Srebrenica: 25 years later

Even 25 years after the war, such tendencies are hindering true reconciliation in Bosnia and Herzegovina – and thus across The Balkans. Even so long after the end of the war, there is still no stable peace – and it cannot exist until those acts have been named adequately and perpetrators considered killers and criminals.

The far-reaching nature of such tendencies to trivialise and relativise has been confirmed by the decision of the Nobel Prize Committee to award the 2019 Literature Prize to the Austrian Peter Handke, an apologist of the denial machinery that questions the statements of survivor who had lost their male family members, sometimes all of them. Handke provides a powerful voice for such actors of questionable morals. By awarding him, the Nobel Prize Committee undoubtedly elevated the relativisation of extermination ideologies in the context of the Balkan wars to an international level.