Peter Handke lights candle with grieving Serbian woman at Orthodox cemetery in village of Retimlje (Photo by Darko Dozet, April 2006, Kosovo-Metohija, Serbia). Visit to the Christian cemetery alongside Serbs exposed Handke and his friends to verbal attacks and insults by the local Albanians.
“In Kosovo there is only hate”
An interview with Peter Handke, translated from Italian by Timothy Fenton
“Without involvement in the wounds of the Balkans I would not be a true
writer”.
“There are no human rights, nor democratic guarantees. The remaining Serbs
are not even allowed to tend their graves, they are living in terror. And
the EU, headed by the Slovene Janez Janza, a leading criminal of the
Yugoslav drama, will recognise its independence, otherwise the Albanians
are threatening a new war”
By Tommaso Di Francesco, Paris
Wary but frank, Peter Handke receives us into his house on the remote
outskirts of Paris. Diaphanous, tall and bony, in a white shirt which he
wears when he comes to meet us despite the cold, he appears like one of
the angels from “Sky Above Berlin” [aka Wings of Desire (1988)], the film by
Wim Wenders for which he wrote the screenplay.
For many years he has lived here, he popped up in these parts like one of the mushrooms for which he
looks during his long walks in the woods near his house. He is one of the most politically incorrect of writers, practically persecuted by the cultural institutions of the world, as when two years ago in Germany his
award of the “Heinrich Heine” prize was rescinded, or straight afterwards in France La Comédie Française dropped one of his plays from their programme. Moreover only two months ago Handke has won a case for defamation against Il Nouvel Observateur which had written, mendaciously, that he had laid a red rose on the grave of Milosevic.
What is his crime? Peter Handke is accused of being pro-Serb, now, during Nato’s bloody “humanitarian” bombing of former Yugoslavia and in the period of the interethnic war. We are meeting him while he prepares to leave on a new “winter journey” to Serbia where he will take part in the Festival of Cinematographic Schools which takes place in the city of cinema planned by Emir Kusturica in Mokra Gora, meanwhile the battle over the status of
Kosovo rages and everyone waits for the presidential elections in Belgrade on 20 January.
Serbs are Not "Pretending to be Afraid", They are Living in Terror
TdF: The new leader of the Kosovar Albanians, Hashim Thaqi has announced that in a few weeks he will declare Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. But, after eight years of NATO occupation and administration by UNMIK-ONU, do the conditions expected for independence, that is to say democratic guarantees, respect for minorities and human rights, actually exist in Kosovo?
PH: I don’t recognise these conditions. I was in Kosovo in April and I have been there four other times recently. I remained truly struck by what I saw in the enclaves of Velika Hoca, a village with a large Orthodox church, and then in Orahovac. They are two enclaves near each other and there one understands how the Serbs are living, how they spend their time, robbed of every possession, forced to go out only at four in the morning,
terrorised all the time.
The Suddeutsche Zeitung, speaking of a Serbian enclave, has unbelievably written: “The Serbs pretend to be afraid”. You see, it’s ideology, their minds already made up. No, the Serbs are not “pretending to be afraid”, they are simply living in terror and they have suffered so many murders in this period.
There are no longer Serbian cemeteries outside the villages as elsewhere in Serbia. In Orahovac the
cemeteries have been transferred to the centre of villages, within the enclaves, and the buses which come every so often from Mitrovica have to wait so as not to disturb the new graves. So even the ordinary tending of
graves is impossible when those who do it may end up murdered and the gravestones themselves are often destroyed.
I have seen only hate in Kosovo. It is NATO that has created this tragic and unsustainable situation, NATO that bombed the whole of ex Yugoslavia. And now NATO and the European Union insist that it is necessary to grant independence because, otherwise, they know that the Kosovar Albanians will kill again and threaten a new war.
But how does one come to deserve independence not by right but because one threatens violence and another war? What democratic logic is this which has been brought to bear by Europe and the US? Even worse they have never let up in eight years from murdering and terrorising. It’s enough even to see a Serbian symbol, a bus or a coach as it approaches the most beautiful monasteries in Europe like Decani or Gracanica, then even the children, in an automatic reaction, throw rocks.
Reduced to Flock of Sheep
The Serbs are reduced to a flock of sheep, lost and impoverished. They have spoken of the violence of the Serbs against the Albanians but they have remained silent in all these years about the hundreds and hundreds of
murders and the destruction of the monasteries. They have told us that the Serbs wanted to expel two million Albanians, and for that reason the campaign of aerial bombardment was justified. They have made a great
theatre along the border, great for the world’s television crews and for NATO’s propaganda. Those refugees, for the most part were in flight because they were afraid of the aerial bombardment, they were accomodated
as soon as they reached the Macedonian border and they have all returned home two months later.
