Racak incident
Encyclopedia
Operation Račak also known as the Račak Massacre (Albanian: ), "The Račak Incident", "The Račak case" and "The Račak Hoax" of 15 January 1999 was the killing of 45 Kosovo Albanians in the village of Račak
by either combat or murder in central Kosovo
. According to Amnesty International
, the victims included three women, a 12-year-old child
and several elderly men, while the ICTY list of dead people records two women, a 13-year-old boy
and two old men.
Various reports (Human Rights Watch
, OSCE, ICTY) initially characterized the killings as a deliberate massacre
of civilians by Serbian police forces. The Yugoslav government maintained that the casualties were all members of the Kosovo Liberation Army
killed in a clash with state security forces. The military operation was planned and organized by the Serbian Special Police commander Goran Radosavljević
"Guri" (meaning "rock" in Albanian).
The alleged massacre in Račak provoked the NATO governments and became one of the main causes for the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. After the war, the Račak "massacre" was a part of the indictment against Slobodan Milošević
and others, but was dropped out of the case because of lack of evidence to substantiate the claims that it was an actual atrocity that had happened.
The incident was the subject of 3 forensic reports, one Yugoslav, another Belarusian and the third Finnish, the first two concluded that those killed were, in fact, not civilians. The Finnish forensic report, on the other hand, was never released to the public. However, Helena Ranta
, the head of the Finnish investigative team, later stated in an interview for a documentary of Russian authors that the dead were not civilians.
It is widely disputed whether the operation at Račak was either a massacre of innocent civilians (as put forth by the heavily biased Kosovo-Albanian government) or a battle, in which the dead were KLA combatants (as put forth by the Serbian government and allies).
An eighty minute documentary; The Truth and Lies of Racak, documents the operation.
(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.
During the year, the KLA conducted a number of illegal actions in the area, including a number of kidnappings and arson attacks. On January 8 and January 10, the KLA mounted attacks on Serbian police posts in the neighboring municipalities of Suva Reka and Uroševac
, killing four Serbian policemen. 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 were received by the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, of civilians being killed in Račak. KVM monitors 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 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
later described what he had seen:
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."
The journalists also provided first-hand accounts of the discovery of the bodies. One of them, the BBC
's reporter Jackie Rowland, reported that the dead "were all ordinary men; farmers, labourers, villagers. They had all been shot in the head." The dead were aged from 14 to 99 years old. ITN's correspondent Bill Neely
was also present and described how other KVM monitors reacted at the scene: "A Swedish monitor notes that the dead are all in civilian clothes and unarmed and that there are no signs of a battle... After working for two hours one monitor, a London police officer, tells me he believes many of the victims have been shot at close range."
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 fire from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Pristina
to await a forensic examination.
A joint Yugoslav-Belarus
ian 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 10 February.
and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials, the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor stated that:
Eyewitness reports from the surviving villagers unanimously supported the account of a massacre. The British journalist Julius Strauss
, writing for the Daily Telegraph, described how he had "spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Račak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serb sources who spoke privately and at some risk." According to the survivors that he interviewed, "a small group of men dressed all in black and wearing gloves and balaclavas ... co-ordinated the attack on the village and the subsequent executions." Men had been separated from women and children before being led away to be executed. One survivor told him that "some of the Serbs were in blue, some in black. The men in black appeared to be in control and wore balaclavas over their heads. Some had uniforms with insignia which included a Serbian flag; some had none. They carried automatic guns and, as we were led up the hill, both units started shooting us." Strauss speculated that the men had been from the Specijalna Antiterroristicka Jedinica
, the Serbian Interior Ministry's elite anti-terrorist unit. Some eyewitnesses told reporters that "Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims, and the six-hour orgy of violence ended with a nationalist song."
The Yugoslav government rejected this version of events. On the day after the killings, the Serbian Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that its police units had come under fire from "ethnic Albanian terrorist groups ... on routes leading to Račak village in the Stimlje municipality." In the subsequent counter-attack "several dozen terrorists were killed in the clashes with the police. Most of them were in uniforms bearing the insignia of the ethnic Albanian terrorist organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)."
