Račak massacre

The Račak incident (also called the Račak massacre or Račak operation) was a clash in the village of Račak, Kosovo, (known as Reçak in Albanian) on January 15 1999 between Yugoslav security forces and Kosovo Liberation Army guerillas, in which 45 Albanian civilians died. Outside Yugoslavia, the deaths were widely blamed on the actions of the Yugoslav security forces, which were accused of having committed a deliberate massacre . The Yugoslav government has consistently claimed that it was a legitimate police operation where no crime was committed by the state forces.

The Račak incident later featured among the war crimes charges for which Slobodan Milošević was eventually indicted and put on trial by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. It was one of the bloodiest incidents to have occurred in the conflict in Kosovo up to that point, and is the only incident prior to the Kosovo War for which war crimes indictments have been issued.

Background

Račak is a small Albanian-inhabited village in the Štimlje municipality of southern Kosovo. By 1998 it had become the scene of activity by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA, or UÇK after its Albanian name). It had a population of around 2,000 people prior to the displacement of most of its inhabitants during Yugoslav and Serbian military activity in the summer of 1998. By January 1999, around 350 people were reported by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to be living in the village. The KLA was highly active in the region and almost certainly had a presence in Račak itself, with a base near a local power plant.

On January 8 and January 10, the KLA mounted attacks on Serbian police in the neighboring municipalities of Suva Reka and Uroševac, causing a number of fatalities. In response, Yugoslav and Serbian security forces established a security cordon in the immediate area of the attacks and around Račak and its neighboring communities.

On January 15, reports emerged which claimed that civilians were being killed in Račak. Monitors from the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, attempted to gain access to the area but were refused permission by security forces despite strong protests. Instead, they watched the fighting from a nearby hill. They later gained access to the village, where they found one dead man and a number of injured people and received reports of other deaths and of people being taken away by the Yugoslav security forces. They were denied permission to interview the villagers or explore the area around the village.

The KVM monitors finally gained access to the surrounding area on January 16. Accompanied by a number of foreign journalists and members of the European Union's Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM), they found a total of 40 bodies in and around the village. Another five bodies had allegedly been removed by family members. In all, 45 were reported killed, including a 12-year-old boy and three women. All had been shot and the KVM team reported that it found several bodies decapitated. KVM head William Walker immediately condemned what he labelled "an unspeakable atrocity" which was "a crime very much against humanity". He told the party of journalists accompanying him:

"I do not hesitate to accuse the (Yugoslav) government security forces. We want to know who gave the orders, and who carried them out. I will insist that justice will be done. They certainly didn't deserve to die in circumstances like this."

Walker's words were attacked by the Yugoslav government, which denied having carried out a massacre and accused him of prejudging the circumstances of the deaths, such as the disputed question of whether the dead were KLA fighters or not, and most importantly whether any of them actually had been executed. He was criticized severly for his comments , with calls from various countries for his deposal as head of the OSCE mission.

Two days later, on January 18, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Louise Arbour, attempted to enter Kosovo to investigate the killings but was refused access by the Yugoslav authorities. On the same day, heavily armed Serbian police entered Račak under attacks from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Priština. Their intervention was attacked by the KVM, which demanded that the ICTY should take over the investigation.

A joint Yugoslav-Belarusian team of pathologists conducted post-mortems at the end of January. A Finnish forensic team working for the European Union subsequently conducted a second post-mortem, which was more detailed but less contemporaneous than the first. The bodies were finally released to the families and buried on February 11.

What happened at Račak?

The course of events in Račak is the subject of considerable controversy. The surviving Albanians and the Yugoslav government presented conflicting versions of what happened on January 15.

Eyewitness accounts

According to eyewitness accounts of the villagers collected by OSCE investigators and Human Rights Watch canvassers, police and army units began shelling Račak on the morning of January 15 and entered the village around 7 a.m. local time. Police reportedly went to a number of houses and arrested around 20 men, all of whom were later found dead in a gully outside the village. Other villagers were said to have been executed in their own homes or on the streets of the village, while others reported being marched up a hill outside Račak before being shot at by security forces and paramilitaries.

