“I consider it a scandalous and shameful decision of the Committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award the Nobel Prize to the writer Peter Handke, who justified war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992-1995 and stood for the protection of their perpetrators,” said member of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Presidency Sefik Dzaferovic on Friday.
Dzaferovic considers that it is a shame that the Nobel Committee has justified the fact that Handke stood for the protection of Slobodan Milosevic and his executors Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who were convicted of grave war crimes before the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, including genocide.
Years after the end of the war, Handke did not show the slightest sign of repentance or apologize to victims of genocide, rape, camps and other atrocity crimes, but to this day denies the truth about the Srebrenica genocide and claims that the people of Sarajevo staged massacres during the siege.
Awarding the Nobel Prize to such a person is an act of directly legitimizing his timeless intellectual and political engagement, which is not worthy of any institution that promotes civilizational values, not even the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
With this shameful decision, the Committee has completely lost its moral compass.