Awarding controversial Austrian writer Peter Handke with the Nobel Prize means awarding it to a “racist individual” and to “human rights violations,” Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday, according to the Anadolu Agency.
The Nobel Committee chose to award Handke, a vocal supporter of the policies of late Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic, with the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. As soon as the news came out, survivors and families and friends of those killed in the massacres between 1992 and 1995 asked for the decision to be withdrawn and protested in front of the Swedish Embassy in Sarajevo.
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Turkey is among the many countries which have decided to boycott this year’s Nobel Prize award ceremony in Stockholm on Tuesday.
“Awarding Nobel Literature Prize to a racist individual will not mean anything other than awarding human rights violations,” Erdogan said in a message marking Human Rights Day.
