb identity no longer had a sovereign state on which to define itself; what remained, though, was the church, and it was through this that Serbs found unity.

The religious nationalism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, then, can be more accurately viewed as a return to the tradition of centuries than an emergence; it is the half-century’s atheism of communist Yugoslavia that is, historically speaking, the aberration. A fundamentally secular country did not turn to religious nationalism; a briefly secular country returned to it.

With the return of such sentiment, there was an inevitable and concomitant rise in homophobia. Homophobia in Serbia is, of course, based partly in the same universal instincts that foster homophobia in every other country in the world, and of course homophobia did not vanish during the godless, Yugoslav era; but the resurgence in religious nationalism in the 1990s undoubtedly brought with it a new wave of homophobia. The Serbian Orthodox Church, with its strong condemnation of homosexuality, returned to the fore of political life; under Patriarch Pavle, politicians actively courted the church and policy fell into line with church dogma in many areas.

The consequences for gay rights were, naturally, negative. As well as quashing any attempt to host a pride parade in Belgrade, legislative attempts to outlaw discrimination also faltered. The initial failure of the 2009 Serbian anti-discrimination bill was due primarily to opposition from the church, and its eventual narrow passage occurred despite the church’s attitude rather than because of it. To Serbia’s credit, the final act’s anti-discrimination provisions are fairly strong:

“Seksualna orijentacija je privatna stvar i niko ne može biti pozvan da se javno izjasni o svojoj seksualnoj orijentaciji.

“Svako ima pravo da se izjasni o svojoj seksualnoj orijentaciji, a diskriminatorsko postupanje zbog takvog izjašnjavanja je zabranjeno.”

[“Sexual orientation shall be a private matter, and no one may be called to declare publicly their sexual orientation.

“Everyone shall have the right to declare their sexual orientation, and discriminatory treatment on the grounds of such declarations shall be forbidden.”]

Unfortunately, though, reality is yet to catch up with legislation. Though officially outlawed, discrimination remains distressingly frequent, and the law can never counter the sort of informal, generalised intimidation that led to the cancellation of the 2009 pride parade. A wholesale change in attitude is necessary, and none seems forthcoming; the church is still unassailable, nationalism still sacred, homophobia still the norm.

The political atmosphere in Serbia, then, is one in which anyone who wishes to be perceived to be concerned with the security of the Serbs cannot be seen to express a pro-gay viewpoint; to do so would be to go against the church and to capitulate to Serbia’s external and internal enemies. This was true in 2001, and it was true in 2009. In 2010, the Serbian minister for Human and Minority Rights, Svetozar Čiplić, has proffered his assurance that a pride parade in Belgrade will go ahead at some point this year; until Serbian attitudes progress and ensure that a pride parade can be enjoyed safely, though, Serbia surely has little to be proud of.

At the start of January Josipović’s predecessor, Stipe Mesić, raised Serbia’s hackles by choosing Kosovo as the location of his final official visit. Croatia’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence has been a significant source of tension for Serbia, and an official visit—during which Mesić received honorary citizenship and the “Golden Medal of Freedom”—did little to soothe that.

Nor too did the decision by Mesić in the same week to reduce the sentence of Siniša Rimac, a war criminal who was convicted for the 1991 execution of Serb civilians in western Slavonia. Though Mesić on the same day also reduced the sentence of a Serb convicted of the torture of Croat soldiers in Bosnia, the Serbian media has thus far, inevitably, chosen to focus on the pardoning of the Croat.

Mesić provoked yet further ire the following week when he threatened to use the Croatian army in Bosnia if speculation about a Bosnian Serb referendum on independence came to fruition. “If [Republika Srpska Prime Minister] Milorad Dodik scheduled a referendum… I would send the army,” Mesić said; Dodik and Serbian President Boris Tadić were predictably, and understandably, outraged.

Some have argued that Mesić is somewhat of a lame duck, not to be taken seriously: after all, he was constitutionally term-limited and so prevented from standing for re-election, and at the age of 75 he will almost certainly see the presidency as the finale of his five-decade political career. It was inevitable, then, that he would see out the interim by making both official visits and some statements he might otherwise have kept to himself. But until Josipović’s inauguration, he still remains in ultimate control of Croatia and her not-insignificant military; such recklessness will always threaten local stability in a region as temperamental as the Balkans.

Mesić, of course, has not worked single-handedly to undermine Serbo-Croatian relations. In response to Mesić’s threats to send the Croatian army into Bosnia, an angry Tadić accused Mesić of being a “warmonger” and threatened to report Croatia to the UN Security Council; by rising to the bait, Tadić ensured that an ill-considered remark was elevated to the status of a diplomatic incident, and that Serbo-Croatian relations were damaged further.

