November 14 2019, 9:18 a.m.
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 short version is that two
Nobel jurors, responding to global criticism over their selection of the
Austrian-born writer, took the unusual step last month of disclosing the
sources they consulted while making up their minds. One of the jurors, Henrik
Petersen, cited a
book by a little-known author, Lothar Struck, who lives in Düsseldorf and
contributes to an online literary magazine. Another juror, Eric Runesson, said he
relied on a book by an Innsbruck historian named Kurt Gritsch. Neither book has
been translated from German, and they have only a handful of citations on the
German version of Google Scholar.
The books by Struck
and Gritsch defend Handke’s
skepticism over the scale of Serb atrocities, and they endorse
Handke’s argument that news reports in the 1990s were unfair to Serbs. The
books have a confident tone, and apparently the Nobel jurors concluded
from them that Handke was justified in his written and gestural sympathy
for the Serb side (which included delivering a eulogy at the 2006 funeral of
Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic, who died of a heart attack while awaiting trial
on charges that included genocide).
But these two books have a
huge flaw that the Nobel jurors apparently didn’t recognize. Both books support
a conspiracy theory that asserts an American publicity firm, Ruder Finn Global
Public Affairs, masterminded a campaign to inflate Serb atrocities and
thus shifted U.S. opinion against the Serbs. According to the wag-the-dog
theory of the Bosnia war that these books adopt, the accepted narrative of
immense and one-sided atrocities by Serbs was largely the consequence of a
deceptive publicity campaign, rather than actual events on the ground. Gritsch
mentions Ruder Finn about 20 times in his book,
“Peter Handke and ‘Justice for Serbia,’” devoting a short chapter to it.
Struck, whose book is
titled “The One With His Yugoslavia,” was so taken with Ruder Finn that he
published a digital supplement that consists of — to a surprising extent —
disclosure forms the company filed with the U.S. government.
As Gritsch wrote, “Due to
various resentments and an already-existing anti-Serb and pro-Muslim position
among many journalists, the thesis developed that the Serb side (and only the
Serb side) was operating death camps in the Yugoslav conflict, and after that
the PR agency Ruder Finn publicized this theory, bringing the news of Serb
concentration camps into massive circulation.” Gritsch added that after the
first pictures and videos emerged of the Serb camps, “the use of
emotionally-loaded terms like ‘ethnic cleansing,’ ‘concentration camps,’ etc.,
can be attributed to the PR agency Ruder Finn.”
This is a vast rewriting of
history. The first articles about Serb camps took off on their own accord in
August 1992; it was a spectacular development that didn’t need any nudges from
a publicity firm. Subsequent investigations, articles, and war crimes trials proved that the camps
turned out to be even worse than the first reports were able to detail. And the
phrase “ethnic cleansing” was in wide use from the start of the war in April
1992, when Serb militias stormed into Bosnian towns and killed or
expelled the Muslims there.
“It’s just nonsense,” said
Marshall Harris, a Bosnia expert in the State Department when the war broke out.
Harris, who resigned his post to protest the lack of U.S. action early in the
conflict, went on to lead a coalition of prominent activists on Bosnia,
and he interacted with Ruder Finn. “The U.S. intervened in the Balkans because
of Slobodan Milosevic. The purpose of attributing great success in influencing
U.S. Balkans policy to a good but small PR firm with limited political reach
minimizes the gravity and scope of the genocide.”
The theory is so off-base that
it’s hard to find scholars familiar with it. University of Chicago
professor Michael Sells, author of the 1996 book “The Bridge Betrayed: Religion
and Genocide in Bosnia,” noticed Serb nationalists mentioning Ruder
Finn on internet bulletin boards during the war, but he was surprised
to learn, when contacted by The Intercept, that the firm was being
discussed now as an important or even minor factor in the conflict. “Things
were so overwhelming and clear in Bosnia about what was going on, from so many
different sources, that I can’t image that Ruder Finn would have tipped the
scales in any way,” he said.
The conspiracy theory about
Ruder Finn has circulated in the bowels of
the internet for nearly as long as the web has
existed. While a small number of books and
articles defending the Serbs feature it, there is basically no
reputable work that lends any credence to the theory. The proposition that it
was unfair to define the Serbs as the overwhelming culprit in Bosnia — and that
a relatively small PR firm created this myth and got everyone to believe it —
is utterly crackpot. Even Jacques Merlino, the French journalist
whose 1993 interview with a Ruder Finn executive gave rise to the
theory, seems taken aback with how far it’s gone. “I know they did their
work but I don’t know if it was particularly effective,” he wrote in an email
to The Intercept.
