Blind to the Truth
By Tobias K. Vogel
Transitions Online
(Prague)
July 20, 2005
FREIBURG, Germany -- Peter
Handke's transformation from one of the German language's most
celebrated writers and an idol of the '68 generation into a full-blown
apologist for Serbian war crimes has taken a good 10 years but is now
officially complete.
His obsession with what he thought to be an injustice of epic
proportions - the demonization of the Serbian people by Western media -
first came to the attention of a broader audience in 1996, when
Germany's foremost literary publisher Suhrkamp brought Handke's A
Winter Journey to the Danube, Sava, Morava, and Drina Rivers, or Justice
for Serbia to a market that was thirsting for anything to do with
the Balkan wars of 1991-1995, which had just ended with the Dayton
accords.
Ian Traynor from the London Guardian called the book (published in
English as A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia) "a
lyrical, finely-wrought description of a recent journey to Serbia
coupled with raging invective against the Germans, the Croats, the
Slovenes, the West generally and the international media in particular
who are guilty of demonizing the Serbs.
"Handke has blown a hole in the politically correct consensus by
heroicising the Serbs and denouncing just about every other actor
involved in a polemic that is at once gentle, reflective, wonderfully
evocative and extraordinarily vicious," Traynor wrote in March 1996,
just as NATO peacekeepers were settling in across Bosnia.
Not surprisingly, the travelogue's various excursions into Serbia's
recent history touched off one of those controversies so beloved of the
German public. Literary critics and journalists who had covered the
Balkan wars were near-unanimous in their condemnation, while Handke
became a hero to those who accused the mainstream media of having fallen
for a conspiracy by Western governments under U.S. leadership to destroy
Yugoslavia and open it up to exploitation by Western capitalists. (This
line would be repeated by Noam Chomsky
with regards to NATO's war against Serbia in 1999.)
Few thought of asking people in former Yugoslavia what they thought of
Handke's views, and the debate soon degenerated into a score-settling
that had nothing to do with Handke's purported subject. As such debates
go, it was singularly unenlightening.
Handke didn't help his cause when he appeared on Serbian state
television during the ill-fated Rambouillet peace talks of 1998 between
the Serbian government and ethnic Albanian rebels from Kosovo.
"There is not a people in Europe in this century which has had to endure
what the Serbs have had to put up with for five, or more, eight, years,"
he told his audience. "There are no categories for this. There are
categories and concepts for the Jews. You can talk about that. But with
the Serbs, it is a tragedy for no reason, a scandal." (Handke later
dismissed this statement as a "slip of the tongue.")
FINDING A CAUSE
Handke was a bit of a pop star of German literature after bursting onto
the scene in the late 1960s. His play Insulting the Audience was
enormously popular and several other titles made it into the pantheon of
German literature. He also co-wrote, with Wim Wenders, the script for
Wenders' 1987 Wings of Desire.
Handke always seemed to have a more withdrawn side and a penchant for
mysticism. When these tendencies found their application in politics,
disaster was preordained.
Handke found his big cause in the fate of Yugoslavia, a country he
evidently loved. Born to a Slovenian mother in the southern Austrian
province of Carinthia, bordering what was then Yugoslavia, he seems to
have felt a special bond to the people and landscapes next door. He was
furious when Yugoslavia broke up and blamed the Western-looking Slovenes
and Croats for its destruction, along with Germany, Austria, and the
Vatican. The Serbs were on this view simply victims, largely blameless
for the violence that now engulfed the former country.
In this he was not alone. A number of Western intellectuals, many of
them with fond memories of Tito's country and a romantic attachment to
his policy of steering a middle course between capitalism and communism,
also blamed the Croats for the break-up. Later on, during the atrocities
in Bosnia, this would degenerate into bizarre accusations - fed by UN
officials on the ground anxious to maintain their "impartiality" in
light of brutal Serbian assaults on Sarajevo that were widely publicized
by an aggressive, and despairing, international press corps there - that
the Bosnian government was responsible for the deadliest shelling.
Some continue this argument to this day. Writing in the
Toronto Globe and Mail of 14 July [2005], retired major-general
Lewis MacKenzie of Canada, the first UN force commander in Bosnia in
1992, said that the Srebrenica massacre was not "a black and white event
in which the Serbs were solely to blame." He then goes on to doubt the
number of around 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys killed, a
number now accepted as accurate not only by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and leading international
human rights organizations, but also by the
government of Bosnia's largely Serbian entity, Republika Srpska.
MacKenzie argues that only 2,000 bodies have been recovered and that
among them are the remains of people who'd been killed during three
years of intense fighting in the area. This, however, is simply untrue: over 2,000 bodies have already been
formally identified as those of the victims of the July 1995 massacre
and reburied at the memorial site outside Srebrenica.
