Erdoğan: Swedish Academy Awarded Prize to a Terrorist in Turkey

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President and Justice and Development Party (AKP) Chair Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said that the Swedish Academy "awarded a prize to a terrorist in Turkey."

Speaking and answering questions from students at an event held on the occasion of Human Rights Day in the capital Ankara, Erdoğan said that "the Nobel exhausted and finished itself" by awarding the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke a writer from Austria who is accused of denying the 1995 Bosnian genocide.

Erdoğan said Turkey also would not participate in the Nobel ceremony, saying "awarding such a killer amounts to complicity in oppression."

It was not just the 2019 prize, according to Erdoğan, as "They awarded the prize to a terrorist from Turkey." 

The president described the Swedish Academy as a foundation that acts "politically and ideologically."

Erdoğan said that he would decline the Nobel Peace Prize if he was awarded one day.

Communications Director: He didn't mean Orhan Pamuk

Fahrettin Altun, the Presidency's Communications Director, made a statement later in the day, saying that Erdoğan did not refer to Orhan Pamuk, the only person from Turkey who received a Nobel Prize in Literature: "Our president in no way refers to Orhan Pamuk in the speech where he said, 'They had awarded a terrorist from Turkey.'"

Altun said Erdoğan was referring to some names awarded or nominated for the Nobel Prize despite their anti-Turkey ideologies and terrorist inclinations.

"Our president actually criticized European institutions' awarding systems based on ideological approaches and stressed the hypocrisy in rewarding racism and terrorism," Altun said. (EMK/VK)