Six Southeast European countries have announced they will boycott today’s Nobel Prize Award ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden, in protest to laureate in literature Peter Handke’s support of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’s criminal policies during the Yugoslavian wars.
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia and Turkey have joined Kosovo and Albania in their decision to boycott the ceremony.
Handke is known for his friendship with ‘The Butcher of the Balkans’, Slobodan Milosevic, and for denying Srebrenica genocide at the hands of the Serb Army of Republika Serbska, who killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys under the command of war criminal Radko Mladic.
The Austrian writer delivered a eulogy at Milosevic’s funeral, who died whilst he was being tried at the UN War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague for genocide and other war crimes committed during the early 1990s.
The announcement of Handke’s award sparked widespread outrage among many nations affected by Milosevic’s brutal wars, as well as international witnesses.
Handke has repeatedly failed to comment on his support of a genocide perpetrator. When he was recently asked about the genocide in Bosnia, Handke refused to answer and compared journalist’s questions to a “calligraphy of shit”.