Tadić later announced that he has turned down an invitation to Josipović’s inauguration ceremony, a major—and staggeringly puerile—diplomatic snub. Tadić claimed that his motivation was the presence at the ceremony of Kosovan President Fatmir Sejdiu, but his recent spat with Mesić must surely have played a part.

Josipović, to his credit, met the snub with aplomb, and has announced that he does not see Tadić’s decision as an act of hostility towards Croatia. Beyond this ventured gesture of polite rhetoric, though, he must surely wonder whether this earliest of interactions is a harbinger of struggles to come.

The issue that bubbles insidiously underneath all of this petty squabbling is, in fairness, far from trivial. In 1999, Croatia filed suit with the International Court of Justice in the Hague, suing Serbia for what it alleges was genocide committed during the Croatian War of Independence in 1991–95.

The case has always been a sore point for Serbia, who look upon the devastation unleashed by Croatia upon the Croatian Serbs in 1995 as a greater crime than any they may have committed in the defence of the short-lived, breakaway Serb state in Croatia. Serbia has spent the last decade trying to force Croatia to drop the case, but in January of this year they instead filed a counter-suit at the ICJ which sought recompense for alleged Croatian war crimes during the same period.

In truth, both sides are almost certainly guilty of some or most of the crimes they try to foist solely upon the other. The court cases—in some hopeful fantasy—might then bring some closure to the events of 1991–95, might bring an end to the denial that plagues the two countries; the prospects are bleak, though. Similar rulings on the Bosnian genocide have done little to foster concord there, and there is nothing to suggest that the judicial evaluation of the Croatian war will be any different.

Until the proceedings at the ICJ are resolved, then, they will continue to act as a wedge driving Croatia and Serbia apart, and will perhaps do so even after their legal completion. When he takes office, Josipović’s foremost foreign policy challenge will be to guide Croatia towards a future in the European Union: that future, though, depends on his salving the wounds of the 1990s. As Croatia’s first president not to have been directly involved in the war, perhaps he will finally be capable of treading this most delicate of tightropes; for the sake of the whole region’s future, he must be successful.

Serbia’s progress has been the most remarkable. 12 or 18 months ago, the relationship between Serbia and the EU was frosty at best, but since then the change has been remarkable: the EU has unfrozen the interim trade agreement between Serbia and the EU; Serbian citizens no longer need visas to travel to EU countries; Serbia’s previously Eurosceptic population is now 70 per cent in favour of joining the organisation. At the end of December 2009, Serbia made clear that it wishes to apply formally for EU membership and was received warmly by existing EU members; it’s a remarkable progression.

Serbia has rumbled, slowly but surely, across the starting line of a race that EU officials estimate will take 5–7 years to complete. Kosovo will, of course, provide many of the obstacles to negotiations—virtually all of the EU countries have, to Serbia’s pique, recognised Kosovo’s independence—but it will not delay Serbia’s advancement forever: the prize is simply too great, and even the hardliners know it. Right-wing politicians like Dragan Marković, leader of Serbia’s nationalist Jedinstvena Srbija (“United Serbia”) party, have spoken in recent weeks of the benefits that EU membership would bring to Serbia—something that would have seemed inconceivable just a few years ago. The presidency of the pro-EU Boris Tadić has, it seems, done much to rehabilitate the institution in the eyes of Serbians.

Croatia, too, has made significant progress. Croatian citizens, like their Serbian counterparts, no longer need visas to visit the EU and the fight against corruption within the Croatian government has been moderately successful; in general, Croatia’s functioning institutions and stable economy have been a solid foundation on which to negotiate Croatian accession to the EU. A border dispute with Slovenia over Piran Bay/Savudrija Bay remains the only significant obstacle to Croatia’s membership; it seems difficult to conceive of a future for Croatia that does not involve EU membership.

Serbia and Croatia’s rapid development and willingness to cooperate with the wider European community is something to be praised and encouraged, of course. But as Serbia and Croatia march towards joining Slovenia in the European Union, with all the concomitant economic benefits that brings, Bosnia risks being left behind—a travesty, given the tremendous boost that EU membership could bring to a country of over four million still reeling from the 1992–95 war.

Serbia and Croatia both emerged from the Yugoslav dissolution as territorially secure, ethnically fairly homogeneous states. Once Croatia had dealt with its war of independence and its secessionist Serbs, and once Serbia had dealt with the Kosovo War in 1999, the process of rebuilding—and of working towards European integration—could begin. Though they have not been without their ethnic problems, the fact that the two countries had overwhelming majorities of single ethnic groups made these issues troublesome but not insurmountable—and certainly made the risk of a return to the troubles of the 1990s unlikely.