Thus they have contrived a new wretched war from photographs and TV broadcasts. In 1996 I was in Decani to deliver a lecture and there were no Italian troops in front of the monastery then as there are now protecting it, near there there was a lone Serbian restaurant and they did not want to leave. Inside there were traces of an
attack by the KLA where an Albanian woman had been murdered: five minutes before on the street the Albanian houses had all of a sudden turned off their lights.
The Serbs have also committed crimes and it has been a disgrace to that nation and who governs it. But no-one was describing it as an interethnic war, no-one was mentioning these armed attacks against the Serbs and the moderate Albanians themselves on behalf of the “freedom fighters”.
A few days into NATO’s war Le Monde and also newspapers on the Left had headlines “All out terror in Europe. 50,000 victims”. There were a lot of victims but from both sides and many moderate Albanians killed by
the KLA. In the end the Hague Tribunal found the graves of two thousand bodies for the most part fallen in combat. But not the fifty thousand or the “five hundred thousand” with which the New York Times headlined.
Janez Jansa, a Criminal Himself, May as Well Boast his Connections with KLA
TdF: The supreme Court of Pristina itself on 6th September 2001 has recognised in an important ruling that there was violence from the Serbian militia but not a “genocide”, declaring in the process that they had evidence that the the flight of eight hundred thousand Albanians was motivated by fear of the NATO bombings which actually caused massacres – “collateral damage” – among that same Albanian population. Then there was the KLA leader Ramush Haradinaj: Carla Del Ponte herself has said that he is a “butcher in uniform” and she has charged him with the slaughter of Serbs and Roma from 1998 (before the staged massacre of Racak). And now the European Union is ready to recognise the ethnic independence of Kosovo under the leadership of Janez Jansa, now prime minister of Slovenia and rotating president of the EU, who boasts an “acquaintance with the problem”…
PH: It’s all very well for Janez Janta to boast connections with the KLA, he is among the greatest criminals the Balkans have ever known. He who glories in the “patriotic war”, who did not hesitate to kill in cold blood 20 conscript Yugoslav soldiers – many Slovenian – who were waiting on a military lorry, murdered like dogs. With the motivation to form a new Mitteleuropa. That is an extraordinary region of culture, poetic and
musical, but to use the motivation of music as the base for an armed aggression seems to me to be at the very least an offense to the existence of Schubert. Janez Jansa has been in the vanguard of the Yugoslav tragedy
which I tried to denounce straightaway in 1991.
Expert Warmongers, the Curse of the Balkans
Handke in Serbia after 1999 NATO aggression that lasted 78 days, in front of destroyed car factory in the town of Kragujevac (Photo AFP).
TdF: Does it not seem to you that the European Union, which together with
the various armed nationalists was responsible for the destruction of
Federal Yugoslavia by recognising the declarations of independence based
on ethnicity – “Slovenicity” and “Croaticity” – now may be revisiting the
scene of their crime by recognising another ethnic independence, that of
Kosovo?
PH: No-one is blameless. [Translation uncertain] Perhaps Austria, but it
is always a revengeful knowledge. Same as for Germany. It is the
understanding of diplomacy, which Fernand Braudel called “the long
duration”, because there remains the awareness of the first and second
world wars. The rest, the French and the English, are completely ignorant
about the Balkans. How all these expert warmongers came on TV and said
“listen to me I am an expert”! They are the curse of the Balkans.
No-One Wants to Write About Serbian Refugees
TdF: And yet all these “experts” and these media types have up till now
stayed quiet about the exodus of a million Serbs, chased out of the
Croatian Krajina, from Bosnia Hercegovina and from Kosovo. Refugees who
will not return to their birthplaces again and constitute a tragedy for
the new Serbia. Why this silence? Not to mention the Kosovar Roma now
scattered across the shanty towns of the Balkans and around Europe…
PH: During my “winter trips”, I have been many times in hotels which house
refugees, in Negotin, Fruska Gora, Bor, Nis. I have written a long report
asking among other things for the journalists to tell the story of the
Serbian refugees. When you enter one of those hotels you see people seated
crosslegged on the ground, the whole day in a daze, until they resort to
drink. With the old women who strive to keep their dignity and that of the
children around them. They are waiting to die or to flee, living like the
emigrants of the last century in America. And despite this there are some
young people who paint, to eat and to describe existentially what they
have become.
