[Responses from Saša Stanišić to questions from the New York Times about the Peter
Handke/Nobel Prize controversy. The NYT article, published on Dec. 10, included just
a few words of Stanišić’s extensive responses. Stanišić subsequently posted his
complete responses to a public Google document on Dec. 12.]
1) Handke's defenders say he never does question events in the wars, he just
questions the reporting of them and the lack of context around it, so he's guilty of
disrespecting victims, but not hiding genocide. Your speech makes it clear you
disagree. Why?
Handke does repeatedly question events in the wars. And yes, he does that sometimes by asking
questions, these though are tendentious and doubting ones, and as such they aim towards
questioning the truthfulness and plausibility of facts: of war reporting, witness statements,
forensic conclusions. That which is measurable, that which is accounted for, is being
disregarded or put in weird relations contexts, created as to weaken factual dealings with war
and crimes, with perpetrators and victims.
I’ll give you some examples of his method. Here is a quote from the „Summer Transcript“ which
I’d like to take a closer look into (I’ve highlighted some parts for better understanding).
"Late at night, then, standing at the open window in the room at the Hotel Višegrad. No peep any more
from the town behind me, and the massive bridge, glimmering in the dark, now depopulated, (...) and now,
the image is crossed by the thought about the reports of killings in the local Muslim
community almost exactly four years ago: according to eyewitnesses, many of the victims […] were
pushed off the bridge over there, and all on the orders of a young Serbian militia leader; in my
memory now, above all: an article from the New York Times, studded with statement after
statement against this man, who at this point has vanished, this man who “often went
barefoot,” a main characteristic, in the paramilitary force that he had named “The Wolves,” and among
the, as usual, exclusively Muslim witnesses for the prosecution, also, again as usual, that one
singular Serb, a soldier from this town, a prisoner now, interrogated there by a UN policeman, but later,
so it was said, exchanged and also vanished.
And I couldn’t help but ask myself, why in this war, again and again, the possible main witnesses of the
atrocities had, as it seemed, without much ado, been cleared for exchange (...) If this and that witness
knew something so terrible, so revealing, why then exchange him and let him go?
And why did the aforementioned article pretend that that Serbian-Bosnian wolf gang here
in Visegrad had had complete freedom to execute its months of raging in 1992? The entire
city a gruesome playing field for nothing but the few barefooted people playing cat and
mouse with their hundreds of victims? (...) Hadn’t the civil war erupted back then, with fighting on
all sides almost all over Bosnia? How could such freewheeling terror rage, given an
overwhelmingly Muslim population, long and well prepared for war, and largely in
positions of authority? The Ivo Andric memorial over there at the entrance to the bridge, hadn’t it been
bombed away already the year before the war started, as a signal for that, and by whom?“

I kind of hope you can recognize yourself the eyewash attempts:

 - In the first part he’s setting the stage for his disbelief of the unfolded events. How is he doing
this? By discrediting, one by one, sources.
First, the eyewitnesses: „almost exclusively Muslim“ (because, so the subtext, Muslims
could be keen on telling lies – all the victims being Muslims).
Then the journalistic research: „statement after statement against this man“ (instead
„Fact after fact“ or „report“ or any other word, which would be more neutral than „statement“,
thus making the journalist in question opinionated). The "man" by the way is Milan Lukić, who
at this point, was already being searched by warrant for the crimes in Višegrad with numerous
reports of the committed atrocities.
Then even the Serb soldier whom Handke also won't take as credible – "a prisoner now,
interrogated there by a UN policeman, but later, so it was said, exchanged and
also vanished“ plus: "And I couldn’t help but ask myself, why in this war, again
and again, the possible main witnesses of the atrocities had, as it seemed,
without much ado, been cleared for exchange, a fact that appeared in every such
report, and that was passed on every time completely unquestioned. If this and
that witness knew something so terrible, so revealing, why then exchange him
and let him go?“ By questioning the exchange, he is directly questioning the information
provided by those witnesses „If this and that witness knew something so terrible, why let him
go?“
After the stage of/for mistrust has been set, the veracity of the crime doubted – Handke goes
over to attacking head-on. This time the method of questioning facts stays the same, but now it
is supported by historical falsehood. Here he is spreading them either purposefully or he is illinformed and a truly bad researcher:
"And why did the aforementioned article pretend that that Serbian-Bosnian wolf
gang here in Visegrad had had complete freedom to execute its months of raging
in 1992? The entire city a gruesome playing field for nothing but the few
barefooted people playing cat and mouse with their hundreds of victims?“ asks
Handke. Note „pretend“ as his choice for the verb here. And of course they had the freedom to
do so. There were no armed men left in the city, the atrocities have been committed on civilians,
local police helped immensely. You can read on all that in the reports about the time in the trials
to Milan Lukić here:
https://www.icty.org/x/cases/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic/custom5/en/090512ftb.pdf
But Handke goes on further to even completely falsify the communal situations in Višegrad at
this stage. He writes: "How could such freewheeling terror rage, given an
overwhelmingly Muslim population, long and well prepared for war, and largely
in positions of authority?“

