[pp.int.general] Clarification of events in Serbia

[Marko Mitrovic]

Hello fellow Pirates and members of Pirate Party International.


 You may or may not have some acquaintance with the recent events in
Serbia, generally and superficially based about upcoming LGBT Pride Parade.

All Pirates in Serbia of course support full and equal rights of all human
beings, including LGBT parts of the population. We are in full support of
LGBT persons' rights to marriage and children adoption, among others. We
are also strong opponents of every form of discrimination, it being
negative or positive.

However, we have opted not to give open and explicit support to Pride
Parade scheduled for October. In Serbia it is a highly polarizing,
politically motivated event used by most parties to gather cheap political
points, for one side or the other. Also, it is organized by persons closely
connected to the corrupted Government in the country, completely
nontransparent and surrounded by inflammatory figures that are in the whole
thing for their personal gain, not the well-being of whole LGBT population.
Pride Parade also does nothing to address increasing issues LGBT persons
are encountering every single day by various far-right and fascist groups.
They are only parading for the media so they can send image of whatever to
their whatever puppet-masters and have nothing to do with human rights.

Pirates of Serbia have with overwhelming majority voted in favor of
completely ignoring the Pride Parade and in general agreed to take steps
and organize some events in the future regarding the unity of LGBT persons
with rest of the population. We support nonviolent gatherings, but we
believe that this particular event is harming the interests of LGBT persons.

However, our efforts have been sabotaged by the founder of Pirate Party in
Serbia, Aleksandar Blagojević. He has abused our social networking channels
to promote his own agenda even though he was out-voted. After our hand was
pushed we had to send a statement contradicting his to limit “damage” done
to our planned course of action.

After those events Blagojević attempted to do a hostile takeover of our
social networks succeeding with twitter which is now out of the Party's
control. Afterwards, he also performed a hostile takeover of our web domain
and changed the DNS settings. All this is done in the zealous name of
“cleansing Pirate Party once and for all”, for which he has support of a
handful of people most of PP-RS's core don't even know how they are.

All this has happened mere days before our planned move to register the
party (NGO for time being as Serbia has draconian laws for registering
political parties, but with that body we will be able to go on elections).
Formalization of our structure would take “power” away from Blagojević's
hands and install procedures and rules that must be followed. Those rules
are, for example, respecting others when you are out-voted and complying
with majority's decision. So far, every time Blagojević was out-voted he
completely ignored other Pirate's opinions and behaved in an authoritarian
fashion having no regard for anything but his desires and actions.

We will remind you that this is not first time Blagojević has attempted to
slow down the progress of PP-RS because of his reluctance for any
interaction where his opinion can be out-voted. Most of you are probably
familiar with Jelena Jovanović case from few moths ago when Blagojević used
many forms of manipulations to exclude her from PP-RS.

Blagojević has also accused rest of us for lack of transparency because we
use mechanisms that he cannot manipulate. All our actions so far have been
transparent. In the same time he is beyond nontransparent about many of his
actions and whereabouts not showing any desire to cooperate with other
Pirates on any questions in recent months, only showing up online when
there is good opportunity for trolling and sabotage.

This email is sent as a pre-emptive to any of his potential emails in which
he will undoubtedly call rest of PP-RS fascists, racists, Nazguls or any
other form of inflammatory name calling he has used in the past to crucify
fellow Pirates that go against his wishes. Blagojević has also made
multiple threats to various PP-RS members including but not exclusive to
threatening with phyisical violence and "destroying your life".

Additional information is that we will now have to get new domain name as
Blagojević is the owner of the old domain and has also bought
piratskapartija.rs two days ago to prevent others from using it, and in the
mean time set redirection of the domain to the official site of the Pride
Parade.

Our plans for formalization and applying for an NGO (or a Movement, it is
the same in Serbian legislature) are proceding as scheduled. If Blagojević
wishes to be part of that as one of equals he is free to do so, but his
authoritarianism will not be tolerated any longer.

We will once again repeat and strongly underline that Pirate Party of
Serbia is strong proponent of equality and LGBT rights and that all these
issues *ARE NOT *connected with those rightful rights in any way other than
one member's personal agenda and ignoring of other people's opinions.
Events around Blagojević have been repetitive over the years and it simply
had to go off at some point. We are deeply sorry for that.

 With best regards and hope we can resolve this matter without flamewars
and false accusations.

 This email is sent from personal email as Blagojević has threatened to put
all @piratskapartija.com emails in lockdown.


 Pirate Party of Serbia.
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