Yet two jurors for the Nobel
Prize for Literature say they relied on books that peddled this conspiracy
theory in the service of exonerating Handke.
THE BEST WAY to tell this
bizarre story is from its origin, which is April 24, 1993. That’s when Merlino
arrived at the office of James Harff, a Ruder Finn executive in Washington,
D.C.
Harff worked on behalf of
Bosnia’s beleaguered government, which at the time was trying to stave off
defeat by Serb forces that in 1992 had attacked the country and seized 70
percent of its territory, murdering or expelling Muslims in their path. It was
Harff’s job to talk with journalists and politicians about the war, which by
1993 had reached a stalemate as Serb militias besieged the capital of Sarajevo
and other cities, including Srebrenica.
As Harff remembers it, the
interview did not last long and was not recorded. But at the end of 1993,
Merlino published a book in
France, “The Truths From Yugoslavia Are Not All Easy to Tell,” that had a
chapter about Ruder Finn. It quoted Harff as boasting that his PR firm had
“outwitted” three major Jewish organizations into supporting Bosnia’s
government, thereby turning the tide of public opinion. According to Merlino’s
book, Harff said Ruder Finn had disseminated reports of Serb-run concentration
camps even though the reports were not confirmed. “Our work is not to verify
information,” Harff was quoted as saying. “Our job, as I’ve told you, is to
accelerate the circulation of information that is favorable to our side. … We are
not paid to be moral.” Harff’s comments seemed to be evidence that the Serbs
had been framed — unfairly and without evidence — for committing genocide in
Bosnia.
Merlino’s book found an
immediate audience among Serbs and their supporters who were trying to stave
off military intervention by the U.S. Here, finally, was proof of what they
were trying to tell the world — that the news reports about Serbs slaughtering
Muslims in a one-sided wave of atrocities was based not on reality but on a
manipulative campaign by a PR firm that now admitted its role. Extracts of
Merlino’s chapter on Harff were published in pro-Serb media and even made
their way into a handful of opinion pieces in mainstream U.S. and European
publications.
Conspiracy theories often have
elements of truth that launch their big lies. What was true in Merlino’s book,
and in what was attributed to Harff, is that the first reports of Serb
concentration camps, in two dispatches in July and August 1992 by
Newsday’s Roy
Gutman, were unconfirmed. Gutman had talked with aid workers and two
survivors of the camps, but he had not visited the camps and did not have an
abundance of firsthand testimony. So it was correct that Ruder Finn circulated
unconfirmed reports.
But the Merlino conspiracy
theory skips a crucial fact: Within days and weeks of Gutman’s articles,
subsequent reporting by other journalists confirmed his work, as did war crimes
trials that came years later. Gutman won a Pulitzer Prize for his articles the
following year.
Virtually every major
newspaper, magazine, and TV network in the United States became filled with
on-the-ground reports starting in early August. Were they exaggerated? As a
reporter for the Washington Post, I made my way to Banja Luka and visited two
camps: Omarska and Trnopolje. They had been cleaned up a bit — Trnopolje even
had an English banner over its entrance that said “Trnopolje Open Reception
Center” — but they remained horrifying. Here’s what I wrote not
long afterward:
“I never thought that one day
I would talk to a skeleton. That’s what I did at Trnopolje. I remember thinking
that they walked surprisingly well for people without muscle or flesh. … One
skeletal prisoner had just enough time to unbutton his shirt, showing off a
mutilated chest with a few dozen fresh scars from God-knows-what torture,
before a look of horror came over his face. He was staring, like a deer caught
in a car’s headlights, at a spot just above the top of my head. I looked
around. A guard stood behind me.
An eighteen-year-old youth
came up to us. He had just arrived at Trnopolje after two months at Omarska,
the worst camp of all. His skin was stretched like a transparent scarf over his
ribs and shoulder bones. “It was horrible,” he whispered. “Just look at me. For
beatings, the guards used hands, bars, whips, belts, chains, anything. A normal
person cannot imagine the methods they used. I am sorry to say that it was good
when new prisoners came. The guards beat them instead of us.”
And Trnopolje was the better
camp. It was where men and women released from Omarska were sent to, and it was
where some refugees went voluntarily because staying in their homes
was even more perilous, due to Serb militias killing and looting their way
through the region. Omarska was pure evil, even in its improved condition, and
this wasn’t a fiction dreamt up by James Harff in Washington, D.C. Taken to a
cafeteria where the prisoners had been marched in, the climate of fear was
overwhelming when I tried to talk with them.
