The King of Sweden Gives Peter Handke a Disgraceful Nobel Prize
( Abhorrent )
Peter Maass
December 10 2019, 6:00 p.m.
A Nobel Prize that will live in infamy was officially presented today to Peter Handke, who is a genocide denier. There was no sign of protest or discord inside the Concert Hall of Stockholm as King Carl XVI Gustaf handed a gold Nobel medal to Handke. After the Swedish monarch warmly shook Handke’s hand, and the Austrian-born writer gave a slight bow in return, an orchestra played an extract from Edward Elgar’s “Salut d’Amour.”
The ceremony, on a winter day with little sunlight, came after precisely two months of international controversy. Among Handke’s large body of work are more than a half-dozen books that downplay and deny the wave of atrocities committed by Serb fighters against the Muslims of Bosnia in the 1990s. Handke is unapologetic about his views, which are widely regarded as extremist and are refuted by, among other things, the verdicts of war crimes tribunals in the Hague and elsewhere. At a press conference on Friday, when I asked Handke why he refuses to accept the fact that more than 8,000 Muslim boys and men from Srebrenica were massacred in a genocide by Serbs, he compared my question to a “calligraphy of shit.”
Protests against this award have been unprecedented. The Balkan countries that best know what happened in the war — Bosnia, Turkey, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Albania — boycotted the award ceremony today. Two members of the Nobel Committee for Literature have resigned their posts, and one member of the Swedish Academy, which is the final arbiter of who wins the literature prize, refused to attend the ceremony. Additionally, a significant number of well-known journalists who covered the Bosnia war issued a series of blunt posts on Twitter and Instagram in the past 24 hours that reaffirmed the truth of the genocide that Handke denies. Those journalists include Christiane Amanpour of CNN and Samantha Power, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations who in the 1990s covered the war as a freelance journalist.
https://theintercept.com/2019/12/10/the-king-of-sweden-gives-peter-handke-a-disgraceful-nobel-prize/
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