Bosnia could not provide a stronger contrast. Its peace in 1995 had a jury-rigged air about it: the Dayton Agreement, which brought peace in 1995 and remains Bosnia’s constitution, is rife with workarounds, get-outs and concessions that seek in vain to spark some sort of cooperation between Bosnia’s three main ethnic groups, none of which forms an absolute majority. The federal executive is hamstrung by its own consociationalism; the need for guaranteed ethnic representation at all times means that executive power, ordinarily vested in one officeholder, is split between three representatives—one Croat, one Bosniak, and one Serb—with predictably unproductive results.

To complicate matters further, the two entities created at Dayton, the Republika Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, are split almost entirely along ethnic lines: the Republika Srpska is majority-Serb, whereas the Federation is majority-Bosniak with a substantial Croat minority. This extends the scope for inter-ethnic squabbling, and allows entity governments to undermine the designedly weak central government.

Bosnia’s Serbs have always considered Dayton an imposition. Though the Republika Srpska enjoys considerable autonomy, Bosnia’s Serbs have nevertheless sought to undermine central institutions and strengthen the institutional and practical sovereignty of the Republika Srpska wherever possible. This extends to challenging the authority of the EU within Bosnia, and power struggles between the Republika Srpska and the Office of the High Representative are distressingly frequent. Unrest is not limited to the Republika Srpska, though. Many in the Federation challenge the Dayton order just as strongly; some have gone so far as to call for the wholesale eradication of the Republika Srpska, viewing it as a product of genocide and of wartime territorial conquest—with predictable consequences for inter-ethnic cooperation.

Dissatisfaction with Dayton is perhaps inevitable: it was, after all, the product of peace negotiations in 1995, and Bosnia has changed much since then. Reform is inevitable; indeed, it is an essential requirement for joining the EU, since the current constitution conceivably violates the ECHR. But constitutional reform has been made impossible by the fact that opinions on reform are so extreme and so split along ethnic lines. A consensus-based government with no inter-ethnic consensus is a recipe for gridlock, and that is precisely what has happened.

Corruption also remains a significant problem. Corruption is not, of course, a uniquely Bosnian problem; Croatia and Serbia have also had to overcome significant problems with graft, bribery and other corrupt practices. Bosnia, though, has been less successful than either Serbia or Croatia in combatting corruption. Integration with pan-European and global processes, such as the OECD’s bribery convention or the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption convention, has been frustratingly slow; journalistic investigation into corruption is hampered by ineffective freedom of information legislation, and threats against government whistleblowers are frequent.

The future looks bleak. In October 2010, Bosnia faces perhaps its most crucial presidential and parliamentary elections since independence. They come at a time when Bosnia’s inter-ethnic tensions are almost certainly at a postwar high, and when experts predict that the global economic downturn—which has thus far left the country largely unaffected—will hit Bosnia’s economy hard.

The Republika Srpska shows no signs of cooperating with either central institutions or the Federation, and RS Prime Minister Milorad Dodik spent much of 2009 clashing with the Office of the High Representative over more and more important issues. Dodik must shore up his core support, of course, but surely he knows the potential price of actually acting on his secession rhetoric—popular though it may be with his constituency. If Bosnia is to overcome the huge obstacles between it and EU membership, its entire population must unite behind that single cause; for as long as it does not, it will surely be left lagging painfully behind its neighbours.

Admittedly, the process has not been smooth. Following the declaration of independence, there were large-scale demonstrations in Belgrade and scuffles between Serbs and Albanians, and Serbian politicians of all stripes have vowed to oppose an independent Kosovo. What didn’t happen, however, is a repeat of the conflicts of the 1990s: Kosovo stands a chance, therefore, of becoming only the second former-Yugoslav entity after Macedonia to gain independence peacefully, something staggering to imagine given the scope of its territorial and ethnic disputes with Serbia.

The first time around, in 1991, those states that chose to secede from the Serbian-controlled Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia endured protracted wars of independence for their troubles. Not even Slovenia was spared fighting, even though it had no territorial disagreements with other Yugoslav republics and was ethnically homogeneous, and thus had no minorities wishing to remain in Yugoslavia. Croatia and Bosnia, who had both territorial disputes and secessionist minorities, were subjected to bitter conflict for three years. Hundreds of thousands died; countless more fled or were driven from their homes, many of whom have still not returned.

