Western journalists did a double-take in 1996 when novelist Peter Handke published a short volume based on his scathing observations about the media coverage of the Yugoslav wars. Such criticism from a popular writer in Germany, a country and society still stigmatized at least in popular American thinking to eternal guilt and condemnation for the Holocaust, was particularly offensive and unforgivable.
 
Handke, whose fame was that of being probably one of the most important postmodern writers since Becket in Europe and praised among academics in the U.S.,—was inspired to examine the war in Bosnia,“but not as most journalists. They always came via the West. I wanted to get to Bosnia from the other side, from the East, through Serbia and over the Drina...”
But most threatening to journalists about Handke’s remarkable book was his reputation for “terrifying” honesty:

“Peter Handke is a terrifying writer, because he is so honest. Many writers claim to be honest, and their claims are blatant fictions. They lie about their motives, their incomes, their politics, their sexuality, their sex lives, and all the other things that human beings like or need to lie about. Peter Handke probably lies about these things too, but, in his writing, he is frighteningly honest...”
Handke, a Catholic of Slovenian heritage on his maternal side, pulled no punches in his criticism about infamous media performances in the Yugoslav wars, which was detailed in an interview that appeared a few weeks after his book was published in 1996:

“...(A)ll the stories that I read about the war were written, as if in front of a mirror. I wanted to get behind that mirror. Nothing had ever been written about the country of Serbia (during this war). Once in a while there was something about Belgrade, but it was always just full of cliches: ‘everything is grey, nobody is willing to speak, the opposition is weak, the war wounded have nothing to come home to,’ etc. etc. Every report was the same, and it was always Belgrade. ...At first I believed the reporting, but felt the balance was wrong. I kept seeing the same turn of phrase, the same twist of grammar and choice of words ...I felt that just can’t be, or if it is so, then everyone, whether journalist or author, at least has the duty to consider the other side, without passing judgement...”

Handke sounded an angry foreboding about the implications of the Yugoslav wars:
“Yugoslavia, however fragmented it might have been was a model for a future Europe. Not Europe as it is now, our somewhat artificial Europe, with its free trade zones, but a place with different nationalities living among each other, especially as it affected young people in Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. That, I thought, is how I would like Europe to be. So, for me the vision of Europe was destroyed with the destruction of Yugoslavia.”

He rejected suppositions about positive perceptions of a “multi-cultural, multi-ethnic” Bosnia.
“...I can’t stand hearing the word ‘multi-cultural’ anymore. That was a dishonest excuse to conjure up a Muslim state of Bosnia out of nowhere. I can’t take it when the word is applied to Sarajevo. But when you apply it to the old Yugoslavia, where the nationalities lived together with one another, naturally separately, then I can accept the words ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multi-cultural.’ Not, however, when it’s applied to Bosnia. For me it was a lie to make a state out of a region that was formerly a mere administrative unit. That’s what Bosnia was in Yugoslavia. Bosnia had never been a sovereign state. For me, creating sovereign states out of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina was also just concocting historical fakes. In the beginning, I too believed all the talk about freedom and freedom fighters battling against ‘panzer’ communism for multi-ethnicity. In the beginning, I believed it. But now I don’t believe a word of it.”

Handke discounted popular secessionist origins for Slovene and Croatian independence at the outset of 1991:
“It was the opportune moment. I’m not a political commentator and I never will be. It was the favorable moment, after the death of Tito, for everyone to make a run for it, to grab something for himself.

“Much too little has been written about what Hitler, together with Catholicism, inflicted on the Balkans. Catholicism, too, was a horribly pernicious force in Croatia, where it was utterly fundamental and destructive, perhaps a bit less so in Slovenia. [Much too little has been written about] the crimes committed in Croatia during the Second World War by Catholicism and Nazism, and nationalism. There was the concentration camp Jasenovac, where between six- and eight-hundred thousand Serbs and Jews were annihilated, and Muslims, too…

“The breeding ground for the collapse of Yugoslavia was Croatia, with its unchecked Nazi-Catholic history in the Second World War, and even earlier. We Europeans, and the whole world, know far too little about all this. But just as the history of the Jews before and during the Second World War has been examined and clarified, as I have said in my book, it is now necessary to bring to light everything that facism did during World War II in Yugoslavia, as well as its holocaust of the Jews.
“(The present wars are) a metamorphosis, or better said, a metastasis, as we say of cancer. It is a continuation of the Second World War. It is significant that when the Croats overran the area of Jasenovac [in May 1, 1995], they destroyed every monument to the victims killed there. The Jasenovac camp was destroyed—as a monument—again this year by the Croats. This is significant. This is what inspired me to write.”

In his book, Handke probed into the effects upon the West of news reports from Yugoslavia:
“It tells of problems. the newspaper reader’s problems in thinking. It tells about the history reader’s problems. It talks about the viewing problems of someone looking at a photo, the problems of a television viewer. It speaks continuously about problems of how a distant reader sees, how I , how we, almost all, read the war reports. Criticism deals with structures. One criticizes esthetic forms of camera technique, of grammar, of the art of war reporting...”

