Members of the Sarajevo Canton Assembly unanimously adopted a Declaration condemning the Nobel Prize for Austrian writer Peter Handke on Wednesday. The Declaration states that Handke, through his public appearances during the aggression on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), publicly supported an aggressive regime led by war criminal Slobodan Milosevic and repeatedly denied the crime of genocide in Srebrenica, despite all the judgments of The Hague Tribunal.
“Peter Handke himself does not change his views today, so in his cynicism he goes a step further and announces his arrival in BiH and his visit to mothers from Kravica and the surroundings of Srebrenica. The very act of giving a Nobel Prize to such a man is a new insult to the victims and all free-thinking people of the world. His eventual visit to our homeland and the Sarajevo Canton would further provoke the anger and humiliation of all victims of past aggression. In this regard, we ask you to prevent such a possible scenario in a timely manner by declaring the aforementioned person an persona non grata in Canton Sarajevo, ”the Declaration reads.
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.
