CIVIL CALLS ON RESPONSIBILITY

Civil – Center for Freedom calls on the competent institutions and structures to undertake urgent measures for prevention of ethnic violence.

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Civil – Center for Freedom decries the violence and hooliganism that occurred during the protests held on Friday and Saturday. In addition, we express a strong disapproval for the ongoing blame game and avoiding responsibility among the political parties for the interethnic tensions. Furthermore, we call on responsibility of the state institutions that have all available mechanisms in place, to use them for improvement of the interethnic relations, rather than escalation of hatred and violence. We consider that responsible behavior of the ruling legislators can prevent, both on long-term as well as in the current situation, escalation of this kind. In the meantime measures may also be taken for prevention of similar incidents, not only in the pending election period, but in the post-election period as well.

In a situation that is already complicated enough, it is extremely dangerous to misuse nationalism and interethnic relations for narrow political interests in the context of the coming elections.

We also call on media to be responsible and act within the frameworks of professional standards in order to circumvent further violence.

We demand manifestation of a sincere political will from the political parties and institutions on both local and national level to the end of dealing with the roots of conflicts on all counts, which, in this particular case, is an interethnic conflict. Naturally, they also need to be held responsible for the growing interethnic divisions. The point is not to calm a situation which has occurred as a result of the wrongful policies of the institutions themselves.

Finally, the fact that the majority of the participants involved in the protests on Friday and Saturday were minors is not less important. The attention needs to be shifted to the extremely unconscionable misuse of minors in dangerous political and party games of this kind.