Bosniak Council: We condemn chauvinistic incidents by individuals in the Army, the minister is not competent to deal with the issue

The Bosniak Council in Montenegro strongly condemns the chauvinistic incidents of individuals in the Army of Montenegro and joins the appeal demanding an urgent and consistent reaction from the competent ministry, the Bosniak Council announced today.

"It is unacceptable for any individual in the Army of Montenegro to glorify war criminals, fascist collaborators, or send messages of intolerance, and such occurrences must be strictly punished," the statement said.

The Bosniak Council added that it is advisable for the competent Minister of Defense, Dragan Krapović, to do what is within his authority - order the implementation of the procedure and remove the rioter or rioters from military service.

"However, it is certainly not within the competence of the minister to deal with the affairs of any religious organization, nor its dignitaries, and especially not the head of the Islamic Community. If we are already going into the analysis of the activities of religious organizations, it would be important to recall that neither the Islamic Community, nor its officials, hodjas, or ulema, have ever been appointed to any state body. On the other hand, memories are still fresh of the clerical and anti-European so-called apostolic government and its prime minister and their appointment, and the worldviews and impulses by which they were guided, when they indiscriminately removed several hundred officials from minority groups from public services," the statement reads.

The Bosniak Council said that the depoliticization of military and security services is the goal of every democratic society.

"We hope that more work will be done on this in the context of strengthening institutions and their openness to all citizens, members of different religions and nations. However, such details, which we witness in public, are not an encouragement that things are going in the right direction, but rather the opposite - that retrograde phenomena carried by young indoctrinated people are gaining a place in the security services. We expect that the Ministry of Defense and the competent military services will demonstrate through their actions that such phenomena remain individual, isolated incidents that are sanctioned in a legal procedure," said the Bosniak Council.