In a tribune at the "World", authors Sylvie Matton and Olivier Py protest against the awarding of the Nobel Prize for literature to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. Why reward a novelist who relativizes the crimes committed by and in the name of Serbian nationalism during the war in the former Yugoslavia?
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Tribune. The Nobel Prize for Literature 2019 was awarded to Peter Handke on October 10th, staggering those who fought against Serbian nationalism in the 1990s. At the same time, many voices were raised in Bosnia and Kosovo against this attribution, while others exulted in Serbia.
Even if he plays with words in order to express his doubts about reality, Peter Handke's position before, during and after the Bosnian war is unambiguous: his texts are numerous that relativize, justify and endorse Milosevic's crimes, until his Winter trip to the Danube, Save, Morava and Drina (Gallimard, 1996), edifying model of revisionism.
So, when Handke requires a "Justice for Serbia"he does not hesitate to ask, paraphrasing the defense of indicted criminals: "Who are the aggressors? " He describes the area of Srebrenica, full of mass graves, in which he walks a small year after the massacres, as "Peaceful and beautiful". It seems to him that "Something could happen"but he doubts and prefers to listen, in a bucolic dream, to the birds and the runoff of springs. Relativism or negationism?
Victimization of the aggressor
In fact, Serbian nationalism is at the origin of Milosevic's wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. "Ethnic cleansing" and its atrocities were the ideology, eugenic and genocidal, as Europe had not known since the Second World War. After an "ethnic cleansing" from Belgrade, which ravaged Bosnia in the spring of 1992, Serbian nationalism culminated in the massacres of the Srebrenica enclave.
Under the gaze of witnesses and satellites, in the hubbub of eavesdropping and desperate calls for help from many chancelleries, more than 8,000 men (and women) in the security zone UN have been executed in a few days. The Bosnian war saw the birth of a new model of nationalism, populism and racist rhetoric before its organizers were condemned by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). Only Milosevic was exempted from the final sentence because he died by deliberate absorption of an antibiotic (prescribed in case of plague and tuberculosis) which canceled the effect of the treatments prescribed for his hypertension.
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https://www.lemonde.fr/idees/article/2019/10/11/le-nobel-du-deshonneur-a-peter-handke_6015176_3232.html
