THE FACT THAT GLORIFYING HITLER AND PAVELIĆ IS NOT CRIMINAL OFFENSE SAYS ENOUGH ABOUT BiH

EAST SARAJEVO, JULY 30 /SRNA/ - Political scientist Filip Matić told SRNA that denying the Holocaust, glorifying the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler or the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelić, and the NDH /Independent State of Croatia/ is not considered a criminal offense under the Criminal Code of BiH. However, if someone claims that there was no genocide in Srebrenica, they can face criminal prosecution.

"This is BiH and the laws of its institutions," Matić said. Matić said that the Prosecutor's Office's failure to launch an investigation into comments on social media such as "Hitler was the best" may be formally and legally correct, but it is neither moral nor ethical. "Likewise, glorifying Pavelić and the NDH, who committed horrific crimes precisely on this territory, is not considered a criminal offense under the law," Matić pointed out. He said that this reflects a neglect of an important historical truth, and perhaps even an avoidance of that entire period, and that, on the other hand, it is more important to deal with laws and investigate people mentioning Srebrenica in a way that does not suit foreigners and Bosniaks, so maybe, this should be investigated too and make it a criminal offense, while all other crimes are not big enough. He noted that, when it comes to freedom of speech or the boundaries of hate speech, different countries can take varying positions. "This is a boundary that is very difficult to define at this moment, especially now, when a neoliberal, centrist, strongly fascist option is in power — one that has excluded many topics in the same way Nazism and fascism were excluded. In other words, following the pattern that Hitler must not be discussed in any way," Matić said. The Prosecutor's Office of BiH received a complaint on June 9, which included a screenshot of a Facebook comment saying, "Hitler was the best." The complaint claimed that the comment represents glorification of Nazism, an insult to the victims of the Nazi regime, as well as hate speech and incitement to violence and intolerance, BIRN reported. In its decision not to initiate an investigation, dated July 8, the Prosecutor's Office of BiH assessed that the statement "Hitler was the best" represents "an unsubstantiated and controversial personal opinion of an individual". The Prosecutor's Office stated that "the comment was not made in the context of hate speech, or the denial of genocide, crimes against humanity, or war crimes".