They received some support from the French newspapers Le Figaro
and Le Monde
, which suggested that the KLA could have fabricated evidence. A film crew working for the Associated Press
accompanied the Yugoslav forces in Račak for part of 15 January. 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,
Another French journalist writing for Le Monde, Christophe Chatelot, gave an account from the perspective of the two AP journalists:
The Serbian President, Milan Milutinović
, accused the KVM head William Walker of fabricating the killings "by securing the co-operation of his protegés in the Kosovo Liberation Army". The Serbian media took a similar line, arguing that the Albanians had removed the KLA uniforms from the bodies and replaced them with civilian clothes. Unnamed French diplomats also criticised Walker for publicly blaming the Serbs for the killings, arguing that he should have waited for a more thorough investigation. Walker was also attacked by the Serbian media for his role as a US diplomat in Central America in the 1980s, at a time when the involvement of the US in a number of civil and political conflicts in the region was a subject of major controversy.
At the end of January 1999, the United States was reported to have leaked telephone intercepts that were said to prove the role of the Yugoslav government in the killings. According to the Washington Post, the intercepts showed that 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. 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 at Račak appear to be the result of combat between government troops and KLA 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. Following the international uproar about the killings, Sainović told Lukić to re-enter Račak and retrieve the bodies. He also told Lukić that the ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour was not to be allowed into the country.
In February 2002, the German television network ARD
broadcast a controversial documentary film, Es begann mit einer Lüge ("It began with a lie"), which accused the then German defence minister Rudolf Scharping
of manipulating the facts of the Račak killings to obtain support from the public and parliament for Germany's involvement in the multinational force in Kosovo.
The film was denounced by Scharping, who accused its producers of "irresponsible cuts and falsifications", and by the Kosovar Albanian interviewees, who said that they had been misrepresented. It was also criticised by other German media and human rights groups.
). The three reports did not differ significantly regarding any of the forensic facts. All three examinations took place in controversial circumstances; the Yugoslav and Belarussian forensic teams carried out their autopsies against the opposition of the KVM and ICTY, which had demanded that the outside experts from Finland should be the first to carry out post-mortems on the dead. The Yugoslav and Belarussian autopsies were conducted on 19 January under the auspices of the Pristina Forensic Medical Institute. Its director, Professor Saša Dobričanin, stated that "Not a single body bears any sign of execution. The bodies were not massacred." He told the media that he suspected that the bodies had been mutilated posthumously to fabricate the appearance of an execution.
The European Union team, headed by Dr. Helena Ranta, began its own autopsy on 21 January. The team released its initial findings on 17 March. However, the introduction of this report stresses that this is not the position of the team, but only of Dr. Helena Ranta. The report concluded that "there was no evidence that the victims had been anything other than unarmed civilians and that they had probably been killed where they were later found by the international monitors." Addressing the claims that the dead had been killed wearing KLA uniforms which had then been replaced with civilian clothes, the report states that "...the clothing [of the dead] 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." Dr. Ranta testified at the subsequent war crimes trial of Slobodan Milošević, stating that retrieved bullets, bullet casings and entry and exit wounds indicate that the victims were killed where their bodies were found and at approximately the same time. A later Finnish report showed that only one victim had provably been shot at close range.
The report from the Finnish team, however, 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 fighters, not civilians as claimed by the Kosovo-Albanians and NATO) 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 were 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, until the Račak case was dropped out of the indictment because of lack of evidence.
The full report of the EU team was handed over to the ICTY at the end of June 2000. An executive summary was published in 2001, but the full report has never been released.
In October 2008, Helena Ranta
, the Finnish pathologist who had conducted the forensic examination on the Račak casualties, stated that she had been pressured to modify the contents of her report, both by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by William Walker
, the head of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, in order to make more explicit the role of Serb troops in the incident. She refused to do so.
, Council of Europe
, European Union
, NATO and the United Nations Security Council
all issued strongly worded statements condemning the killings. On January 22, the Contact Group
of countries with an interest in Yugoslavia (Britain
, France
, Germany
, Italy
, Russia
and the United States
) issued a joint statement condemning "the massacre of Kosovo Albanians in Račak on 15 January. All members expressed their revulsion at this act of mass murder. No amount of provocation could justify it. The Contact Group condemns UCK provocations which can only contribute to rising tensions and further violence... The Contact Group also condemns the decisions by the FRY authorities to refuse entry into Kosovo by ICTY Chief Prosecutor Judge Arbour." The Contact Group also called for the Yugoslav authorities to "work with the International Tribunal to ensure that those responsible for Račak are brought to justice [and] suspend those VJ
and MUP officers operating in Račak on 15 January pending the results of this investigation becoming available".
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, 1999 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 Šainović
(Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister), Dragoljub Ojdanić
(Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army) and Vlajko Stojiljković
(Serbian Interior Minister). The Račak massacre was added by the ICTY prosecutors in an amended indictment, but was subsequently dropped from the case, due to lack of evidence to support the accusation.