“They bowed their heads
farther down, noses virtually in the bowls,” I wrote at the time. “This was a
place where words, any words, could kill them. ‘Please, don’t ask me
questions,’ one of them begged in a whisper. A prisoner slipped a note to us.
‘About 500 people have been killed here with sticks, hammers and knives,’ it
said. ‘Until August 6, there were 2,500 people. We were sleeping on the concrete
floor, eating only once a day, in a rush, and we were beaten while we were
eating. We have been here for 75 days. Please help us.’”
Was it so bad? In 1997, the
two Serb warlords responsible for these camps were indicted by the
International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. One of them, Simo
Drljaca, was
killed as NATO troops tried to arrest him. Drljaca had taken me and
the other journalists to Omarska and Trnopolje. The other warlord, Milan
Kovacevic, with whom we had argued to get permission to visit the hellish
camps, was flown to The Hague but died of natural causes during his
trial for genocide and crimes against humanity.
When Merlino’s book came out,
Ruder Finn did what it could to correct its fallacies and errors, Harff told me
in a phone interview last month. Faxes were sent to Merlino — one of
them, which Harff emailed to me, had the subject line “Misquotes,
Inaccuracies, Cynicism” — and legal letters were dispatched to media outlets
that quoted Merlino’s book. Nothing was corrected or retracted (Merlino told me
he didn’t receive any faxes from Ruder Finn), but as the
war went on, Merlino’s book didn’t seem to matter that much because
evidence of Serb atrocities became so overwhelming.
In the summer of 1995, the
onslaught culminated with a massacre of more than 7,000 Muslim men and boys in
Srebrenica — a new act of genocide that finally triggered military intervention
against the Serbs by the U.S and its NATO allies. The war crimes tribunal in
The Hague later indicted key Serb politicians — not just Slobodan Milosevic but
also Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander, Ratko
Mladic. Milosevic’s death spared him a verdict, but Karadzic and Mladic were
found guilty of genocide and sentenced to life in prison. The evidence was
indisputable.
Yet Merlino’s book had a
surprising afterlife. A quarter-century later, it helped deliver the Nobel
Prize to Peter Handke.
THE CONSPIRACY THEORY about
Ruder Finn is tenacious on the homepages of left and right extremism, but it’s
obscure elsewhere. Even though I covered the war and wrote a book about it, I
had not heard of Ruder Finn until I contacted Kurt Gritsch last month.
I reached out to Gritsch
because Eric Runesson, the Nobel juror, had mentioned Gritsch’s
book as what appeared to be his principal source for deciding, before awarding
the Nobel to Handke, that the criticism of him was wrong. “Kurt Gritsch, as I
see it, comes to the conclusion that the criticism is not entirely factual,”
Runesson told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter last month. I emailed
Gritsch to ask whether he might have an unofficial English translation of his
book because I can’t read German. Gritsch said there was no translation, but he
provided a nearly 2,000-word explanation of his research. He wrote that
“Belgrade and the Bosnian Serbs played an important — and probably the most
important — role in many ways of the conflict,” but he also cited the Bosnian
Croat militia and what he described as “the Bosnian-Muslim militia” — which is
a provocative way to refer to the Bosnian Army, the only military force in the
country that had a legal standing.
He defended Handke by mashing
together several debunked talking points that pivoted around Ruder Finn. One of
the talking points involved a controversial statement issued by the
International Committee of the Red Cross in 1992 in response to Gutman’s
articles about the Serb camps. The ICRC, seeking to remain a neutral
arbiter, falsely suggested that
all combatants had prison camps of equal brutality. The statement was disproved
by the stream of subsequent news reports, investigations, and war crimes
trials, but conspiracy theorists nonetheless cite it as proof that abuses at
prison camps in Bosnia were roughly equivalent on all sides. The conspiracists
pick one soon-to-be-discredited data point and ignore everything that
discredited it later on.
