Aleksandar Hemon: ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists’
Back in my previous life in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I read the Austrian writer Peter Handke’s books, was pleasantly baffled by his plays and watched the movies he wrote. I loved the shimmering emptiness of his novel “The Goalie’s Fear of the Penalty Kick.” I loved the beauty of the Wim Wenders’s masterpiece “The Wings of Desire,” which Mr. Handke worked on.
In the late 1980s, I was young and invested in the pursuit of the smart and cool. Mr. Handke seemed not only smart and cool but also a writer who was expanding the frontiers of literature. He was the kind of writer I was angling to become.
But things changed for Mr. Handke and me in 1991, when Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. The Yugoslav People’s Army, responding to Slobodan Milosevic, president of Serbia, engaged in a brief war in Slovenia, then in a longer and much bloodier one in Croatia, leveling cities and committing atrocities.
Unwilling to stay in Yugoslavia, a majority of the people in Bosnia and Herzegovina decided in a 1992 referendum to declare independence. Mr. Milosevic pounced. His nationalist ambition to create a “Greater Serbia” demanded a genocidal operation against Bosnian Muslims. Radovan Karadzic, one of Mr. Milosevic’s proxies in Bosnia, conducted a campaign of “ethnic cleansing,” which meant rape and murder, mass expulsions, concentration camps and siege. Mr. Milosevic’s state provided full financial and military support.
In July 1995, the Serbs entered Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia, that had been declared a safe zone and was supposed to be protected by a Dutch battalion under the United Nations flag. Gen. Ratko Mladic, the commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, was there to celebrate the taking of Srebrenica. He declared that it was the most recent victory in the 500-year war against “the Turks” — a racist term for Bosnian Muslims. A few days later, Mr. Mladic’s soldiers murdered about 8,000 Bosnian Muslims and buried them in unmarked mass graves.
I don’t remember how or when I heard that Mr. Handke, whose mother was from Slovenia, had decided that the real victims of the Yugoslav wars were the Serbs, and that the Western governments and journalists lied about them out of hatred.
It could be that my initial reaction was mere disbelief — for how could the writer who imagined the angels in the sky over Berlin caring about all its citizens in Mr. Wenders’ movie come to believe that the “Muslims” in the multiethnic Sarajevo were massacring themselves to blame the Serbs, that both sides committed atrocities in Srebrenica. Mr. Handke insisted that the number of Bosnians killed was much exaggerated and that the Serbs were suffering like the Jews under the Nazis.
Shortly after the war was over in 1996, he published a book titled “A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia.” He discovered a kind of purity that was 2,000 years old in Serbia and Republika Srpska (the ethnically cleansed Serb entity in Bosnia established as part of the Dayton Peace Accord) and came to believe that a true Europe still existed only there.
Mr. Milosevic was so fond of Mr. Handke, he bestowed upon him the Order of the Serbian Knight for his commitment to the Serbian cause. Even after huge amounts of evidence of Serbian crimes in Croatia and Bosnia (and after 1999, in Kosovo) led to Mr. Milosevic and his proxies being arrested and indicted after the war, Mr. Handke’s support for the butcher of the Balkans went on unabated.