On June 18, 2001, a court in Pristina
sentenced Zoran Stojanović, a 32-year-old police officer, to 15 years imprisonment for murder and attempted murder in Račak. Stojanović, a Kosovo Serb, was convicted by a joint UN-Kosovo Albanian panel of judges (two United Nations magistrates and one ethnic Albanian). Stojanovic's trial was heavily controversial. It was speedy, one of the first trials by a hastily organized new court. Stojanovic was found guilty for a logical fallacy - alledgedly murdering one man and wounding two more by firing one single bullet. During the trial, both international judges and the Albanian judge had wanted to dismiss the case, but they changed their minds later, allegedly for political reasons and due to presence of intimidation. During the trial, all six witnesses of the prosecution were rebuffed, none of them telling the same story - four of them had repeatedly changed their testimonies during the trial, while the remaining two had presented testimonies that contradicted all known forensic evidence, suggesting that they had very little involvement with the case.
The reconstruction of events in Racak were prevented by two armed Albanians, one with a Kalashnikov
and another with a pistol, who chased off court officials, telling them "We don't want any cockroachs (Serbs
) in our village." The second reconstruction was prevented by an angry mob of Albanians. A subsequent reconstruction was held without the presence of both the defendant and his lawyer. The prosecutor, Tome Gashe, threatened the court during the trial that unless he is found guilty, innocent blood will be spent and the people will "take justice in their own hands". The sentencing of Stojanovic was condemned and deemed unlawful by the United Nations
and Amnesty International
. Despite announcements of a dismissal, Stojanovic's sentence remained. In late 2009, President of Serbia Boris Tadić
pardoned Zoran Stojanovic, declaring that the trial was unjust, which opened the question as to whether he had jurisdiction because Stojanovic was sentenced by an international High court. Stojanovic's ethnic Albanian wife and their two children have been exposed to intensified intimidation, most notably because other Albanians consider her a traitor for marrying a Serb.
Due to lack of evidence, Zoran Stanojević was pardoned in 2007 and released from custody. As of 2011, none are found guilty for participation in the Racak massacre and no known investigations are being held.
Racak
Račak is a village in central Kosovo located at . It became notorious in January 1999 after 45 people were killed in the village during the conflict between state security forces and Albanian guerrillas....
by either combat or murder in central Kosovo
Kosovo
Kosovo is a region in southeastern Europe. Part of the Ottoman Empire for more than five centuries, later the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija within Serbia...
. According to Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
, the victims included three women, a 12-year-old child
Child
Biologically, a child is generally a human between the stages of birth and puberty. Some vernacular definitions of a child include the fetus, as being an unborn child. The legal definition of "child" generally refers to a minor, otherwise known as a person younger than the age of majority...
and several elderly men, while the ICTY list of dead people records two women, a 13-year-old boy
Boy
A boy is a young male human , as contrasted to its female counterpart, girl, or an adult male, a man.The term "boy" is primarily used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions or both...
and two old men.
Various reports (Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
, OSCE, ICTY) initially characterized the killings as a deliberate massacre
Massacre
A massacre is an event with a heavy death toll.Massacre may also refer to:-Entertainment:*Massacre , a DC Comics villain*Massacre , a 1932 drama film starring Richard Barthelmess*Massacre, a 1956 Western starring Dane Clark...
of civilians by Serbian police forces. The Yugoslav government maintained that the casualties were all members of the Kosovo Liberation Army
Kosovo Liberation Army
The Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA was a Kosovar Albanian paramilitary organization which sought the separation of Kosovo from Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s....
killed in a clash with state security forces. The military operation was planned and organized by the Serbian Special Police commander Goran Radosavljević
Goran Radosavljević
Goran Radosavljević was a Serbian police general and the first commander of Serbian special police unit Žandarmerija....
"Guri" (meaning "rock" in Albanian).
The alleged massacre in Račak provoked the NATO governments and became one of the main causes for the subsequent NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. After the war, the Račak "massacre" was a part of the indictment against Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
and others, but was dropped out of the case because of lack of evidence to substantiate the claims that it was an actual atrocity that had happened.
The incident was the subject of 3 forensic reports, one Yugoslav, another Belarusian and the third Finnish, the first two concluded that those killed were, in fact, not civilians. The Finnish forensic report, on the other hand, was never released to the public. However, Helena Ranta
Helena Ranta
Meri Helena Ranta is a Finnish forensic dentist. She has gained publicity particularly on contributing to several international forensic investigations of conflicts such as Kosovo. In addition, she has a University of Helsinki professor's position, a rare case of a Licentiate gaining a post...