The Yugoslav government rejected this version of events, claiming that all those killed had been KLA fighters and that the village had been abandoned by all but KLA supporters and fighters. According to a police communiqué issued to the international press center in Pristina on the day of the action in Račak, 15 KLA terrorists had been killed in combat in the village and a large stock of weapons had been seized. It was subsequently claimed by Yugoslav sources that KLA terrorists had faked the massacre, tampering with the bodies by dressing dead KLA fighters in civilian clothes and moving many of them into the gully where they were later found. These claims were disproved by the autopsy, which found that '...the clothing bore no badges or insignia of any military unit. No indication of removal of badges of rank or insignia was evident. Based on autopsy findings (e.g. bullet holes, coagulated blood) and photographs of the scenes, it is highly unlikely that clothes could have been changed or removed,' and '...they were most likely shot where found.' Survivors were said to have been coached or intimidated by KLA supporters into giving investigators a fabricated story about what happened. The KLA admitted that eight or nine of its fighters had indeed been killed in the Račak area, but insisted that all of the 45 dead in Račak itself were civilians.

The matter was confused further by conflicting press reports and apparent political in-fighting in the OSCE monitoring team. A film crew working for the Associated Press accompanied the Yugoslav forces in Račak on January 15. Two French journalists from the Agence France Press and Le Figaro interviewed the cameramen and saw at least some of the footage, from which they concluded that it was possible that the KLA could have staged the massacre, and that "only a credible international inquiry would make it possible to resolve those doubts ." According to the paper,

"It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning, sticking close to the walls. The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from KLA trenches dug into the hillside. The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village. Watching from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the KLA guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out. A score of them in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted."

It is worthwhile noting that the cameraman was a Serb who had been invited by Serb police to film the action, leading to a possible conflict of interest.

It was later alleged that the French journalists had been briefed by Gabriel Keller, the French deputy head of the OSCE monitoring team and former French ambassador to Belgrade, who was said to be unhappy at William Walker's swiftness in blaming the Yugoslav government for the killings. Keller was subsequently accused of deliberately undermining Walker, an allegation he denies.

Another French journalist writing for Le Monde, Christophe Chatelot referenced the account from the two AP journalists:

"When at 10 a.m. they entered the village in the wake of a police armored vehicle, the village was nearly deserted. They advanced through the streets under the fire of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) fighters lying in ambush in the woods above the village. The exchange of fire continued throughout the operation, with more or less intensity. The main fighting took place in the woods. The Albanians who had fled the village when the first Serb shells were fired at dawn tried to escape. There they ran into Serbian police who had surrounded the village. The UCK was trapped in between. The object of the violent police attack on Friday was a stronghold of UCK Albanian independence fighters. Virtually all the inhabitants had fled Racak during the frightful Serb offensive of the summer of 1998. With few exceptions, they had not come back. ‘Smoke came from only two chimneys,’ noted one of the two AP TV reporters"

Forensic reports

The reports written by the Yugoslav, Belarusian and Finnish forensic teams did not differ significantly regarding any of the forensic facts. But the report from the Finnish team was kept confidential by the EU until long after the war, and the team leader, Helena Ranta, issued a press release at the time containing her "personal opinion" and indicating differing and opposite findings. Ranta stated that "...medicolegal investigations [such as scientific analysis of bodies] cannot give a conclusive answer to the question whether there was [in fact] a battle [between the police and insurgents]...", but she leaned towards the victims being non-combatants in part because "...no ammunition was found in the pockets" of the bodies she investigated. The report was widely understood as saying that the Finnish team had disproved the finding released by the Yugoslav and Belarusian pathologists, whose tests had shown a positive for gunshot residue on the hands of 37 out of the 40 bodies, indicating that they had fired arms.

Criticism was levelled against the paraffin method used by the Yugoslavs and Belarusians to test for powder residue on the victims' hands, since it regularly gives false positives because of many other substances, including fertilizers, tobacco, urine and cosmetics, and even provides false negatives on occasion. The test is still used by the police of many countries who cannot afford more modern methods, but has been described since as early as 1967 as 'of no use scientifically.'

The international reaction to the Yugoslav and Belarusian report on one hand, (which supported the view that those killed were KLA,) and that of the EU expert team on the other, (which did not find any evidence to suggest that the dead were combatants) differed considerably, not least in the NATO-countries who were preparing for war against Yugoslavia. The former was ignored or dismissed as propaganda, and the latter was accepted as truth; evidence of a massacre against civilians. Several pro-war activists and writers wrote of, and quoted, the Finnish team's press-release as if it was the actual report. Both reports were used as evidence by the prosecution and particularly by the defence of the Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević in his trial at The Hague.

Unnamed sources

Unnamed Western sources told the press around January 28 that telephone messages had been intercepted (presumably by the American intelligence services) that directly implicated the Yugoslav government and military in the killings. According to the Washington Post, the Yugoslav government had ordered security forces to "go in hard" to the Račak area to find and kill the KLA guerrillas responsible for earlier attacks on the Serbian police. After the Račak killings, Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović and Interior Ministry General Sreten Lukić reportedly expressed concern about reaction to the Račak assault and discussed how to make the killings appear to have resulted from combat between government troops and Kosovo Liberation Army rebels. On the day of the attack on Račak, Sainović was aware that the assault was underway and asked how many people had been killed. Lukić replied that as of that moment the tally stood at 22.

