Peter Handke is probably the most famous proponent of a certain phenomenon that conflicts like Yugoslavia sometimes seem to conjour up: That suddenly people who pride themselves in being critically start embracing organizations and states that are probleatic at best, genocidal at worst to a ridiculous degree because they allegedly "oppose imperiallism" or some such rationalization. Like Chomsky's Cambodia episode or Jean-Luc Mélenchon's account of Yugoslavia, which I address here, Handke became convinced that Slobodan Milošević and Radovan Karažić – of all people – were somehow the defenders of anti-nationalist Yugoslav ideology.

Eric Gordy summed up the matter in one comment on Handke's price:

A journey to the rivers [Handke's 1996 book Eine winterliche Reise zu den Flüssen Donau, Save, Morawa und Drina oder Gerechtigkeit für Serbien], competes for the title of the most regrettable dross to be written about the Balkans with Robert Kaplan’s Balkan ghosts. Unlike Kaplan, whose interlocutors are opinionated taxi drivers and lusty nuns, Handke says he is „drawn“ to the country „least known to me“ and proceeds to learn nothing by talking principally to his two translators and a gaggle of regime-sponsored writers. Mostly the book repeats slogans that were recited to him by his hosts, and it also describes some rivers which, in contrast with Handke’s arguments, hold water.

He proceeds to call Handke a typicial padobranci – a parachutist –, meaning an author "who turn up knowing nothing with a conclusion already formed, and leave a short time later knowing no more but armed with a few quotations from the small number of people they met who confirmed their prejudices."

The reason I am mentioning all of this is because it is rather crucial for centextualization for the things Handke says about the history of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav wars. Because starting with the claim about Croat and Bosniak camps, it is correct that both Crotian forces in Bosnia as well as Bosniak forces have been accused and convicted of a variety of war crimes for their activities during the Yugolav wars. This is reflected in the massive list of people indicted and sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

There is for example, Zlatko Aleksovski, commander of Kaonik prison in Busovača municipality during the war, where the Croatian Defense Council – HVO, the official military formation of the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia – brought hundreds of Bosniaks from the Lašva valley. He was tried and sentenced for inhumane treatment, including excessive and cruel interrogation, physical and psychological harm, and forced labour as well as using the Bosniaks in the prison as human shields.

The crimes of the HVO in Lašva valley even went so far that both the ICTY and general scholarship on the matter agrees that it was a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The Lašva Valley's Bosniaks were subjected to persecution on political, and religious grounds, deliberately discriminated against in the context of a widespread attack on the region's civilian population and suffered mass murder, rape, and imprisonment in camps such as Kaonik and Vitez. Massacres were committed by HVO forces in places like Busovača, Vitez, and Ahmići.

At the same time, the ICTY as well as scholars have indetified several camps run by Bosniaks as sites for massive crimes against humanity and war crimes. The most famous one probably the Čelebići camp, which prompted the ICTY to make a landmark judgement by qualifying rape as a form of torture, seeing also how frequently it was used by the troops there from the Bosnian Ministry of the Interior and later Bosnian Territorial Defence Forces (TO). In a similar vein, ICTY indicted and sentenced Rasim Delić, high ranking Bosniak general and head of the Bosnian general staff, for his failure to prevent various Mujahedin units from committing war crimes against Serb prisoners such as killing 60 Serb prisoners in 1995 or beheading two combatants of the Republika Srpska the same year.

The point here is that it is absolutely possible to look to the HVO campaign in the Lašva valley and the Kaonik camp as well as to the Čelebići camp on the Bosniak side and identify a plethora of crimes against humanity and war crimes. And while there is some truth to the fact that this is often ignored and forgotten in the larger Western discourse – as is so much about Yugoslavia –, the fact that the ICTY did prosecute and sentence a variety of the people reposnible for these crimes and named things by its name – the Lašva valley ethnic cleansing campaign – shows that to a possible degree there is a will to address these things and bring people to justice.

