Category: Balkans
Putin’s Endgame Is Not a Mystery. It’s Regime Survival.
The Intercept
March 12, 2022
HE IS THE president of a Slavic nation who takes advice from no one and gambles on a war that does not go as planned. Fierce resistance prevents his forces from seizing the capital he covets. Western sanctions send his economy into a tailspin, the middle class flees, ...
The Warning Lights Are Flashing Red for America
The Intercept
Jan. 6, 2022
IT WAS THE winter of 1991, and the country I was working in, the Soviet Union, was months away from its demise. Yet the collapse, so close, was unimaginable.
Moscow was frigid and miserable. The currency was a wreck, stores had empty shelves, and the Kremlin seemed ...
The U.S. Military Is a Machine of Impunity
The Intercept
Dec. 26, 2021
My education in wartime savagery started in Bosnia in the 1990s. Reporting on the war, I visited death camps, saw civilians get shot and beaten, interviewed torturers, and was arrested multiple times for being in the wrong place and asking too many questions. ...
Oscars Face Stark Choice Over War Movie “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
The Intercept
March 27, 2021
IF A WAR MOVIE focuses on the killing of civilians rather than the courage of soldiers, can it win an Academy Award? The conventional wisdom — “that’s improbable” — may be upended by a wrenching film about the genocide in Bosnia, “Quo Vadis, Aida?”
Hollywood ...
The King of Sweden Gives Peter Handke a Disgraceful Nobel Prize
The Intercept
Dec. 10, 2019
A Nobel Prize that will live in infamy was officially presented today to Peter Handke, who is a genocide denier. There was no sign of protest or discord inside the Stockholm Concert Hall as King Carl XVI Gustaf delivered a gold Nobel medal to Handke. After the Swedish monarch ...
Nobel Winner Peter Handke Compared My Questions About Genocide in Bosnia to a “Calligraphy of Shit”
The Intercept
December 6, 2019
The Swedish Academy held a press conference on Friday for Peter Handke, the writer it selected as the winner of the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. Handke’s lifetime work includes about a half-dozen books that downplay Serb massacres of Muslims in Bosnia, and his critics ...
The Nobel Prize, a Rape Camp in Bosnia, and Peter Handke
The Intercept
November 28, 2019
What does it mean to spend a night at the Vilina Vlas hotel?
The answer to this seemingly odd question reveals the moral and intellectual collapse of the Swedish Academy, which last month bestowed on Peter Handke the 2019 Nobel Prize for Literature. Handke is an Austrian-born ...
The Nobel Prize Organization Is Now Fully Engaged in the Business of Genocide Denial
The Intercept
November 20, 2019
It has come to this: The Nobel Prize organization has not merely selected a genocide denier for its 2019 literature award. The organization itself has become an open skeptic of the mass murder of Bosnia’s Muslims.
In a letter to a group of publishers in Bosnia, the Swedish ...
Peter Handke Won the Nobel Prize After Two Jurors Fell for a Conspiracy Theory About the Bosnia War
The Intercept
Nov. 14, 2019
This is a story about a conspiracy theory that was born in the 1990s, hibernated in obscurity for two decades, and in 2019 appears to have duped jurors into awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to Peter Handke, who has denied the Serb genocide of Muslims in Bosnia.
The ...