You are reading a daily contextual review of the news that marked the previous day.
By Ljubomir Filipovic, CdM observer
No protest in Montenegro has ever been accompanied by such drama and such pressure to prevent the protest. During the DPS rule, starting from the most traumatic protests in the late 1990s, through the referendum campaign, protests in recognition of Kosovo’s independence, anti-corruption protests, religious processions, to DF protests, during which they tried to enter the Montenegrin Parliament, no government as this one tried to absolve itself of responsibility for the safety of citizens. Yesterday, the leaders of the three coalitions that won the elections joined forces and blamed all the responsibility for the safety of the citizens on the opposition parties and protest organizers. The prime minister did it first, and then the Parliament Speaker’s party. Abazovic did it, too. As Andrej Nikolaidis noticed well, they encouraged the church to organize this in Cetinje for days, and now all three of them have crawled into mouse holes.
While the government is trying to shift responsibility to the opposition and present the reasons for the protest as discriminatory, listen to what the citizens of Cetinje have to say about it.
Those who have the greatest responsibility, such as the Patriarch of Serbia Porfirije, do not want to “ get their minds dirty” by forcibly wanting to establish themselves in Cetinje.
And the government staffed by his church cannot guarantee the safety of the people, they are evacuating the hospital in Cetinje, expelling international guests from the gathering of philologists in order to harm the Faculty of Montenegrin Language and Cultue by closing the Grand Hotel. Because of this, the PEN Center reacted as well.
While most of the NGO sector is silent about what happened on Sunday, Zlatko Vujovic warns of a possible escalation.
Chess player and DJ behind the attack on activists?
In addition to being banned from entering the Monastery, activists who protested against discriminatory statements by church leaders of the Church of Serbia, are the target of disgusting campaigns on social networks, in which they are insulted in the worst way. The activists called on the people who link to those pages, and who are close to the Serbian Orthodox Church, to clearly say whether they run those pages. Among the people who run chauvinist sites that have been sowing hatred in Montenegro for two years, they mentioned the famous chess player Milos Pecurica and the disc jockey from Bar, Strahinja Djordjevic, people close to father Gojko Perovic, but also Dritan Abazovic.
Blockade for the RTCG team
The obligation of the Government of Montenegro is to establish an environment in which all journalists can do their job, said the Center for Civic Education (CGO), reacting to the attack on the RTCG journalist team that took place in front of the Cetinje Monastery. “CGO condemns the incident against the RTCG journalist team. Unfortunately, these examples are becoming the rule, so the reaction of the competent institutions must be quick and efficient”, the CGO tweeted.
The Church of Serbia said that “this event is just a piece of the puzzle in order to create pressure on the Metropolitanate due to the upcoming enthronement of the newly elected Metropolitan of Montenegro and the Littoral Joanikije and endangering the human and religious rights of the Metropolitan’s faithful people”.
The end of power in Tivat
The SDP presidency has decided to deny minority support to the local government in Tivat, which means that this government loses its majority and thus its legitimacy from the last local elections, the party told CdM. “By supporting the minority government after the elections, SDP showed good political will to give a chance to some, nominally, civic structures in order to try to make a discontinuity from the bad previous DPS government, which did not govern for the benefit of citizens and therefore lost the support of Tivat residents”, SDP pointed out. However, as they say, the increasingly frequent events in Tivat, which have a very pronounced nationalist background, are in complete disagreement with the basic program and value principles of the SDP since its founding.
That’s it for today. See you again on Monday.
