Nobel for author who eulogized Milosevic sparks controversy

The decision to name Austrian writer Peter Handke as co-winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize in literature has led to widespread criticism due to his praise of the late Serbian leader and convicted war criminal Slobodan Milosevic, according to the Washington Post.

Handke, who split the honor with Polish author Olga Tokarczuk, has received numerous awards for his writing but has also been the target of protests due to his defenses of Serbian nationalists in the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s, including accusing the media of “relentlessly portray[ing] the Serbs as evil and the Muslims as the usual good guy.”

{mosads}Author Salman Rushdie has accused Handke of “the suggestion that Sarajevo’s Muslims regularly massacred themselves and then blamed the Serbs” and of denying the Srebrenica massacre, in which the Bosnian Serb army killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys.

Handke also delivered a eulogy in Serbian at Milosevic’s funeral in 2006 in which he said, “The so-called world knows the truth. This is why the so-called world is absent today, and not only today, and not only here. I don’t know the truth. But I look. I listen. I feel. I remember. This is why I am here today, close to Yugoslavia, close to Serbia, close to Slobodan Miloševic.”

Handke, whose mother is Slovenian, told the New York Times he attended the funeral because of his family ties to the region, saying in 2006, “I wanted to accompany the fall of my favorite country in Europe, and this is one of the reasons to be at the funeral.”

Vlora Citaku, Kosovo’s ambassador to the U.S., blasted the decision, calling the author a “propagator of ethnic hatred and violence” on Twitter.

“Sometimes I would like to be a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting for Kosovo” – Peter Handke , the brand new #Nobel prize laureate

In a world full of brilliant writers, the Nobel committee choses to reward a propagator of ethnic hatred & violence

Something has gone terribly wrong!

— Vlora Çitaku (@vloracitaku) October 10, 2019

The Swedish Academy awarded the Literature prize to two authors this year after postponing the 2018 ceremony amid a sexual misconduct scandal.