The international community, sadly, played a key role in enabling this bloodshed. Mired in concerns first about whether this was a European problem or an American one, and then over quite what the common European line should be, the supposed mediators of the Yugoslav crisis could not agree on the most trivial of matters, let alone on whether or not to afford the new republics diplomatic recognition. Germany pushed hard for early recognition, the rest of Europe disagreed; while Europe fiddled, Bosnia and Croatia burned. Had the European Community recognised the new states and their borders immediately, and reinforced that support with the threat of military force, the region could perhaps have been spared conflict, and a focus could have been placed on a peaceful solution to the legitimate grievances of the Croats in Bosnia and the Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia.

Kosovo found itself in 2008, then, in a similar situation to that of Croatia and Bosnia in 1991: as a constituent part of a Serb-dominated state, it wished to organise itself along ethnic lines in order to better pursue self-determination for its people. Kosovo’s central belt, with its disparate Serb enclaves and mixed population, was demographically not substantially different from the Drina Valley in Bosnia where the massacres at Srebrenica and Višegrad took place. Its Serb population lived as the Bosniaks had in the Drina Valley, in disparate pockets and enclaves, surrounded by Kosovar Albanians as the Drina Valley Bosniaks were surrounded by Serbs. When Kosovo declared independence, then, one might have been forgiven for predicting a repeat of the bloodshed of 1992–1995 in Bosnia and Croatia, or of the 1998–1999 Kosovo War. If this was to be avoided, Kosovo needed the international community not to repeat the mistake of 1991: would they have the diplomatic fortitude to recognise Kosovo immediately, and stave off any potential conflict?

In the end, they did. Within 24 hours of declaring independence, Kosovo found itself with the absolutely essential recognition of the United States, France, and the UK, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council. Within a week, 17 countries had recognised Kosovo; to date, 63 countries have done so. A clear message was sent to Serbia: military action was out of the question. The issue was by no means settled, but early recognition ensured that the future of Kosovo would be determined at the negotiating table and in the international courts, not on the battlefield. The international community had achieved that rarest of things in their dealings with the former Yugoslavia: success. Tentative, diffident success; but success regardless.

His life surveyed change on an utterly incomprehensible scale. He was born in 1914 in Kućanci, a village that in his lifetime was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of Yugoslavia, and finally of an independent Croatia. In the region of his birth, he lived through the crumbling of two mighty empiresat the end of World War I—the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman—and the establishing of a new Yugoslav state partly in their stead.

He lived through World War II, and the devastation it wrought upon his homeland; it was at least partly as a result of this destruction that he was in 1946 ordained as a monk in the Serbian Orthodox church, taking the name Pavle after the apostle Paul of whom he was a particular admirer. He was to spend the rest of his life in the service of this institution: his loyalty and assiduousness were rewarded with promotion, and in 1957 he was given the coveted bishopric of Ras and Prizren, a highly prestigious appointment that he was to hold for over thirty years.

His crowning glory, though, was to come in 1990 when he succeeded the seriously ill Patriarch German as Patriarch of Serbia, the sixth highest-ranking patriarchy in Eastern Orthodoxy. His appointment was to come at a time of yet more turmoil for Yugoslavia. Already tensions were brewing, and within five years Pavle’s constituency, formerly relatively unified, was to be spread across four states; within his lifetime it would splinter yet further, and ultimately Pavle saw his once-Yugoslav flock divided between Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, and Macedonia.

The prospect of such disunity, and the perceived need to fight it, was to prove the most contentious aspect of Pavle’s patriarchy. He was by no means a stooge of the Serbian government; his relationship with Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia was fractured at best, and by the late 1990s Pavle was clashing frequently with the government. In 1997, as Belgrade was rocked with anti-government protesters, Pavle was outspoken in his support for the protesters; when Milošević was ousted in 2000, he openly supported opposition figures.

His support of the Serb cause, though, was unwavering. Even as Bosnian Serbs massacred Bosniaks by the thousands, Pavle offered them and their Croatian brethren his full support: the image of the commander of the Bosnian Serb army, Ratko Mladić, kneeling to kiss Pavle’s hand was to become a defining image of the Bosnian War, and his support of the notorious organised crime figure and paramilitary leader Arkan would haunt him for years.

He never recanted this support, however, even in the face of international condemnation. Even despite this steadfastness, he has in recent years come to be seen as a peacemaker, someone to be lauded for his role in the downfall of Milošević. To ignore the more unpalatable aspects of his patriarchy, though, is to perpetrate a whitewashing that Yugoslav history cannot stand. Pavle was witness to extraordinary change in his lifetime, almost all of it with an extraordinary human cost; we can but hope that with Pavle passes another small part of that divisive, ethnocentric ideology that has so plagued the former Yugoslavia. Perhaps the reaction to his death, and especially its diverse origins, can with cautious optimism be seen as a positive step towards that goal.