The following is what Gritsch
wrote in his email, with the grammar corrected as he requested (“You can quote
this but … please correct the grammar, vocabulary and spelling when needed”):
“The reason for all of this
can be found in a PR campaign of 1992. In August 1992, Ruder Finn Global Public
Affairs was working for the Croatian and the Bosnian-Muslim governments. They
published that camps had been found in Bosnia and that it was Serbs running
them. The facts were, as the ICRC (the Red Cross) gave evidence in the same
month, that all three parties in the Bosnian conflict — Croats, Muslims, Serbs
— were running prison camps. The ICRC was very clear about this and very
concerned about the terrible conditions of those camps, where human rights
violations took place every day, up to rape and murder. The ICRC confirmed that
there were many Serbian-run camps but … explained that this was within the
proportion of the fighting parties — the Serbian militia was the biggest group
at that time and ran the most camps. Yet the other two groups had their prison
camps too.
But ignoring this was not the
only thing Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs did. They gave it a spin by
declaring prison camps to be death camps and by comparing Bosnian Muslims with
the Jews. This was possible with the help of three big Jewish American organizations
which publicly supported the Bosnian Muslims (ignoring the fact that their
leader, Alija Izetbegovic, had his own ideas of an Islamic state, published in
a book many years before). The next step was to combine the perpetrators, and
there it was: If Bosnian Muslims were the Jews of our time, then the Serbs had
to be the Nazis.”
Just as he does in his book,
Gritsch repeated yet another discredited theory that comes from a long-debunked
1997 article by a German freelance journalist, Thomas Deichmann. Among
conspiracy theorists, Deichmann’s work is often cited alongside Merlino’s; they
are fundamental parts of the extremist canon that tries to rewrite what
happened in Bosnia. And in what may be one of the most telling yet least noted
twists of the entire Handke controversy, Deichmann has been one of Handke’s
closest traveling companions in the Balkans — they made at least four visits
together to Serbia and Bosnia in the 1990s and 2000s. Though their joint trips
are little-known, it’s not a secret; they have been mentioned in
various books and websites.
Deichmann first came into
public view when he testified as a defense witness in the 1996 trial of a Serb
named Dusko Tadic, who was accused of committing war crimes at Omarska and
elsewhere. Deichmann, testifying as a media expert, said that Bosnian Muslims
who identified Tadic in court might have known him only through news photos or
TV reports about him. Deichmann was suggesting that their identification of
Tadic was a lie or a case of mistaken identity. It was not a persuasive
argument: Tadic was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20
years in prison.
Within a year, Deichmann was
back in the limelight, writing a lengthy article headlined “The Picture That
Fooled the World.” His article was published by a far-left magazine called LM,
which was formerly called Living Marxism and launched a decade earlier by
Britain’s Revolutionary Communist Party. Deichmann wrote that a British
television crew from ITN, the first to visit Trnopolje, had purposefully staged
a shot in which detainees stood behind a fence topped with barbed wire, to
exaggerate the conditions there. Deichmann’s article turned into a perfect
complement to Merlino’s book of a few years earlier — it was not just a U.S.
publicity firm that was trying to smear the Serbs, but journalists on the
ground were creating fictions too.
The journalists who were
accused by Deichmann sued for libel in a London court and won damages of
375,000 pounds. This forced LM out of business — but not Deichmann’s article.
Like Merlino’s theory, it was kept alive by revisionist books and postings
on Stormfront and other
websites of the extreme right and left. As the photography historian David
Campbell noted in a meticulous
study, the Deichmann article was “part of an overall argument which
attempts to revise the understanding of the Bosnian war by denying the nature,
extent and purpose of the violence in the Bosnian Serbs’ ethnic cleansing
strategy.” Campbell added, “What matters for LM and others is the way this
dispute enables the potential link between Bosnia and the Holocaust to be cut,
the meaning of the Bosnian war to be diminished, and the responsibility of
those who perpetrated the ethnic-cleansing campaigns to be denied.”
Gritsch treats the Deichmann
article as fact in his book and in the email he sent me. “When later Penny
Marshall and ITN filmed a refugee camp in Trnopolje and put the film crew
behind barb wire in order to make it look like as if the people were imprisoned,
the whole world interpreted it as evidence of ‘new Nazi-camps’ in Europe,”
Gritsch wrote. “The picture, as you surely know, was later (in 1996/97)
analyzed and German journalist Thomas Deichmann found out that it had been a
construction (‘The picture that fooled the world’).” Gritsch’s book has at
least 30 references to Deichmann, including passages about Deichmann’s
work that range, in tone, between neutral to supportive. In an interesting
twist, the cover photo of Gritsch’s book, which shows Handke gazing over a
body of water along the Montenegrin coast, was shot by Deichmann.
