This
morning, most of the Western world woke up to the news that the Swedish
Academy had awarded their countryman Tomas Tranströmer (again, not Bob
Dylan) the Nobel Prize for Literature. Minutes earlier, however, Serbian
newspaper readers were informed that their very own Dobrica Cosic had won the
prize. As Jacket Copy reports, the culprit turns out to be a fake
website (www.nobelprizeliterature.org) that was just purchased
yesterday and mimicked the design of the real Nobel Prize homepage.
The pranksters behind the site also emailed the announcement of his victory to
news outlets. Now that nobelprizeliterature.org has been outed as a hoax, the group
that created it — which bills itself as a “non-profit, self-organized group of
web activists” — has posted a different message, in both Croatian and
(somewhat broken) English. Read what they have to say for themselves after the
jump.
We
are a non-profit, self-organized group of web activists.
The
purpose of our activity is to bring to the attention of the Serbian public
dangerous influence of the writer Dobrica Cosic, who has been, again this
year, proclaimed by some as a serious contender for the Nobel Prize in
Literature.
Dobrica
Cosic, author and public political figure, active for decades, always close
to the highest political power and those who exercise it, from the Communist
Party of former SFRY, inspirators of their manifest of Serbian nationalism,
infamous Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of sciences, former president of
the Milosevic’s wartime SR Yugoslavia, to present alliance with reactionary
and most dangerous Serbian pseudo-democratic circles in the new era.
We
have registered the domain of this obviously hoax site on the 5th October
2011, as a symbolic reminder of that day eleven years ago, when Serbia
missed a historic opportunity to create a different and better world. Today
again, Serbia turns to war, terror and deadly kitsch of the nineties,
violence towards diversity, nationalist conservatism and dishonest
orthodoxy. We believe the political activity of Dobrica Cosic is still
deeply intertwined with this hazardous value system, which does not cease to
threaten us all.
Terrible
consequences of decades of Mr. Cosic’s political, literary and public
activity are felt to this day, both by his own country and throughout the
region.
Dobrica
Cosic is not a recipient of the Nobel Prize, although the general public in
Serbia, and he himself, believed he is for 15 full minutes.
We
find some solace in that fact.