 The fighting – which I too witnessed – had been long over when the killings started. The
Bosnian Army had retreated, leaving the town in the hands of the former Yugoslavian People’s
Army (who were at least civil to some degree) and in the hands of the Bosnian-Serb Police and
then the military forces. The "overwhelmingly Muslim population“ was 62% percent, not
that overwhelming, „long and well prepared for war“ is Handke’s really exclusive opinion
– Bosnian forced had some huge losses at the beginning of the war, and lost the fight for
Višegrad only after a couple of weeks. And "largely in positions of authority?“ is also
wrong – the city was led in ethnic mix, but at the point of crimes happening, it was only in Serb
hands.
So, after staging doubt, Handke is actively trying to dilute the military and the political situation
in Višegrad in order to make that what happened seem less possible. Even in the way in which
he describes the orders of Milan Lukić as the orders of „a young militia leader“ make it, for
an uniformed reader, easy to say to himself: "Well, how in hell could have he done all this?“ –
"The entire city a gruesome playing field for nothing but the few barefooted
people playing cat and mouse with their hundreds of victims?“
What exactly had been done, by the way, Handke is silent about it most of the way. He does
mention the bridge and bodies thrown in the river Dina, when he writes about a women that had
seen her mother and sister being thrown off the bridge, but he mentions it in a way that again
questions the reporting of the woman’s pain by seeing the scene, thus not just taking the
journalist serious, but also belittling the pain of the witness that had seen the murder of her
family.
About the remark Handke is „only questioning the reporting“: He is questioning the reporting
and he does that with full right to undertake a critical look into it, but the way how he does it
and what he questions goes way over a simple language critique or a plea to be more objective.
He is questioning the reporting via questioning the facts. You can do that too, of course, but
then you have to provide your own research, you have to provide the contra-facts.
Questioning facts in order to create another reality that is "free from facts and yet more truthful"
because it claims to be literature. This is not what literature should do/should be doing.
Milan Lukić has been held responsible for the murders he and his men had committed.
Handke is not interested in Milan Lukić, not interested in the murders, not interested in
working on history, he is not really interested in working on language, even though he states
that he is. He is interested in taking a side in history and in this conflict. When at the end of his
„Summer Postscript“ essay he cynically compares the Bosnian Serb army with „Indians“ who
only out of their struggle and despair for freedom were attacking „Yankee caravans“, he’s
blatantly falsifying the political and military reality of the region by rewriting the Serb forces to
become freedom fighters instead of – as in fact mostly happened - aggressors.
In an interview from the year 2011 he is saying that the number of genocide victims in
Srebrenica is 2000-4000 (it is above 8000), and he is mocking the „Mothers of Srebrenica“ by

 saying that he doesn’t take their grief seriously. He says that if he were a grieving mother, he
would grief alone. Why would you want to question the sadness of others?
He uses the same method of bending the truth via questioning the facts and the feelings in
numerous other texts, and not only in Bosnia. For example, when talking about the war in
Croatia, he states that Dubrovink’s old city had not been really affected by shelling which is,
again, false. In his latest interview he has a completely distorted view on what led to the breakup of Yugoslavia, relating completely on weird theories in which Milošević was fighting for
former Yugoslavia to stay together which in fact he has not.
To the second part of your first question: "Is it a case that merely by raising questions,
you're doubting the whole war? Any examples you can give would be welcome.“
No one has stated that Handke is questioning the war. He is questioning certain events within
the war and is siding with nationalistic leaders, privately and in interviews and his work, but
also by taking over their apologetic approach to the war crimes and similar atrocities and events,
for example by stating, in Srebrenica „muslim soldiers“ had been killed (false) or that the
genocide there was done out of revenge (false).
There have been a number of scholars, intellectuals, artists and writers who have raised
questions on how to write the history of the war in the Balkans. But they were keen on supplying
truth to their questions. Raising questions was never the problem. But if you keep raising certain
ideological questions, particularly questions related to a certain group of victims and
perpetrators, you are consciously creating space for doubt of historic truths - and I really can’t
see a profit of any kind in that.

2) Why do you think he's acted and written as he has?
This is something only Handke can and should answer.

3) The Nobel Committee say this is a literature prize, and so the politics is
irrelevant. What's your response and have you read any of his non-Serbian
writings and so have a view on him in their sense as literature?
Just yesterday an external member of the Committee has quit because she said that the decision
to choose Handke was one that she can’t agree on, because politics are not less worth when we
judge literature, and in case of Handke, the literature he wrote in the complex of Yugoslavia is
highly political.
The politics, if they play a role in a literary text, can’t be overlooked. As little as you can’t just
take out a philosophical idea or a psychological premise to a character – the political discourse
is, in Handke’s case, a narrative carrier of his travels through the Balkans, an immanent and an
important key to read these works.

 Other authors who had problematic ideological views had been awarded the Nobel Prizes before
it was publicly known what their political stands were or would be through history. Handke is
being awarded with the prize, although the Committee knew.
And even Handke himself has stated numerous times that he doesn’t think that his work should
be separated from his person. In this case we should listen to Handke.
4) I apologise for an extra one, but I understand you fled Visegrad to Germany in
1992 (I assume you were 14 at the time?). Did you have direct experience of "The
Wolves"? When was it you read Handke's comments on events in the town and
how did they make you feel?
No, we fled, because we were warned about the possibility that something really bad could and
would happen soon in the city. That was our luck – to not experience the „Wolfes“.
Also: I am saying all this and have been criticizing Handke’s work, not because he is speaking
and writing about my home town, but as a reader and as an author, who asks a very simple
question: How on earth is it possible that we honor a work driven by a nationalistic political
agenda, work that is untruthful to history, and that is damaging the memory of living and the
memory of the dead?
In the region, the award has already been exploited by nationalists. For the victims it is a punch
in the gut. For literature it is an aesthetic and moral failure. For the Nobel Prize, which should
honor a work of idealistic power, it is a shame.