, the head of the Finnish investigative team, later stated in an interview for a documentary of Russian authors that the dead were not civilians.
It is widely disputed whether the operation at Račak was either a massacre of innocent civilians (as put forth by the heavily biased Kosovo-Albanian government) or a battle, in which the dead were KLA combatants (as put forth by the Serbian government and allies).
An eighty minute documentary; The Truth and Lies of Racak, documents the operation.
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 ArmyKosovo Liberation Army
The Kosovo Liberation Army or KLA was a Kosovar Albanian paramilitary organization which sought the separation of Kosovo from Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s....
(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
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is the world's largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, human rights, freedom of the press and fair elections...
(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.
During the year, the KLA conducted a number of illegal actions in the area, including a number of kidnappings and arson attacks. On January 8 and January 10, the KLA mounted attacks on Serbian police posts in the neighboring municipalities of Suva Reka and Uroševac
Uroševac
Ferizaj or Uroševac is a city and municipality in southern Kosovo, located some south of the capital Pristina.Uroševac is the third most populous city in Kosovo, after Pristina and Prizren.It is the administrative centre of the homonymous district...
, killing four Serbian policemen. 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 were received by the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, of civilians being killed in Račak. KVM monitors 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 monitors finally gained access to the surrounding area on January 16. Accompanied by a number of foreign journalists and members of the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
'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
William Walker (diplomat)
William Graham Walker is a veteran United States Foreign Service diplomat who served as the US ambassador to El Salvador and as the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission.-Political career:...
later described what he had seen:
- "In a gully above the village, I saw the first body. It was covered with a blanket, and when it was pulled back, I saw there was no head on the corpse — just an incredibly bloody mess on the neck. Someone told me that the skull was on the other side of the gully and asked if I wanted to see that. But I said, "No, I've pretty much got this story." [Three more bodies were found.] They looked like older men, with gray hair or white hair ... They had wounds on their heads, and there was blood on their clothes. [Then a larger group of bodies.] I didn't count them. I just looked and saw a lot of holes in the head - in the top of the head and the back of the head. A couple had what appeared to be bullet wounds knocking out their eyes. I was told there were other bodies further up and over the crest of the hill, and I was asked by journalists and inspectors if I was going to go up and see the rest. I said, 'I've seen enough.'"
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."
The journalists also provided first-hand accounts of the discovery of the bodies. One of them, the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
's reporter Jackie Rowland, reported that the dead "were all ordinary men; farmers, labourers, villagers. They had all been shot in the head." The dead were aged from 14 to 99 years old. ITN's correspondent Bill Neely
Bill Neely
Bill Neely is International Editor for ITV News, the news service produced by ITN for British commercial broadcaster ITV. He has been a broadcaster since 1981...
was also present and described how other KVM monitors reacted at the scene: "A Swedish monitor notes that the dead are all in civilian clothes and unarmed and that there are no signs of a battle... After working for two hours one monitor, a London police officer, tells me he believes many of the victims have been shot at close range."
Two days later, on January 18, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Louise Arbour
Louise Arbour
Louise Arbour, is the former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada and the Court of Appeal for Ontario and a former Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda...
, 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 fire from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Pristina
Pristina
Pristina, also spelled Prishtina and Priština is the capital and largest city of Kosovo. It is the administrative centre of the homonymous municipality and district....
to await a forensic examination.
A joint Yugoslav-Belarus
Belarus
Belarus , officially the Republic of Belarus, is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered clockwise by Russia to the northeast, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the northwest. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel ,...
ian team of pathologists conducted post-mortems at the end of January. A Finnish
Finland
Finland , officially the Republic of Finland, is a Nordic country situated in the Fennoscandian region of Northern Europe. It is bordered by Sweden in the west, Norway in the north and Russia in the east, while Estonia lies to its south across the Gulf of Finland.Around 5.4 million people reside...
forensic team working for the European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
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 10 February.
Investigations
The killings at Račak became the focus of an investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In its indictment of Slobodan MiloševićSlobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials, the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor stated that:
Eyewitness reports from the surviving villagers unanimously supported the account of a massacre. The British journalist Julius Strauss
Julius Strauss
Julius Strauss is a British print journalist who spent several years working as a foreign correspondent in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and other war zones....
