Austrian novelist Handke facing protest at Nobel Prize ceremony

STOCKHOLM: Nobel literature laureate Peter Handke faces protest and boycotts over his backing of Serbia during the wars in ex-Yugoslavia as he prepares to receive his prize at a gala ceremony on Tuesday in Stockholm.

The Swedish Academy's pick for the 2019 prize, announced in October, triggered outrage in the Balkans and beyond because of Handke's support for late Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday slammed the choice of Handke, saying "the Nobel has no value".

"Granting the Nobel Literature Prize on Human Rights Day to a figure who denies the genocide in Bosnia and Herzogovina is nothing less than rewarding human rights violations," he told Turkish television.

The 77-year-old Austrian author will receive his award from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustaf at a ceremony with this year's other laureates, followed by a gala banquet attended by more than 1,200 special guests.

The Academy honoured Handke "for an influential work that with linguistic ingenuity has explored the periphery and the specificity of human experience".

It called him "one of the most influential writers in Europe after the Second World War".

The choice of Handke came as the Academy struggles to recover from a rape scandal that resulted in the 2018 prize being postponed and awarded this year to Polish author Olga Tokarczuk.

But its 2019 pick has done little to improve its predicament: one Nobel committee member resigned over the choice, one Academy member and representatives of the embassies of Albania, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Turkey have said they will boycott Tuesday's ceremony, and two demonstrations were due to be held as he receives his prize.

Handke has also not been invited to a traditional event for literature laureates with high school students in a Stockholm suburb, where many students are of foreign background. Tokarczuk will however attend.

At the Nobel banquet, Handke was to be the laureate seated farthest from the king and queen at the head table, while Tokarczuk was to be seated between the king and Prince Daniel, the husband of Crown Princess Victoria.

Organisers have refused to comment on the seating arrangements.

In 1997 Handke was accused of minimising Serb war crimes in his book "A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia".

He also drew criticism for speaking at the 2006 funeral of Milosevic, who died while on trial for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Divided Academy

Hundreds of people were expected to attend an anti-Handke protest at a central Stockholm square, while a second demonstration was planned outside the Stockholm Concert Hall where the prize ceremony was to take place.

"He's allowed to write what he wants. The problem is that he is being honoured for his writings," Teufika Sabanovic, the organiser of one of the protests, told AFP.

"He defends war criminals, he qualifies genocide, he qualifies genocide deniers. Where is the limit for what is acceptable?" she said.

Born in Srebrenica in 1990, she lost her father and 70 percent of her relatives in the hamlet when some 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb forces in July 1995, which the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has recognised as a genocide.

In Stockholm on Friday at a press conference, Handke dodged questions on the Balkan wars, telling reporters: "I like literature, not opinions."

But in an interview with German weekly Die Zeit in late November, Handke defended his writings.

"Not one word I have written about Yugoslavia can be denounced, not a single one. It's literature," he said.

Back then, "reporting about Serbia was monotone and one-sided," Handke told Die Zeit.

He said he "of course" had to be at Milosevic's funeral.

"He voted against dissolving Yugoslavia in one of the last ballots. His funeral was Yugoslavia's funeral too," Handke said. "Have people forgotten that this state was founded in opposition to Hitler's Reich?"

At the same time, Handke said he "not once bowed down before him — not internally, not externally".

The head of the Swedish Academy's Nobel committee, Anders Olsson, has insisted Handke is "not a political writer".

Olsson responded to a letter from survivors of war crimes in Bosnia and Herzegovina: "It is obvious that we understand Peter Handke's literary work in very different ways."

But another committee member, Peter Englund, disagreed.

"I will not participate in Nobel Week this year... Celebrating Peter Handke's Nobel Prize would be pure hypocrisy on my part," Englund said.

Ironically, in 2014 Handke called for the Nobel Literature Prize to be abolished, saying it conferred a "false canonisation" on the laureate.