If I were a journalist I would live for months with those
people, like Ryszard Kapuscinski did. No-one’s doing that. In Germany
there are study grants in some cities for young writers who as guests
describe their experience for a year. I have made this proposal: let’s
send them for a month to be among the Serbian refugees. Not a single
writer has put himself forward, they prefer to get a prize of two thousand
Euros for talking about cookery. I am beginning to despise the young
writers.
Paris Tribunal Found Nouvel Observateur Guilty of Defamation
TdF: You have been accused of having put a red rose on Milosevic’s grave
and of having approved of the Srebrenica massacre, haven’t you?
PH: It’s a complete fabrication. The Paris Tribunal has found the Nouvel
Observateur guilty of defamation for these claims: they had alleged that I
had declared I was only happy when close to Milosevic. Those who know me
know that I hate all men of power. But naturally all the French newspapers
have glossed over the court’s ruling. They have waged a campaign against
me that resulted in the Comedie Francaise withdrawing my work from their
programme, and then they have kept quiet about the fact that what they had
said was not true.
I deeply love the France of George Bernanos, of
Francois Mauriac, and above all of Albert Camus, but the culture of
today’s France is truly shameful.
Nowadays the men of letters and
philosophers are caricatures like André Gluksmann, Bernard-Henri Lévy and
those jokers of the international humanitarian rights like Bernard
Kouchner, who in the meantime has become Foreign Minister.
As for Srebrenica they have made a mockery of my words. I have condemned the
crimes committed by the Serbs, however I recalled that it is all
incomprehensible if one does not take into account the earlier slaughters
of even women, old people and children – not like in Srebrenica [where
only males of fight age were killed] - perpetrated by the Bosnian Muslim
forces led by the Srebrenica leader Naser Oric in the villages around
Srebrenica: Kravica, Bratunac. These deeds were authorised by President
Izetbegovic. It was a brutal interethnic and interreligious war to be
denounced as much as possible.
My Choices are a Testimony
TdF: Don’t you think you made a mistake in going to Milosevic’s funeral in
2006 when he died in gaol at the Hague?
PH: I was not invited and I could have stayed away at home. No, I said to
myself, I must go there even if it will be damaging for me. And in fact
immediately they created a tsunami against me, distorting my every word. I
am recognised for my books, but I am proud of this choice. It is a
testimony which also helps the new Serbia, which is now struggling against
Kosovo being removed from its sovereignty, its history and its culture.
In
the same way I am proud to have been earlier to the Hague, not to revere
Milosevic, I am not interested at all in him as a man of power. I know
that the Serbs also committed crimes, which I do not defend. I insist on
denouncing the nature of a completely fratricidal war. I went to the Hague
because he was still in gaol accused of everything and as uniquely
culpable for the war in the Balkans which he saw, from 1991 to 1995 and
then from 1996 to 2002, full seven battle fronts, and some when Milosevic
was not yet in power or no longer in power, even though he was involved to
ratify the peace, as happened at Dayton for Bosnia Hercegovina, for which
the USA was very thankful. I went to the Hague above all because I think
that the politician in gaol is much more interesting than when he is in
power. After all I was in good company with the former American attorney
general, Ramsey Clark.
Literature Must be Merciful, or One Has No Right to Call Himself a Writer
TdF: What will be the immediate effect in the Balkans of the declaration
of independence by Kosovo?
PH: I don’t know how the artificial state of Bosnia Hercegovina will hold
up, nor what will happen in the Serbian zone of Kosovska Mitrovica, which
is well maintained and productive compared to the disastrous economy in
the rest of Kosovo where unemployment, mafia and the rule of
“international aid” holds sway. And what will happen in Macedonia with the
existence of really two Albanian states in the region? I am in mind of the
grave responsibility of the Albanian Ismail Kadare, not a great or even a
good writer. But above all he is an “ultranationalist” who has fanned the
flames of ethnic war. I met him and spoke to him of my love for the
Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric and of his courage as a free man. He replied to
me with a lie: I must not be fond of Andric because he was “against the
Albanians”.
TdF: Why does a writer like you, who continues to work in a painful way of
life like something Kafkaesque, demonstrate such involvement in the
suffering of the Balkans?
PH: Without this passion my life as a writer would truly be lived with
little emotion. Writing is a very noble profession, but if I did not
involve myself, merge myself in the Yugoslav conflict I would not deserve
to still be called a writer. I am proud to have written about the Serbian
refugees. I think that literature, as I say of Erri De Luca, must be
merciful. Else I would have no right to be a writer.
