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Austrian writer Peter Handke. Photo: EPA-EFE/Jonas Ekstroemer.

Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo have said that their diplomats will boycott the Nobel Prize ceremony on Tuesday in Stockholm, where the 2019 award for literature will be given to Peter Handke, an Austrian writer whose support for Serbia’s 1990s leader Slobodan Milosevic has angered war victims.

Turkey will also boycott the ceremony, and North Macedonia will not send a representative, although it did not describe its stance as a boycott.

Today is #HumanRightsDay .

Respect for human rights and dignity are fundamental parts of our constitution and system of values. On this day we fight the ones who are awarded by @NobelPrize for supporting the violation of our rights. We stand up for our human rights. #Handke pic.twitter.com/06C2jFsZLa — Behgjet Pacolli (@pacollibehgjet) December 10, 2019

Kosovo’s Foreign Minister Behgjet Pacolli said on Saturday that the boycott was a protest to support human rights, while Albania’s Acting Foreign Minister Gent Cakaj wrote on Twitter on Monday that “justification of war atrocities during the Yugoslavia break-up must not be rewarded”.

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Tuesday that giving the literature prize to Handke “will not mean anything other than awarding human rights violations”.

The Croatian foreign ministry said meanwhile that its ambassador would not be attending because an award was being given to someone who was “politically engaged in supporting Slobodan Milosevic’s Greater Serbian policies in the 1990s”.

The chairman of Bosnia’s tripartite presidency, Zeljko Komsic, issued an instruction to the Bosnian embassy’s staff in Sweden not to attend, saying that the presidency “does not authorise anyone to attend the Nobel Prize award ceremony on behalf of Bosnia and Herzegovina”

Hundreds of people are expected to attend a protest in Stockholm led by associations representing Bosniak war victims from the 1992-95 conflict.

More than 58,000 people worldwide have signed an online petition demanding that Handke’s prize be revoked. Some journalists who reported from Bosnia during the war have also spoken out against the award, among them CNN correspondent Christiane Amanpour.

“I was there. We all know who’s guilty,” Amanpour wrote on Twitter on Monday.

In 1997, Handke wrote what was seen as a pro-Serb book about the Balkan wars entitled ‘A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia’, and in 2006, when Slobodan Milosevic died, he made a speech at the Serbian leader’s funeral in his hometown Pozarevac in Serbia.

It has also emerged that he was granted a Yugoslav passport under Milosevic’s regime.

The Swedish Academy has defended its controversial decision to award Handke the prize. Mats Malm, the head of the Swedish Academy, said that Handke had made “provocative, unsuitable and unclear comments” but had not glorified violence or supported the Srebrenica massacres, Reuters news agency reported.

On Monday, Handke told RTRS, the public broadcaster in Bosnia’s mainly Serb entity Republika Srpska, that he did not expect a campaign against him and that he had an idea to “try to reconcile the views”.

“I would love to meet one mother on one side and one on the other. One mother from [the Serb village of] Kravica, where the [1995 Srebrenica] massacre began, and one mother from the vicinity of Srebrenica. That was my idea, but I think it was a bit naive,” Handke said.