MacKenzie's piece also assures us that
Srebrenica couldn't have been a
genocide: "if you're committing genocide, you don't let the women go
since they are key to perpetuating the very group you are trying to
eliminate."
The idea that the primary victims of the conflict had somehow brought
all this misery upon themselves had been abandoned by most serious
intellectuals by the time of Srebrenica, and they tended to remain quiet
for the rest of the war.
They understood something Handke still doesn't get, after all these
years.
Denouncing gullible Western journalists, who were indeed often
propagating facile black-and-white images of the conflicts in Bosnia and
Kosovo, and cozying up to a dictator like Slobodan Milosevic are two
very different things.
The former could be done, and indeed was done, by perfectly reasonable
people with a genuine will to understand what was going on in the
Balkans.
The latter was the specialty of a few maverick writers such as the
Russian
Edward Limonov, who commented about meeting Zeljko Raznatovic "Arkan,"
Serbia's most notorious "ethnic cleanser," "I've always loved bright and
handsome gangsters." He later went to visit his friend and fellow man of
letters Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and was
filmed firing a machine gun at besieged Sarajevo.
FANNING THE FLAMES
Handke's latest essay, published in the July issue of the monthly
Literaturen (Literatures), is less
confrontational than A Winter Journey and has so far failed to revive
the fierce debate that followed the 1996 book. But Handke's beliefs are
as firm as ever, and he still sees Serbia, and Serbia's former president
Milosevic, now on trial at the ICTY, as a bulwark against the
encroachment of market modernity on ever-wider regions of the world.
Indeed, what seems to animate his relentless denunciation of Western
responses to the Balkan slaughter is his hatred of the modern world, a
theme already much in evidence in A Winter Journey. Traynor wrote in the Guardian, "The
simplicity of the pre-capitalist system he encounters [in Serbia] is so
attractive to Handke that he wants the country's enforced isolation
maintained so that this charm is not lost, a sentiment not likely to be
shared by many of those directly affected." Much of this spirit is
intact in the latest installment.
But then, Handke has never been particularly interested in the views of
those he encounters; he always made sure that they would only tell him
what he wanted to hear.
"The Tablas of Daimiel: A detour witness report on the trial of Slobodan
Milosevic," billed as a travelogue, describes a talk Handke had with the
deposed Serbian president in the ICTY detention facility in The Hague
last year. (The cryptic title refers to an anecdote of dubious relevance
Handke tells at the end of the piece.)
"Almost the entire time," Handke writes of the more than three hours
they spent together, "it was only Milosevic who talked." But we never
hear what Milosevic said - Handke doesn't tell us.
It's the same with Serbian refugees from Bosnia and Kosovo he meets
across Serbia: it's not what they say or feel but the impression they
make on the writer that's recorded here. Still, it's only in these
encounters that Handke's humanity shows through, and it becomes evident
that the neglect and misery these people have been living in for the
last 10 years touches him deeply and, one hopes, genuinely.
What he utterly fails to even contemplate, of course, is that it might
have been the policies of his hero Milosevic that put an abrupt end to
what may have been content lives in Knin or Pristina.
Handke also has rather less sympathy for other victims of the wars
unleashed by Milosevic, for example referring to the association of
mothers of Srebrenica as "organized and activated for a global audience,
hopefully by the mothers themselves."
FIGHTING THE FACTS
On the 10th anniversary of the premeditated massacres at Srebrenica - in
the meantime ruled a genocide by the ICTY that Handke so loathes - there
seems to be growing recognition in Serbia of the enormity of that crime.
Handke, by contrast, is now aligning himself with a faction of the
Serbian public that still refuses to recognize what happened at
Srebrenica.
Srebrenica was a watershed event that finally shamed the Western powers
into stopping the bloodbath in former Yugoslavia by military means.
It is this original sin that so exercises Handke: disregarding the fact
that the ICTY was set up by the UN Security Council, which also includes
two permanent members that opposed military intervention in Bosnia, he
considers it to be partial and an extension of NATO. It is victors'
justice that's being pursued at The Hague, Handke insists.
This argument, of course, is no different from those offered by Serbian
nationalists. But they have come under increasing pressure in recent
months as dramatic video footage seemed to suggest that Serbian Interior
Ministry troops may have been directly involved in the killing at
Srebrenica.
For Handke, what happened there still only qualifies as a "massacre of
Muslim soldiers" and is worth no more than a few sentences in the entire
20-page essay. It may be this fact more than anything Handke actually
says that best illustrates his particular moral blindness.