Peter Handke's Nobel Prize for Literature shames Sweden

The Nobel Prize for literature, worth £750,000 and awarded to the Austrian novelist, and film script writer Peter Handke shames Sweden, shames the Nobel Prize and should be withdrawn.

Handke is a typical Nobel prize winner, difficult to read, difficult to understand, full of verbal dexterity. But in the 1990s he did something that no other Nobel prizewinner has ever done. He identified as fully and completely as was possible with the crimes against humanity of the Slobodan Milosevic regime in Serbia.

As the world watched with horror at Serb ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the shelling of the great city of Sarajevo, Handke cheered on the butchers.

In 1995, the Serbs took out 8,000 Europeans, men, boys and one woman and put them to death at Srebrenica. The killing was perfectly organised. The plastic handcuffs arrived in time. The right number of bullets for the Serb machine guns were delivered.  There were meal and coffee and slivovitz breaks.  The excavators for the graves dug out the precise amount of earth.

It was the worst state-sanctioned mass murder on European soil in 50 years. The German Nazis killed fewer in Lidice after Czech resistance heroes helped by the UK’s Special Operations Executive executed Reinhard Heydrich, a principal author of the Holocaust. You have to go back to Stalin’s cold-blooded one-by-one murder of Polish officers and civil servants in Katyn to get something close to what happened in Srebrenica.

Milosevic and his epigones, some now in high office in Belgrade, went on to authorise murders, rapes, village burning, ethnic cleansing in Kosovo which led to more than half the population fleeing for their lives into neighbouring countries like Macedonia and Albania in 1998-99. Finally, the democratic world’s patience snapped and Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schröder and Jacques Chirac authorised serious action to stop the impending Serb genocide in Kosovo.

Margaret Thatcher and most Tories, as well as Paddy Ashdown and Lib Dems were clear on the need to defeat Milosevic. It was a rare moment of (relative) political unity. Jeremy Corbyn, of course, opposed opposing Slobodan Milosevic, just as his predecessor as Labour leader in the 1930s, George Lansbury, thought that signing a peace petition would stop Hitler.

At least the Russians in 1989 finally apologised for Katyn, and the Germans have never stopped saying sorry and making reparations for their crimes against humanity.

From the Serbs, nada. Not a word. But they had a defender, the new Nobel Laureate for literature, Peter Handke. At the end of the three-year siege of Sarajevo he said that Bosnians who were Muslims had staged their own massacres in Sarajevo to blame the Serbs.

As Milosevic warlords ran amok killing Kosovans and burning their homes, Handke said “Sometimes I would like to be a Serbian Orthodox monk fighting [to keep] Kosovo (as a Serb colony)”.

Even after the full details of Serb atrocities in Kosovo were revealed by the lawyers at the Hague, by the OSCE, UN and Human Rights Watch, Handke could not contain his support for Serb war crimes in the 1990s. He went on to read an eulogy at Milosevic at his funeral.

PEN in America has called for the Nobel Prize to Handke to be withdrawn. Margaret Atwood is one of many British writers who hold honorary office in PEN. Will PEN luminaries in Britain step forward and dissociate English literature from this shameful award?

Britain has a minister of culture, and presumably Labour, Lib Dem and SNP spokespersons on culture. At least, let them say that Britain is repelled by this Swedish decision to honour an apologist for the worst crimes committed by a state on European soil since 1945.