My new story reveals that Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke received a passport from Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia in 1999, and the passport listed Handke's nationality as Yugoslav. Here's why that's quite something. (thread) theintercept.com/2019/11/06/nob…
Handke won the Nobel Prize for Literature last month, prompting outrage that it had gone to a writer who consistently denied or downplayed the Serb genocide of Muslims in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Handke's defenders have insisted the Austrian writer has been even-handed.
Handke's sympathy for Serbs has always been clear and he hasn't hidden it; the controversy is over his denialism. But the passport, not reported until now, adds a new and potentially volatile factor. It shows Handke was closer to Milosevic's regime than previously known.
Here are the cover and inside pages of Peter Handke's Yugoslav passport. 
It was issued by the Yugoslav embassy in Vienna on June 15, 1999. On the left side of the passport, just above the photo of Handke, his nationality is listed as "Yugoslav."
There are lots of questions about Peter Handke's Yugoslav passport, and I try to answer them the best I can in my story. Here's what I know and don't know.
I found photos of his passport on a digital archive created a few years ago by the Austrian National Library. Here's the somewhat obscure page where the photos were posted as thumbnails (they were deleted after I began making inquiries about them). handkeonline.onb.ac.at/node/2495
I verified the photos by contacting the friend of Handke's who was listed (before the photos were deleted) as having provided them to the archive. Handke's friend confirmed that Handke had given him the passport. I'll get back to what Handke told the friend in a moment.
Getting a passport from Milosevic's Yugoslavia in 1999 was an exceptional act for almost any outsider. At the time, Yugoslavia was generally considered an outlaw nation. The U.S. and its allies had just ended a 78-day bombing campaign to force Milosevic's army out of Kosovo.
In Kosovo as well as Bosnia, Serb military forces were accused of war crimes including, in the case of Bosnia, genocide. Milosevic was indicted for crimes against humanity just three weeks before Handke obtained the passport from his regime.
These were not normal times and Yugoslavia was not a normal country. As my story notes, accepting a passport from Milosevic at that time was akin to a political act that was heavily freighted with meanings of support and alignment. Why accept a passport at that time?
Handke's friend (the one who supplied the passport to the National Library) told me that Handke said he got the passport so that he wouldn't have to pay the higher rates charged to foreigners at hotels in Serbia. It's true that foreigners paid higher rates back then. But...
...that does not seem, on its own, a sufficient reason for connecting oneself to a generally criminal regime, which I think accepting a Yugoslav passport (if you're a public figure like Handke) amounted to at that time.
I hope that in the coming days and weeks -- Handke officially receives his Nobel in Stockholm next month -- we learn more about why he got this passport, whether he also had Yugoslav citizenship, and what this says about his books and plays and how we should receive them.
All eyes must be on the @NobelPrize organization. The world's most important literary award has gone to a writer credibly accused of genocide denialism, and it turns out he secretly had a passport from the regime that committed the genocide. theintercept.com/2019/10/26/nob…
