ZAGREB, October 15, 2019 - The decision by the Swedish Academy to award the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2019 to Austrian writer Peter Handke is contrary to the original idea of the Nobel Prize, the Croatian P.E.N. Centre said in a statement signed by its president Tomica Bajsić on Tuesday.

The Nobel Prize is awarded to "people who make an exceptional contribution to humanity."

Handke's literature has been intertwined with his consistent support to the Slobodan Milošević regime whose devastating consequences we still feel today, P.E.N. Croatia recalls.

It stresses that Handke's denial of mass crimes, his idolatry of a tyrant and contempt of the victims of the aggression in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina are built into his work and can therefore not be viewed as being separate from the award of the Nobel Prize, whose reputation is linked with the nobleness of resistance to repression and commitment to testifying to the truth.

Taking into consideration that Nobel Prize winners are considered worldwide as role models and a kind of the world's conscience, it is disgraceful that the Swedish Academy does not care that the awarded writer described the killing of people in Dubrovnik and the city's siege as the Dubrovnik Summer Games, depicting the victims of the besieged Vukovar and Sarajevo as their own executioners, and that he said untruths about prison camps and was an apologist of the Srebrenica genocide, says P.E.N. Croatia.

The Swedish Academy's decision was also condemned by PEN International and PEN America.

PEN International described Handke as an author who had called into question well-documented war crimes while PEN America said that he had publicly supported perpetrators of genocide - former Serbian president Slobodan Milošević and Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić.

"At a moment of rising nationalism, autocratic leadership, and widespread disinformation around the world, the literary community deserves better than this," PEN America said.

More culture news can be found in the Lifestyle section.

ZAGREB, May 30, 2019 - Nobel Peace Prize winner Denis Mukwege has called for joint global action to help war rape victims around the world, and he thinks Croatia can contribute.

Late last year, his Mukwege Foundation started the International Reparations Initiative, a global fund for survivors of wartime sexual violence. He is trying to include as many countries as possible in the Initiative, expected to come to life this year.

With the fund for survivors, we can give the right answer to all victims of sexual violence, Mukwege told Hina in Carcavelos, Portugal, where he took part in an Estoril conference on global challenges.

Sexual violence is a weapon of war which isn't tied to only one conflict. It's a common tactic used around the world. Reparations are a step towards restoring dignity to survivors who usually don't have the money to seek justice for the pain they experienced, Mukwege said.

This gynaecologist from the Congo received the Nobel Peace Prize last year for physically and psychologically treating women and children raped in war conflicts in Congo over the past 20 years as well as for his fight against that form of torture.

That remains a big problem in the world. It's a problem in Iraq, in Syria and in many states in Africa, Mukwege said.

The theme of this year's Estoril conference, named after the tourist resort, was "Empowering Humanity: From Local to Global Justice".

On Monday, Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović spoke in defence of the equality of women in world politics and locally, saying society suffers great losses by neglecting and marginalising women.

I was impressed by how seriously the Croatian president understands the issue of women, women in Croatia, and we talked about what could be done about women victims of war rape in the world, Mukwege said.

After her address at the conference, Grabar-Kitarović met with Mukwege at the Carcavelos Faculty of Economics. They also talked about war rapes in Croatia during the Greater Serbia aggression in the 1990s.

We shared our experiences about what happened in Croatia and other parts of the world, about ethnic cleansing. Local solutions are not enough, we need global solutions, Mukwege said.

She is really committed to this issue. This weapon of war was used in Croatia and elsewhere in the world, so we must join forces to fight against it and to find a solution for the victims, he added.

More news about war crimes in Croatia can be found in the Politics section.

ZAGREB, May 21, 2018 - The famous Romanian-born writer and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Herta Mueller will be a guest of the Philosophical Theatre programme at the Croatian National Theatre (HNK) in Zagreb on May 27.