The murder of Dejan Nebrigić
Murdered at twenty-nine: Dejan Nebrigić founded Serbia's first gay and lesbian organisation.
On 29 December 1999, Dejan Nebrigić was found dead in his flat in Pančevo. It was his twenty-ninth birthday. The activist had been strangled, and the perpetrator came from his closest circle: his former boyfriend.
Nebrigić was one of the pioneers of the Serbian gay and lesbian movement. In nineteen ninety, together with the feminist Lepa Mlađenović, he founded Arkadija in Belgrade, the first organisation for gay and lesbian rights in the country. The timing could hardly have been worse. Yugoslavia was falling apart, nationalism under Slobodan Milošević dominated the streets, and there was little room for people who did not fit the traditional image. Nebrigić therefore campaigned not only for queer rights but also against the war, for example with Women in Black. When he was to be conscripted into the army, he came out before the draft board. He was sent to a psychiatrist.
Later, with the Campaign Against Homophobia, he documented hate speech in the media and politics. In the spring of 1999, he took a step that nobody had dared before him. He sued the father of his ex-boyfriend, who had repeatedly threatened him because he blamed him for his son's homosexuality. It was the first trial for homophobic discrimination in Serbia. The police did not help him; they beat him. A court-appointed lawyer refused to take the case. The hearing was postponed, and no verdict was ever reached.
After his death, the regime showed how it used such cases. The investigating judge publicly portrayed Arkadija as a foreign-funded, anti-state sect. The murderer was only sentenced years later, to four years in prison. Many of his companions were convinced that Nebrigić ultimately had to die for his courage.