, writing for the Daily Telegraph, described how he had "spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Račak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serb sources who spoke privately and at some risk." According to the survivors that he interviewed, "a small group of men dressed all in black and wearing gloves and balaclavas ... co-ordinated the attack on the village and the subsequent executions." Men had been separated from women and children before being led away to be executed. One survivor told him that "some of the Serbs were in blue, some in black. The men in black appeared to be in control and wore balaclavas over their heads. Some had uniforms with insignia which included a Serbian flag; some had none. They carried automatic guns and, as we were led up the hill, both units started shooting us." Strauss speculated that the men had been from the Specijalna Antiterroristicka Jedinica
SAJ (Special Anti-terrorist Unit)
The Special Anti-terrorist Unit is a special operations and tactical police unit in Serbia.-History:The SAJ was formed in the former Yugoslavia, due to the increasing phenomenon of terrorism in Europe that was occurring at the time from such groups as: IRA, ETA, Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade...
, the Serbian Interior Ministry's elite anti-terrorist unit. Some eyewitnesses told reporters that "Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims, and the six-hour orgy of violence ended with a nationalist song."
The Yugoslav government rejected this version of events. On the day after the killings, the Serbian Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that its police units had come under fire from "ethnic Albanian terrorist groups ... on routes leading to Račak village in the Stimlje municipality." In the subsequent counter-attack "several dozen terrorists were killed in the clashes with the police. Most of them were in uniforms bearing the insignia of the ethnic Albanian terrorist organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)."
They received some support from the French newspapers Le Figaro
Le Figaro
Le Figaro is a French daily newspaper founded in 1826 and published in Paris. It is one of three French newspapers of record, with Le Monde and Libération, and is the oldest newspaper in France. It is also the second-largest national newspaper in France after Le Parisien and before Le Monde, but...
and Le Monde
Le Monde
Le Monde is a French daily evening newspaper owned by La Vie-Le Monde Group and edited in Paris. It is one of two French newspapers of record, and has generally been well respected since its first edition under founder Hubert Beuve-Méry on 19 December 1944...
, which suggested that the KLA could have fabricated evidence. A film crew working for the Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
accompanied the Yugoslav forces in Račak for part of 15 January. 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."
Another French journalist writing for Le Monde, Christophe Chatelot, gave an account from the perspective of 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 Račak 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."
The Serbian President, Milan Milutinović
Milan Milutinovic
Milan Milutinović is a former President of Serbia. He served as Director of the National Library of Serbia , Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Greece, Yugoslavia's Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs , and as President of Serbia from 1997 until 2002.After his presidential term...
, accused the KVM head William Walker of fabricating the killings "by securing the co-operation of his protegés in the Kosovo Liberation Army". The Serbian media took a similar line, arguing that the Albanians had removed the KLA uniforms from the bodies and replaced them with civilian clothes. Unnamed French diplomats also criticised Walker for publicly blaming the Serbs for the killings, arguing that he should have waited for a more thorough investigation. Walker was also attacked by the Serbian media for his role as a US diplomat in Central America in the 1980s, at a time when the involvement of the US in a number of civil and political conflicts in the region was a subject of major controversy.
At the end of January 1999, the United States was reported to have leaked telephone intercepts that were said to prove the role of the Yugoslav government in the killings. According to the Washington Post, the intercepts showed that 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. Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović
Nikola Šainovic
Nikola Šainović , born 7 December 1948 in Bor, Serbia, Yugoslavia) is a former Prime Minister of Serbia of Montenegrin descent...
and Interior Ministry General Sreten Lukić
Sreten Lukić
Sreten Lukić, born on 28 March 1955 in Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is the former head of the Serbian police in Kosovo during the 1998-99 Kosovo and subsequently Serbian deputy interior minister from 2001 to 2004...
reportedly expressed concern about reaction to the Račak assault and discussed how to make the killings at Račak appear to be the result of combat between government troops and KLA 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. Following the international uproar about the killings, Sainović told Lukić to re-enter Račak and retrieve the bodies. He also told Lukić that the ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour was not to be allowed into the country.
In February 2002, the German television network ARD
ARD (broadcaster)
ARD is a joint organization of Germany's regional public-service broadcasters...
broadcast a controversial documentary film, Es begann mit einer Lüge ("It began with a lie"), which accused the then German defence minister Rudolf Scharping
Rudolf Scharping
Rudolf Scharping is a German politician .Scharping studied politics, sociology and law at the University of Bonn. He joined the Social Democratic Party in 1966. He was Member of the Rhineland-Palatine Parliament from 1975 to 1994. From 21 May 1991 to 15 October 1994 he was prime minister of the...
of manipulating the facts of the Račak killings to obtain support from the public and parliament for Germany's involvement in the multinational force in Kosovo.