What Handke does on the other hand is a classical example of whatbaoutism. Handke does not address these camps and crimes in order to promote justice for its victims or change the Western disciourse to include a broader understanding the horrific and often criminal nature of the Yugoslav wars. Handke mentions these things because he sees mentioning that others did crimes too as a way to distract from crimes committed by Serbian forces. He is the "but what about Stalin" guy in discussions about the Holocaust. Holm Sundhaussen, one of the best historians of Yugoslavia, once wrote: "Die These, ´alle Konfliktparteien´ waren gleichermaßen schuld (…) ist ebenso unakzeptabel wie die These, dass es auf allen Seiten Schuldige gab, richtig ist." [The thesis that all parties of the conflict are equally guilty (...) is as unacceptable as the thesis that there are guilty on all sides is correct.]

That Handke does not heed these words and instead is trying to cynically use the fact that there are the guilty on all sides to assuange the guilt of his "favorite" side is evident in Handke's writing. In A journey to the rivers, Handke has his protagonist muse on about the New York Times journalists who come to a country they don't understand and will believe everything the people tell them, specifically a story of a woman who talks about seeing Republika Srpska troops killing her mother and throwing her into the Save river. The next day, the protagonist goes swimming in the Save and Handke has him thinking "Ah yes, remember, don't open your mouth because of all the corpses." It's a moment that goes to show Handke's cynicism and this resentment of the victims. His is not a quest motivated by getting justice for all the people killed in Yugoslavia but rather a quest that posits him as a smart critic against Western discourse.

The passage on the Srebrenica episode betrays this mindset further. What Handke refers to are the actions of the troops of Naser Orić, commander of the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) forces in the Srebrenica area. The area which Orić commanded was the Srebrenica enclave under siege by Republika Srpska troops. During the years from 1992 to the massacre in July 1995 Orić and his troops committed several war crimes during attacks on the surrounding Serb troops. Among these were the attack on Fakovici and other villages along the river Drina, where Orić's forces killed at least 24 Serb soldiers and burned down 36 buildings; the January 7, 1993 Kravica massacre, where in the in the village of Kravica Orić's troops killed 35 VRS soldiers and 11 civilians on Orthodox Christmas Day and the attack on the village of Skelani where on January 16, 1993 Orić's forces are alleged to ahve killed 48 Serb soldiers.

Orić's and his troops' actions were certainly part of a spiral of radicalizing actions of ethnic cleansing and massacres that occured in the Srberenica area for pretty much the entire war and like the Republika Srpska troops targeting the Bosniak civilians, Orić and his men participated in that spiral and helped make the entire conflict more violent and abhorrent. Only what doesn't work is to use their actions as a justification for the massacre in Srbrenica itself.

It would be nice to be able to believe Handke that all he intends here is to make sure Orić's crimes are not forgotten and that justices is doled out euqally and it is remembered that these massacres occured. Only that is hard to swallow from someone who has used his platform continously to promote the murderers of one side as somehow morally justified. When Handke said of Milošević at his funeral that the real world knows the truth about this great man, the last vestige of pretense that this is about anything other than rehabilitating a war criminal went out of the window.

As an Austrian and historian of Yugoslavia, I want to conclude with the personal words of fuck Peter Handke.

Sources:

• Peterson, Roger D. (2011). Western Intervention in the Balkans: The Strategic Use of Emotion in Conflict.

• Mojzes, Paul (2011). Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century.

• Max Bergholz. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community.

• Miller, Paul B. "Contested memories: the Bosnian genocide in Serb and Muslim minds." Journal of Genocide Research 8.3 (2006): 311–324.

• Holm Sundhaussen: Geschichte Jugoslawiens 1918–1980.

• Holm Sundhaussen: Jugoslawien und seine Nachfolgestaaten 1943–2011. Eine ungewöhnliche Geschichte des Gewöhnlichen.

• Sabrina P. Ramet: The Three Yugoslavias: State-Building and Legitimation, 1918—2005.

• Sabrina P. Ramet: Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia at Peace and at War: Selected Writings, 1983—2007.

• Carole Rogel: The Breakup of Yugoslavia and Its Aftermath.