On claims and complaints that Handke’s positions were biased and “pro-Serb”:
“...Naturally I have my opinions and convictions, but what I have written has nothing to do with opinions. It has to do exclusively with basic questions. My best expression for this is, it is a question of telling a story, as it is, as I always have done in my literature since I began writing. I never let it be known what my opinion is. That’s why it’s so amazing that all this hate and aggression has erupted against my little book, especially in Germany.”
On perceiving the war through the Western media and correspondents sent to Yugoslavia to cover the wars:
“Even if you go there, you go with interpreters, so I don’t necessarily believe in the evidentiary value of simply having been there. Many journalists can remedy this when using interpreters, but it’s a rarity when they succeed. Most journalists from the West take an interpreter who speaks English or German. Where do they get this interpreter? What does the interpreter tell you? Where does he take you, etc.? First of all, the journalists usually do not understand the language of the country. They can’t decipher the Cyrillic alphabet and have no idea, much less any real knowledge, about Yugoslavia before the war broke out. They are always taken to where the victims are, as per arrangement, or according to news reports, They always come to Sarajevo. This was always, as far as history goes, suspicious to me. ...Many journalists, whose good will I do not doubt, were nutzliche idioten (‘useful idiots’) in the hands of the two regimes that claimed to be the chief victims, the Croats and the Muslim Bosniacs.”

On his personal knowledge about Serbs, their supposed intolerance and disinterest “in other cultures”:

“That is one of the worst and most monstrous lies. Almost worthy of Goebbels. What has been spread about the Serbs is a lie. I believe that is not must my personal story, but everybody’s who has dealt with Serb culture and the Serb people. If there is any people in the Balkans open to the East, the West, the South, or simply has any sensitivity to the rest of the world —that is in Serbia, not in Croatia or Slovenia. Where do you find books of the whole world, today and yesterday, published and read in translation? In Serbia. Far less in Croatia, and even less in Slovenia. Serbia, I can enthusiastically recommend to everyone who thinks about what a country can be—a land of rivers. What can a country be that is far from the sea? Naturally, Serbia is disadvantaged in the media landscape, as compared to Croatia (with) Dubrovnik, Split, or Zadar. But apart from these fabulous cities on the Adriatic, Croatia is totally a land of the interior and almost unknown to the traveler or the tourist. ...But Serbia, I would say, is a warm-hearted land... In its history Serbia was always tolerant. In World War II, if there was any land that accepted Jews, sheltered Jews, that took Jews into their houses, that was not Croatia, not Slovenia —but Serbia. Serbia was the only philosemitic country in the Balkans, together with Greece—though Greece, strictly speaking, isn’t Balkan. What has been done to the Serbian people and the lands of the Serbs in the last five years is an enormous injustice. It’s an injustice that cries to high heaven to compare Serbia with Nazi Germany...”
On the “right of national self-determination” for all but Serbs:

“That is the height of absurdity. The Serb nation in Croatia and the 35% of Serbs in Bosnia-Hercegovina—no one recognized any right of self-determination for them. Where is the justice in that? That is a lot of sanctimonious talk about the right of national self-determination. But these nations, the Croats and Slovenes, I believe, were well off in the Yugoslav state. Especially in the ten years following Tito’s death they never once made a complaint that they were mistreated or disadvantaged under the federal government in Belgrade. Their (recent) claims of such are a historical lie. The Croats and Slovenes, on the contrary, were given preferential treatment, economically, in trade on the Mediterranean and in tourism, and much more.”
Astonishingly, Handke predicted that “Yugoslavia” and its now-severed fellow republics would reconcile in some future form of federation:

“I believe it can’t be otherwise. It will resurrect. It is the only sensible thing. Look at the economics, the geography, the rivers, the mountain ranges. The common history after 1918 was not so bad. There was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and there was Tito’s partisan communist Yugoslavia. By the 1980s there was no more communism. For me that was a near religious event. Compared to many European states, Yugoslavia was a model for Europe. It cannot remain fragmented...”
Inevitably, Handke earned the wrath of European interventionist media for his published views:
“...There have been insults and outbursts of hate against me in the media, specially the German, Austrian, and Swiss, and French and Spanish, too. It affected me. But like a Kafka figure, you accept it, as if it belongs to history.
Fellow artists and academics more clearly understood Handke’s intrusion into media stereotype of the Balkan war reporting:
“The storm of disapproval that arose in the press following the publication of Justice for Serbia ...can only be understood if one keeps in mind the really audacious provocation that the poet was undertaking, legitimized by nothing other than the artist’s sheer self will. The poet is not only seeking to criticize the predominant media practices and place a question mark over them. He wants to counterpose his poetic experience, his poet’s eye, to the picture of the Serbs that the media paints world-wide. Against the superior power of media opinions about this war, he counters with his poetic voice. A single individual opposes the world’s entire press: the poet, in and for himself. And he has the nerve to pose the question anew: Which side bears the guilt for the Yugoslavian war of secession?”

But, the lesser guilt resided inside the borders of the former Yugoslavia—before deliberate Western dismemberment in 1991.
Seen Here is Peter Hanke helping a mother light candles on her son's grave.