Although their veracity was never confirmed, the transcripts are believed to have played an important part in the subsequent indictment of both Šainović and Lukić for war crimes in Kosovo. The intercepts did not surface in the trial against Slobodan Milošević, in which the Račak-incident played a significant part, being the only alleged massacre to have taken place before NATOs attack on the country. Milošević focused strongly on the Račak incident in the first part of his defence case, after the prosecution case was concluded.

Other claims

Some have alleged that William Walker was acting as an agent for United States intelligence agencies, on the grounds that in an earlier role as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America (during the 1980s) he had allegedly colluded illegally with Nicaragua's rebel Contras. However, he was cleared by the independent counsel appointed to investigate the Iran-Contra affair.

Consequences of the incident

Many western governments, human rights groups and international organisations insisted that the Račak incident was a deliberate massacre, conducted in defiance of earlier Yugoslav agreements to end the violence in Kosovo. The OSCE, Council of Europe, European Union, NATO and the United Nations Security Council all issued strongly worded statements condemning the killings. Opponents of the following Kosovo War point out that the governments are mostly NATO members, and that these international organisations are dominated by these governments, most notably by the United States. The timing was an unwelcome surprise. It had been widely predicted that an upsurge in fighting was likely in the spring, when weather conditions were more favourable for guerilla warfare, but any major upsurge in fighting as early as January was not expected. The security forces' operation at Račak was alleged to be a precursor to a bigger offensive against Albanian rebels, prompting United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to comment that "Spring has come early to Kosovo". It was soon decided to prepare for a major bombing-attack against Yugoslavia, plans many believe were established well beforehand. Similar threats from NATO had been issued in the fall of 1998, and from the White House more general threats had been issued as far back as the time of the previous Bush administration.

On January 29, the Contact Group of countries with an interest in Yugoslavia (Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the United States) issued a joint statement deploring "the massacre of Kosovo Albanians at Račak which resulted in several thousand people fleeing their homes" and calling a conference to be held at Rambouillet in France. At the same time, NATO issued an ultimatum to Yugoslavia, warning that it would take military action if Milošević's government "did not comply with the demands of the international community". The United Nations also condemned the killings, with the Security Council and Secretary General describing them on January 31 as a massacre perpetrated by Serbian security forces.

The ICTY issued a sealed indictment on May 27 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war against a number of senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials. These were Slobodan Milošević (President of Yugoslavia), Milan Milutinović (President of Serbia), Nikola Sainović (Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister), Dragoljub Ojdanić (Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army) and Vlajko Stojiljković (Serbian Interior Minister). Račak was specifically cited in the ICTY indictment.

On June 18, 2001, a Kosovo Serb was jailed for 15 years for murder and attempted murder in Račak. Zoran Stojanović, a 32-year-old police officer, was convicted by a joint UN-Kosovo Albanian panel of judges (two United Nations magistrates and one ethnic Albanian).

See also

• Klecka Limekiln
• Karol Drewienkiewicz

References

• "French mass media question accusations against Serbs", TASS News Wire, January 21, 1999
• "Cloud of Controversy Obscures Truth About Kosovo Killings", Los Angeles Times, January 23, 1999
• "Belgrade Ordered Kosovo Massacre", Washington Post, January 29, 1999
• "The Racak Report", The Oregonian, March 18, 1999
• "Kosovo: Serb Guilty In Deaths Of 45", New York Times, June 19, 2001

External links

• Human Rights Watch: Yugoslav Government War Crimes in Račak, January 29, 1999
• OSCE: Kosovo/Kosova - As Seen, As Told, 1999
• ICTY: Indictment of Milutinović et al., "Kosovo", September 5 2002
• Report of the UN Secretary-General, January 31, 1999 (covering Račak at paragraphs 11-13)
• Report of the EU Forensic Team on the Račak Incident, 17 March 1999
• "Independent forensic autopsies in an armed conflict: investigation of the victims from Račak, Kosovo", J. Rainio, K. Lalu, A. Penttilä. Forensic Science International 116 (2001), 175-185.] (free registration required)
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (2001): "Media Advisory: Doubts on a Massacre: Media Ignore Questions About Incident that Sparked Kosovo War." July 18.
• Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (2001): "Media Advisory: An Update on Račak." July 18.