By Prof. Dr. Fadil Çitaku, PhD, MME (Uni Bern), CEO of the Academy of Leadership Sciences Switzerland
Peter Handke, a supporter on war criminal Slobodan Milosevic have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
The Swedish Academy, which oversees the prestigious award, suspended it in 2018 after a sexual assault scandal awarded Nobel Prize this year Peter Handke.
Peter Handke, an Austrian playwright, novelist and poet was recognized for “an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience”, the academy said in a statement.
However, he has been a highly controversial figure for his support for the Serbs during the 1990s Yugoslav war, and for speaking at the 2006 funeral of former Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who has committed genocide and other war crimes in for states of ex-Yugoslavia.
PEN America said it was “dumbfounded by the selection of a writer who has used his public voice to undercut historical truth”, in a statement from its president, Jennifer Egan.
While initially left-leaning in his youth, his increasingly pro-Milosevic stance saw many writers distance themselves from him in the 1990s. After the end of the three-year Serbian siege of Sarajevo, he claimed that the Muslims had staged their own massacres in Sarajevo and had blamed this on the Serbs.
Then, Alain Finkielkraut, the Paris intellectual, said Handke had become “an ideological monster”, while Slavoj Zizek – who is Slovene – said Handke’s “glorification of the Serbs is cynicism”. And Susan Sontag, who had spent several months in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war staging a performance of Waiting For Godot, said that Handke was now “finished” in New York.
In 1996, Handke wrote an essay about a trip to Serbia for the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung that questioned the media’s portrayal of Serbs as the aggressor in the conflicts sparked after the collapse of the Yugoslavian state.
“In an effort to bring the war to their customers, international magazines from Time to the Nouvel Observateur relentlessly portray the Serbs as evil and the Muslims as the usual good guy,” Handke wrote. The article was published a year after a massacre in the town of Bosnian Srebrenica after Serbian forces overran a Muslim-held enclave and killed thousands of men and boys.
When NATO allies later bombed Serbia, Handke again rose to the country’s defense. In 1999, when appearing on Serbian television, he suggested that he might like to be a “Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo” and compared the plight of the Serbs to the persecution of Jews (he later apologized for invoking the Holocaust).
The Swedish Academy, by doing this offends many victims caused by wars worldwide. We expect from the Swedish Academy to withdraw the prize given to Peter Handke.
We, the civilized world expect from the protagonists, who receive Nobel Prizes to be a role model of people worldwide. We expect from them to give a contribution to a health, wealth and prosperity to the world and not to spread hate and support war criminals, wo caused a genocide to many thousands of civilians, raped many girls and women and killed old people and children.
If the Nobel Prize Academy wants to keep its credibility, it has to withdraw the Nobel Prize given to Peter Handke.
Reverences:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/oct/10/nobel-prizes-in-literature-olga-tokarczuk-peter-handke-2019-2018 (Oct.10.2019)