I was surprised to hear these
discredited ideas coming from the author of a book that was apparently a
crucial factor in the deliberations of the Nobel Prize jury. But Gritsch’s email
was consistent not just with his book but with articles he has written,
including one from a few months ago in the online magazine Telepolis, where he
described Ruder Finn’s efforts as “discourse
determining” — specifically referring, in a footnote, to Merlino’s work. As
Gritsch wrote in his 2009 book on Handke, “Jacques Merlino’s report about the
work of the U.S.-American PR agency Ruder Finn Global Public Affairs urgently
poses the question whether and to what extent the official depiction of the
Croatian or Muslim perspective can be believed.”
When I contacted Gritsch for
comment on this story, he replied politely in another email of about 2,000
words that restated the outlines of his book. His response included these
lines: “Science and the search for truth is not something easy. … I do not
claim to know the truth about the Yugoslav wars or the debate about Peter
Handke, but anyone willing to dive into the debates and discourses can identify
the master narrative and the counter narrative. And this can already help to
understand the whole debate a little better.”
UNDER ALFRED NOBEL’S WILL, the
Swedish Academy is charged with selecting the winner of the Nobel Prize for
Literature. The academy’s two-step process was amended this year due to a
sexual abuse scandal in 2017 that undermined confidence in the academy’s
abilities. This year, five outside experts joined the academy’s four-member
subcommittee that chooses a shortlist of finalists. The final decision is made
by the 18-seat academy. This year, the subcommittee nominated just one person
for the 2019 award — Peter Handke — and the full academy accepted it.
Eric Runesson, who said he
trusted Gritsch’s exoneration of Handke, is a member of the academy. Henrik
Petersen, a literary critic, was one of the subcommittee’s outside experts.
In an
article on October 17, Petersen defended the selection of Handke by
saying that “a political program is not propagated” in his work, though he
acknowledged that “the manner in which Handke articulated his critique was
precarious, clumsy, and sometimes led to downright absurd comparisons.” The
clumsiness was nonetheless a small factor for Petersen and other jurors,
apparently. Petersen wrote that in 50 years Handke would be regarded as “one of
the most obvious laureates ever awarded by the Swedish Academy,” and he
suggested that “if you would like to know more about what Handke actually said
about Yugoslavia, I recommend Lothar Struck’s remarks in ‘The One With His
Yugoslavia.'”
Struck’s book appears to have
gotten relatively scant attention in literary circles since it was published
about seven years ago. His book is more thoughtful than Gritsch’s and doesn’t
wade as deeply into other conspiracy theories. Struck has a few passing mentions
of Thomas Deichmann and his discredited story about the Trnopolje camp, but he
doesn’t delve into it the way Gritsch does. Nonetheless, Struck’s book embraces
the general theory about the Serbs being unfairly turned into the prime culprit
of the Bosnia war by a manipulative publicity campaign, rather than by their
own actions on the ground.
“The opinion about the
warring factions was partly determined, early on, by professional PR
agencies,” Struck wrote. As evidence, he pointed to what he described as the
“almost legendary” interview that Merlino, the French journalist, had conducted
in 1993 with James Harff of Ruder Finn. This is of course the same interview,
and the same conspiracy theory, that Gritsch wrote extensively about. Struck
goes on to quote a passage of the Harff interview that Merlino published.
“Harff’s campaign was, by the standards of the industry, surely an excellent
maneuver,” Struck wrote. “Above all, it was sustainable, since from that
point on the Serbs weren’t simply the aggressors, but rather
could be placed in the corner of genocidal murderers.”
Struck’s book had a lengthy
digital supplement, nearly 600 pages long, that he described as its “volume of
source material.” About a third of it consists of disclosure forms that
Ruder Finn filed with the U.S. government in the 1990s, listing its contacts
with journalists and politicians, among other things. Struck’s interest in
Ruder Finn’s influence has not faded since his book was published. After the
Nobel Prize was announced, Struck posted
a long defense of Handke on the literary magazine
he contributes to, Glanz & Elend (“Splendor & Misery”).
Arguing that Handke has been smeared by a deceptive publicity campaign against
Serbs and their supporters, he wrote that Ruder Finn and other firms that have
represented Croats and Kosovars since the 1990s “have been working
the U.S. public, have done a good job, their poison is still there, is being
picked up by commentators and injected into the world unchecked.”
Here’s what shocks me most
about this Nobel Prize disaster. It’s not that the
Nobel jurors fell for conspiracy theories. That’s terrible
enough, of course. The worst is that the elevation of Peter Handke has
also raised from the nearly dead a discredited rewrite of history and
genocide. We are going back in time.
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