Queer-feminist and anti-fascist organization: Zagreb Pride

My name is Marko. I’m 31, living in Zagreb, Croatia. I’m an activist of Zagreb Pride, a queer-feminist and anti-fascist organization, which is committed to the achievement of an active society of solidarity and equality free from gender sexual norms and categories, and any other kind of oppression. Our programs include research, education, anti-discrimination and anti-hate crime and direct action, which, of course, includes organizing and supporting Zagreb Pride March. My first activist impulse was back in 2000 in anti-war and anti-military protests, and then when I moved to Zagreb in 2003, at the start of US invasion on Iraq, when I participated in huge anti-war protests in Zagreb. At the same time, I was doing my own political LGBT coming out and joined Zagreb Pride. In last 10 years Zagreb Pride grew, both as a movement but also as an organization.  

 

 

First Zagreb Pride March was held in 2002, but we decided to form an organization in 2008. In the beginning it was just for the purposes of organizing the Pride March, but later, when we had to respond to the growing number of violent incidents against us. We,  as local  LGBTIQ community in Zagreb, were  being attacked and bashed, not just after the March, but almost every weekend, and many people were asking us for help because the police was not willing to protect us at the time, and therefore we decided to start working with lawyers to support our criminal charges. At that time we started with court procedure monitoring and realized that criminal legislation could be better and therefore started with advocacy. Our advocacy attempts became quite successful because of the accession to the EU and we continued to grow. My personal motivation was in the beginning to organize a Pride March, which was, at the time, quite unpopular within the LGBT community. Most of the queer boys in particular did not want to give up of their male privileges and come out to march. Seeing my friends and fellow activists, and myself couple of times, being a victims of hate crime, I had come to conclusion that organization I belong to, has to do something beyond direct actions and organizing marches.   

 

 

Most recent success was the adoption of Life-Partnership Act which guaranteed same-sex couples equal rights to married different-sex couples, apart from joint child adoptions. Our organization participated in drafting this legislation, which was adopted by the Croatian Parliament, just couple of months after constitutional referendum on banning same-sex marriage has, unfortunately, succeeded.

 

But personally I would like to share a story of one of our beneficiaries, who later become our member and now also our staff.

 

In 2012 a young woman, Petra, got involved with Zagreb Pride, as a volunteer in Pride March Committee.  It was her first more recognizable contribution to the LGBT movement, even though she had been working with another human rights organization for over a year. After successfully completing all activities related to Pride March 2012, Petra was invited to become a full member of Zagreb Pride. The new year of her activist life begun with her decision to rent an apartment as she wanted to live on her own, without the flat-mates. She also had a girlfriend at that time who could come over and visit her more often. She had found an apartment that really fitted her needs. It wasn’t too small, but also not too expensive.  However, the owner of the apartment has refused to sign a lease contract with Petra because of her sexual orientation.  Zagreb Pride has provided Petra with lawyer, as we would do to any other LGBTI person who would report a discrimination to us, but Petra was determined for her story to be heard, so has also decided to speak about her experience in the media, for one of major newspaper publishers in Croatia.

 

Litigation lasted over a year, throughout the late 2013 and 2014, during which homophobic clerical organization “In the Name of the Family” has initiated a constitutional referendum which successfully banned a possibility of marriage equality in Croatia. Both Petra and her girlfriend volunteered in massive campaign that sought to mobilize citizens to vote “NO” on the referendum. The court finally made a verdict: the apartment owner was found guilty for discrimination, and ordered to pay Petra a compensation equivalent to her monthly salary and cover all the costs of Petra’s lawyers.  This was the first discrimination lawsuit in area of housing in Croatia, although Zagreb Pride has documented several similar cases that mostly involved young gay men. 

 

 

We have around 100 volunteers and currently 4 full time staff. Our programs include anti-discrimination and advocacy program, the research and education program and the activist program, which includes, of course, organizing Pride March. Most of our members and supporters like to contribute to organizing Zagreb Pride March. Besides Pride March, we also organize IDAHOT events, public forums and discussions for LGBT people, trainings, hold lectures, conduct research, campaigns and protests. For example, at one IDAHOT event, we organized a protest in front of Turkish Embassy in Zagreb to raise awareness regarding murders of transwomen in Turkey. 

 Can you evaluate LGBTI and the movement’s situation for now in your country?

        

It gets better with time, but more slowly than we would like. For instance, Croatia is 5th on ILGA-Europe’s Rainbow Map of legal protection of LGBT people. That looks very high. At the same time Croatia is a top 3 in the EU when it comes to number of hate crimes against LGBT people. There are many social and historical reasons why this situation is such. Briefly, I’d like to point out the EU accession as a contributor to legal protection and the 90s wars that produced strong nationalism and increased the role of the Catholic Church in our society as a main contributors to prejudice and hostility against us. Many scholars also state that the war and nationalism has heavily contributed to phenomenon of reconstruction of the patriarchy, or the re- patriarchization and this is evident in the growing attacks against reproductive and sexual freedoms in Croatia.

 

 

There is around 10 organizations. Some of them are legally founded and are project-oriented, some are informal groups of people doing amazing stuff, some are civil initiatives or collectives with very fluid membership. Zagreb Pride started as collective of LGBTI activists and we were doing our work like that for our first 5 or 6 years. What makes Zagreb Pride different than other LGBTI groups is that we are mixed-gender and queer-feminist group of activists. We try to maintain good relationships with all or other organizations, but we do have our political principles and therefore we collaborate more closely with LORI (www.lori.hr), the lesbian organization from Rijeka and Trans AID (www.transaid.hr ), the trans*, inter* and gender variant organization. When it comes to Pride Marches in Croatia, they are being organized in 3 largest cities: Zagreb, Split and Osijek and we collectively as Zagreb Pride members attend and/or support all of them. Due to strong cultural and political connections, most of Croatian LGBT organizations also collaborate closely with organizations from other post-Yugoslav countries.

 

How are the menacing, hate crimes and society’s general sense against LGBTI and what kind of legal protections and mechanisms do you have in your country?

 

As I stated before, Croatia is a country with quite good legal protection of LGBTI people: the Anti-discrimination act forbids all forms of indirect and direct discrimination in both private and public, based on 19 grounds, including gender identity, gender expression and sexual orientation. In short, this means that any discrimination is forbidden in employment, education, access to public and private goods and services, access to health and so on. Since 2013, Criminal Law proscribes more severe penalties for hate-crimes against LGB and trans people and other social groups defined by the law. There are also several soft laws, policies that regulate legal gender recognition. Looks all good in paper, but the implementation is quite bad. Actually, access to justice, guaranteed by both Croatian laws and international (European) laws, for LGBTI people in Croatia is quite limited.  We did see more significant success only in combating hate crimes, where all parties involved, especially the police, have made a lot of progress in understanding both legal and social aspects of violence motivated by homophobia and transphobia. Since 2014 Croatia has also recognized LGBT families by adopting a legislation called Life-Partnership Act.

 

Social aspect towards LGBT in Croatia are alarming. Our research shows that more than 2/3 of Croatian LGBTI people have had experienced some form of violence. At least 1/3 of LGBTI people polled stated that they have experienced discrimination based on their sexual orientation or their gender identity. Many of them experience discrimination in their primary families and therefore many young LGBTI people choose to leave their parents much sooner than their straight peers. For culturally catholic society like Croatian, family relations are considered very important, and being accepted by your family is something that most of LGBTI people wish but unfortunately don’t get to experience many times.