Montenegro’s government totters

GUESTS IN A beachside restaurant where the Bojana river flows lazily into the sea belt out old Yugoslav pop songs while children gambol in the sand. It is just the image that Montenegro’s tourist industry wants to promote, as it struggles to recover from the wave of covid-19 that whacked the country last year. But away from holiday haunts the picture is very different. The government is tottering. Old feuds are ripping Montenegro apart.In March the minister of justice expressed doubt that the massacre at Srebrenica in neighbouring Bosnia in 1995, when 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Serbs, was an act of genocide. Parliament sacked him on June 17th and made it illegal to deny that the crime was genocide. Outraged, the largest party backing the government withdrew its support, leaving it in jeopardy. Srebrenica is a litmus test in Montenegro: if you say it was not genocide, you are considered “pro-Serb”. Many Montenegrins consider themselves Serbs; even those who hold that there is a separate Montenegrin ethnicity admit close cultural and historical ties.