Below we
reproduce an English translation of an article by French journalist, Christophe
Chatelot, published in Le Monde on 21st January 1999, which casts
doubt on the official story. Chatelot
himself was in Racak on the afternoon of 15th January after the
Yugoslav forces had withdrawn from the village and observed nothing out of the
ordinary.
Were the Racak dead really massacred in cold blood?
The version of events spread by the Kosovars leaves
several questions unanswered. Belgrade says that the forty-five victims were
KLA "terrorists”, killed in combat, but rejects any international
investigation.
PRISTINA. Isn't the Racak massacre just too
perfect? New eye witness accounts
gathered on Monday 18thJanuary by Le Monde throw doubt on the
reality of the horrible spectacle of dozens of piled up bodies of Albanians
supposedly summarily executed by Serb security forces last Friday. Were the victims executed in cold blood, as
the KLA says, or killed in combat, as the Serbs say?
According to the version gathered
and broadcast by the press and the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) observers
from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), the
massacre took place on 15 January in the early afternoon. ‘Masked’ Serbian police entered the village
of Racak, which had been shelled all morning by Yugoslav army tanks.
They broke down the doors and
entered people's homes, ordering the women to stay there while they pushed the
men to the edge of the village to calmly execute them with a bullet through the
head, not without first having tortured and mutilated several. Some witnesses even said that the Serbs sang
as they did their dirty work, before leaving the village around 15:30.
The account by two journalists of Associated Press TV
television (APTV) who filmed the police operation in Racak contradicts this
tale. When at 10:00 they entered the
village in the wake of a police armoured vehicle, the village was nearly
deserted. They advanced through the
streets under fire from KLA 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 KLA was
trapped in between.
The object of the violent police
attack on Friday was a stronghold of KLA 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 APTV
reporters.
The Serb operation was thus no
surprise, nor was it a secret. On the
morning of the attack, a police source tipped off APTV: “Come to Racak,
something is happening”. At 10:00, the
team was on the spot alongside the police.
It filmed from a peak overlooking the village and then through the streets
in the wake of an armoured vehicle. The
OSCE was also warned of the action. At
least two teams of international observers watched the fighting from a hill
where they could see part of the village.
They entered Racak shortly after the police left. They then questioned a few Albanians about
the situation, trying to find out whether there were wounded civilians. Around 18:00, they took four persons – two
women and two old men – who were very slightly wounded toward the dispensary of
the neighbouring town of Stimje. The
verifiers said at that time that they were “incapable of establishing the
number of casualties of that day of fighting”.
The publicity given by the Serbian
police to that operation was intense.
At 10:30, they gave out their first press release. They announced that the police had
“encircled the village of Racak with the aim of arresting the members of a
terrorist group who killed a policeman” the previous Sunday. At 15:00 a first bulletin announced fifteen
Albanians killed in fighting. The next
day, Saturday, they welcomed the success of the operation which, they said, had
resulted in the death of dozens of KLA "terrorists" and the capture
of a large stock of weapons.
The attempt to arrest an Albanian
presumed to have murdered a Serb policemen turned into a massacre. At 15:30 the police evacuated the site under
the sporadic fire of a handful of KLA fighters who continued to hold out thanks
to the steep and rough terrain. In no
time, the first of the Albanians who had got away came back down into the
village, those who had managed to hide came out in the open and three KVM
vehicles drove into the village. One
hour after the police left, night fell.
The next morning, the press and
the KVM came to see the damage caused by the fighting. It was at this moment that, guided by the
armed KLA fighters who had recaptured the village, they discovered the ditch
where a score of bodies were piled up, almost exclusively men. At midday, the chief of the KVM in person,
the American diplomat William Walker, arrived on the spot and declared his
indignation at the atrocities committed by “the Serb police forces and the
Yugoslav army”.
The condemnation was
total, irrevocable. And yet questions
remain. How could the Serb police have
gathered together a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site
while they were constantly under fire from KLA fighters? How could the ditch located on the edge of
Racak have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings
who were present before nightfall? Or
by the observers who were present for over two hours in this tiny village? Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so
little blood in the hollow road where 23 people are supposed to have been shot
at close range with several bullets in the head? Rather, weren't the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by
the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horrendous scene, which was
sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion? Doesn't the violence and rapidity of Belgrade's reaction, which
gave the chief of the KVM 48 hours to leave Yugoslavia, show that the Yugoslavs
are sure of what they are saying?
Only an international inquiry
above all suspicion will make it possible to clarify these obscure points. Finnish
and Belorussian legal doctors were expected to arrive in Pristina on Wednesday
to attend the autopsies being carried out by Yugoslav doctors. The problem is that the Belgrade authorities
have never been co-operative in this matter.
Why? Whatever the conclusions of
the investigators, the Racak massacre shows that the hope of soon reaching a
settlement of the Kosovo crisis seems quite illusory.
Labour
& Trade Union Review
June
2001