Demonstrations against the Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Han …

Spilled blood hurts. There are crimes and irreparable damage and every attempt to close is doomed to failure. The conflictual and never-ending look at the recent past –the Balkan war– go back to the place for the price Nobel Prize for Literature to the Austrian writer Peter Handke. The main association of genocide victims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica announced that request the withdrawal of the Nobel Prize for Handke's literature to "defend those responsible for war crimes". Munira Subasic, president of the Srebrenica Mothers' Association, told the Bosnian portal Klix that the petition will be sent to the Nobel Committee. "The man who defended the Balkan butchers can not win this prize," Subasic said. "We are very touched as victims. How can a defender of criminals and especially genocidaires get the Nobel Prize? ", Added the president of the Srebrenica Mothers' Association. On the demand platform Change.org have gathered more than 12,000 signatures to require the withdrawal of the Nobel Prize of the Austrian writer for being admirer of Slobodan Milosevic (1941-2006), "the butcher of the Balkans", a shared appellation with Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic.

The past is the subject of disputes. the different protagonists manifest and remain silent, underline or skimp the elements of the construction of their own history. Serbobosnias of the Srebrenica militia 8,000 Muslim men were killed in 1995 during the war in Bosnia, an act which international justice has described as genocide. Handke's positioning, in agreement with Serbia, old injuries reopened in the Western Balkans, a territory still traumatized by the consequences of the wars of disintegration of the old Yugoslavia; an area where there is a struggle for conflicting memories. The figure of the author of Winter trip on the rivers Danube, Sava, Morava and Drina or justice for Serbia, a book published in 1996, is at the heart of this contest. For some Austrian writer is a apologist crimes committed in the name of Serbian nationalism, while for others, it is an intellectual who dared to fight against demonization Serbs as the cause of all the woes of the wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The author of Short letter of goodbye, Left-handed woman and A writer's afternoon, to name only a few titles of his prolific production, denied having downplayed the murder of Srebrenica and stated that his intention was to qualify the Manichean image proposed by the international media of portraying Serbs as "bad guys" and Bosni-Muslims as "good guys". During the NATO bombings in 1999 against the former Yugoslavia, Handke said that the Atlantic Alliance (NATO) had the intention to create "a new Auschwitz" in reference to one of the concentration camps and the extermination of Nazi Germany. The comparison hurt more sensibilities and the author later was excused for the use of this phrase. What we must not lose sight of, is that Handke's greatest heresy was to question the role of NATO and the mainstream media and to show how international propaganda had managed to generate favorable public opinion for any intervention against Serbia.

His dissenting position – unlike the manipulation of portraying Serbs as "monsters" – is radicalized and it is here that the most difficult knot of controversy arises. Milosevic was considered the architect of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and Bosnia. Handke not only visited Milosevic at The Hague prison in 2004, when he was tried as a war criminal, but attended his funeral March 18, 2006 in the garden of the family home Pozarevac, the hometown of the former Serbian president. "I'm here to defend human dignity," admitted Handke, who then searched his own grave next to Milosevic. His presence at the burial sparked a scandal and had to give up the Heinrich Heine literary prize, granted by the city of Düsseldorf.

Many intellectuals and artists who supported manipulate as Elfriede Jelinek, Modiano Patrick, Wim Wenders and Emir Kusturica They denounced the fact that the Austrian writer was undergoing "a campaign of defamation for having thought against the current". In a later interview with The New York Times He explained his presence at the funeral: "I think he was a tragic figure. Not a hero, but a tragic human being. But I am a writer and not a judge. I love Yugoslavia – not so much Serbia, but Yugoslavia – and I wanted to accompany the fall of my favorite country in Europe and that was one of the reasons to attend the funeral. . "In 2016, ten years after the death of Milosevic, the Hague tribunal absolved him of all responsibility for war crimes committed between 1992 and 1995 in Bosnia.

Sefik Dzaferovic, a Muslim member of the Bosnian tripartite presidency, deemed it shameful to reward Handke, whom he described as: Fan of Milosevic. "C & # 39; shameful that the Nobel Committee ignores the fact that Handke has justified and defended Slobodan Milosevic and his executors, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, who have been convicted of the most serious war crimes, including genocide, "said Dzaferovic. from Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, also added to the questions: "The genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina had an author, Handke chose to support and defend these perpetrators. The decision on the Nobel Prize has caused immense suffering to countless victims"Thaci wrote on Twitter. Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama acknowledged in the same social network: "I never thought I'd want to lose a Nobel Prizebut immodesty is becoming a normal part of the world we live in. To conclude, he tweeted: "NO, we can not be so insensitive to racism and genocide!"

In Serbia, the Nobel Prize for Handmade Literature has been received with joy. The Minister of Culture, Vladan Vukosavljevic, stressed that the author was with "the Serbian people" in his most difficult moments. Filmmaker Emir Kusturica He celebrated the prize and declared that "the political struggle (of Handke) was the continuation of his literature". The reflection of the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievitch, Nobel Prize for Literature 2015, illustrates the problem: "The memories are not an impassive passionate account of the vanished reality. they are the rebirth of the past, when time will come again.