Shortly before the award of Peter Handke with the Nobel Prize for Literature Recep Tayyip Erdogan attacked the writer. The Turkish president described Handke as a "racist person".
"The Nobel Prize for Literature being given to a racist person denying the genocide in Bosnia Herzegovina and defending war criminals on Dec. 10, Human Rights Day, has no other meaning than to honor violations of human rights," said Erdogan. At the same time, critics accuse the Turkish head of state of human rights violations, for example that under his leadership oppositionists are silenced by political processes.
Last weekend, Erdogan's spokesman Ibrahim Kalin had demanded via Twitter to withdraw the "irrational and outrageous" decision to award the award to Handke. He also accused the Nobel Prize committee of encouraging new war crimes.
REUTERS
Peter Handke: Erdogan calls him a "racist person"
Handke's election to the laureate had sparked a heated debate even before the ceremony on Tuesday in Stockholm. The reason for this is Handke's attitude to the Yugoslavian conflict: the author had strongly solidarized himself in the conflict with Serbia and criticized the trivialized by Serbs war crimes trivialized or denied. In 2006, he delivered a speech at the funeral of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, who had been ousted six years earlier.
The collapse of Yugoslavia at the beginning of the 1990s was accompanied by a series of extremely bloody wars between Serbia and other successor states. In Bosnia alone, there were 100,000 dead and two million displaced persons. Although all sides committed war crimes, evidence from contemporary history research and the jurisprudence of the International Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague proves that Milosevic's wars were planned and initiated, and that most of the worst atrocities went to his account.