My family was killed in the Srebrenica genocide — the one Nobel laureate Peter Handke claims never happened
Most of my male relatives were executed in eastern Bosnia in 1995 simply because they were Muslim.
Those who survived the war have been living with the trauma for years. The pain feels heavy and cuts deep.
I was retraumatized on Thursday when I found out that Austrian author Peter Handke, a man who has publicly denied genocides in Bosnia and said that Muslims had staged their own deaths, was awarded a Nobel prize in literature.
Handke has supported the Serb nationalist regime responsible for the deaths of 8, 372 Muslim men and boys killed in my hometown Srebrenica. My grandfather, uncles and cousins were among those killed.
My immediate family and I managed to escape the war in 1992 and eventually settled in the United States. For years my parents waited anxiously to hear from their missing loved ones, only to find out years later that they had been killed and their remains scattered across multiple mass graves in Bosnia.
The Srebrenica genocide was organized by Serb nationalist leaders whose goal was to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia of Muslims. Handke has supported and defended their causes for years.
In 2006, he attended Serbian nationalist leader Slobodan Milošević’s funeral, where he declared his solidarity with the people of Serbia. In 1999, he compared their plight to the persecution of Jews during the Holocaust — a false statement meant to divert public attention away from the Muslim men imprisoned at concentration camps in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995, and the thousands of Muslim women and girls abused by Serb perpetrators at rape camps during that same time.
I missed out on relationships with my grandfather and uncles, and my cousins were forced to grow up without fathers. All this because Serb nationalists didn’t deem their lives as worthy.
I would much rather kiss my grandpa Ismet on the cheek and tell him how much I love him, than write this article honoring his legacy. I would much rather hug my uncle Jusuf like I used to when I was a kid on our family’s farm outside Srebrenica, than have to fight for his existence to be acknowledged.
As a survivor of the Bosnian war and someone whose family was killed in a genocide committed by Serb nationalists, I feel obligated to challenge the Swedish Academy and the Nobel committee on their decision to award this year’s literature Nobel prize to Peter Handke.
The Nobel committee’s decision has been a source of retraumatization for genocide and war survivors. It has shown survivors that the Nobel committee stands in solidarity with a man who has abused his literary platform to distort historical truths.
Please do better. Survivors deserve better.