Famous CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour, who reported from Bosnia and Herzegovina during the war, responded to a message ahead of allocation of the award to Nobel Prize-winning writer Peter Handke.
“I was there. We all know who’s guilty,” Amanpour wrote on Twitter.
Victims and witnesses of war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina sent a letter to the Nobel Committee on Literature in late October expressing their protest and deepest disappointment at the decision to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Austrian writer Peter Handke.
The letter stated that they profoundly offended the victims of genocide, the survivors of the inmates, the victims of rape and torture.
The Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, in cooperation with the Association “Movement of Mother Enclave of Srebrenica and Zepa” and seven associations of victims of war from the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in a joint letter, recalled the crimes committed in the territory of BiH from 1992 to 1995 by those who the Nobel Prize winner supports.
Nobel Committee Chairman Anders Olsson responded to a letter from survivors of war crimes and victims and witnesses in Bosnia and Herzegovina protesting the decision to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Austrian writer Peter Handke.
In a letter sent to Murat Tahirovic, president of the Association of Victims and Witnesses of Genocide, Olsson said they received the letter with “concern and deep sadness.”
“It is obvious that we understand Peter Handke’s literary work in very different ways. However, we seem to have a common view that we all rely entirely on the legitimate and careful conclusions of the Hague Tribunal. For us, the Tribunal’s decisions form the basis for understanding the essential part of the European a history from which, hopefully, we can all learn, “the letter from the Nobel Committee chairman said.
The popular change.org platform has launched a petition to revoke recognition from this year’s Nobel Prize winner for literature, Peter Handke.
The petition was launched a month ago, and so far it has more than 51,000 signatories.
The December 10 protests in Stockholm on the occasion of the Nobel Prize in Handke for Literature have been announced.
“As a survivor of genocide, I hope one day this man, Peter Handke, will allow me to tell him personally what happened to me and my family,” reads one of the comments on the petition.
The highest award in literature goes to a writer who denies the existence of concentration camps that it was my accursed honor to find in Bosnia in 1992, who lauded Slobodan Milošević, the mastermind of the hurricane of violence of which they were part, and contests the massacre at Srebrenica in 1995, The Guardian reports.
Handke was not just expressing his opinion in his book A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia and his homily at Milošević’s funeral – he went out of his way to give credence to mass murder and, in this context, as importantly, to lies. He offered to testify for Milošević at The Hague; had he done so, we might have met – on opposite sides.
