PEN Center lashes out at writer: Latić complains like a spoiled child!

The Management Board of PEN Center reacted today to the criticism of BiH writers who were not admitted to the membership of this organization, reports the BiH news agency Patria (NAP). They state that Džemaludin Latić, Amir Brka and Abdulah Sidran were not admitted because they did not receive enough votes.

- You cannot force PEN members to vote for you. Complaining, like a spoiled child, that someone does not want to accept you into their society is disgusting and infantile. Latić's attack is beyond all logic: is it logical for you that someone begs and blackmails to be admitted to an organization that is an "unforgiving ideological section..." Why does Latić want to be part of that nasty organization which, according to him, nurtures a "Greater Serbian colonial project"? Would a reasonable person who thinks so want to be part of such an organization – they say in their reaction.

The PEN Center accuses Latić of "running away and hiding while others suffered in besieged Sarajevo".

- Latić, unlike many of his fellow writers who had nothing against so-called "mixed" marriages, and he stigmatized them, is alive and well. As for whether he is supported – as he once wrote in an attack on our member, a writer from an absolute minority in BiH, Marko Vešović – by "hundreds of thousands of Muslims", let those hundreds of thousands decide, not him – they state, among other things, in an unsigned letter from the Management Board of this organization.

In recent weeks, PEN Center has been at the center of several scandals, from a secretly held assembly where the current leadership's mandate was extended, even though they did not have the statutory possibility to do so, to Ferida Duraković's departure from the position of secretary, and finally to the refusal to admit three respected BiH writers.