I wrote a series of articles about the baffling decision by the Swedish Academy to award the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer whose books downplayed and denied the Serb genocide of Muslims in Bosnia. I also went to Sweden for the Nobel award ceremony. Throughout this work, I wrote a lot of threads on Twitter with additional details about my articles and what I had found. I connected these threads onto a thread of threads — and here it is:
Read the entire Twitter thread.
If you’re just tuning into the scandal over the Swedish Academy selecting Peter Handke for the Nobel Prize in Literature, here’s a thread of my stories and tweets on the controversy (which still shocks me).
— Peter Maass (@maassp) December 2, 2019
I found out last month that two Nobel Prize jurors, in their deliberations, fell for a debunked conspiracy theory that falsely backs up Handke’s discredited views on the Serb genocide of Bosnia’s Muslims. https://t.co/wakbFbsF9j
— Peter Maass (@maassp) December 2, 2019
I also found out that during a 1998 visit to Bosnia, Handke stayed in a hotel, the Vilina Vlas in Visegrad, that had been used as a rape camp by Serbs during the war. It seems likely that Handke knew of the hotel’s history. https://t.co/fKJ5FTLUSm
— Peter Maass (@maassp) December 2, 2019
If you want to know more about the crimes committed at the Vilina Vlas, please read this thread by @hikmet_karcic. https://t.co/6cc4zrxNCc
— Peter Maass (@maassp) December 2, 2019
Handke delivered a eulogy at the 2006 funeral of Slobodan Milosevic, who oversaw the genocide in Bosnia. Though Handke has claimed he wasn’t allied with Milosevic, I found out that he secretly had a passport from the Serbian leader’s regime. https://t.co/ZxN8BfjABV
— Peter Maass (@maassp) December 2, 2019