The film was denounced by Scharping, who accused its producers of "irresponsible cuts and falsifications", and by the Kosovar Albanian interviewees, who said that they had been misrepresented. It was also criticised by other German media and human rights groups.
Forensic reports
Three forensic examinations were carried out on the bodies, by separate teams from Yugoslavia, Belarus (at the time an ally of Yugoslavia) and Finland (under the auspices of the European UnionEuropean Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
). The three reports did not differ significantly regarding any of the forensic facts. All three examinations took place in controversial circumstances; the Yugoslav and Belarussian forensic teams carried out their autopsies against the opposition of the KVM and ICTY, which had demanded that the outside experts from Finland should be the first to carry out post-mortems on the dead. The Yugoslav and Belarussian autopsies were conducted on 19 January under the auspices of the Pristina Forensic Medical Institute. Its director, Professor Saša Dobričanin, stated that "Not a single body bears any sign of execution. The bodies were not massacred." He told the media that he suspected that the bodies had been mutilated posthumously to fabricate the appearance of an execution.
The European Union team, headed by Dr. Helena Ranta, began its own autopsy on 21 January. The team released its initial findings on 17 March. However, the introduction of this report stresses that this is not the position of the team, but only of Dr. Helena Ranta. The report concluded that "there was no evidence that the victims had been anything other than unarmed civilians and that they had probably been killed where they were later found by the international monitors." Addressing the claims that the dead had been killed wearing KLA uniforms which had then been replaced with civilian clothes, the report states that "...the clothing [of the dead] 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." Dr. Ranta testified at the subsequent war crimes trial of Slobodan Milošević, stating that retrieved bullets, bullet casings and entry and exit wounds indicate that the victims were killed where their bodies were found and at approximately the same time. A later Finnish report showed that only one victim had provably been shot at close range.
The report from the Finnish team, however, 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 fighters, not civilians as claimed by the Kosovo-Albanians and NATO) 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 were 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, until the Račak case was dropped out of the indictment because of lack of evidence.
The full report of the EU team was handed over to the ICTY at the end of June 2000. An executive summary was published in 2001, but the full report has never been released.
In October 2008, Helena Ranta
Helena Ranta
Meri Helena Ranta is a Finnish forensic dentist. She has gained publicity particularly on contributing to several international forensic investigations of conflicts such as Kosovo. In addition, she has a University of Helsinki professor's position, a rare case of a Licentiate gaining a post...
, the Finnish pathologist who had conducted the forensic examination on the Račak casualties, stated that she had been pressured to modify the contents of her report, both by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by William Walker
William Walker (diplomat)
William Graham Walker is a veteran United States Foreign Service diplomat who served as the US ambassador to El Salvador and as the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission.-Political career:...
, the head of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, in order to make more explicit the role of Serb troops in the incident. She refused to do so.
Consequences
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 OSCEOrganization for Security and Co-operation in Europe
The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe is the world's largest security-oriented intergovernmental organization. Its mandate includes issues such as arms control, human rights, freedom of the press and fair elections...
, Council of Europe
Council of Europe
The Council of Europe is an international organisation promoting co-operation between all countries of Europe in the areas of legal standards, human rights, democratic development, the rule of law and cultural co-operation...
, European Union
European Union
The European Union is an economic and political union of 27 independent member states which are located primarily in Europe. The EU traces its origins from the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community , formed by six countries in 1958...
, NATO and the United Nations Security Council
United Nations Security Council
The United Nations Security Council is one of the principal organs of the United Nations and is charged with the maintenance of international peace and security. Its powers, outlined in the United Nations Charter, include the establishment of peacekeeping operations, the establishment of...
all issued strongly worded statements condemning the killings. On January 22, the Contact Group
Contact Group
The Contact Group is the name for an informal grouping of influential countries that have a significant interest in policy developments in the Balkans. The Contact Group is composed of United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, and Russia. It was first created in response to the war...
of countries with an interest in Yugoslavia (Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
, France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
, Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
and the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
) issued a joint statement condemning "the massacre of Kosovo Albanians in Račak on 15 January. All members expressed their revulsion at this act of mass murder. No amount of provocation could justify it. The Contact Group condemns UCK provocations which can only contribute to rising tensions and further violence... The Contact Group also condemns the decisions by the FRY authorities to refuse entry into Kosovo by ICTY Chief Prosecutor Judge Arbour." The Contact Group also called for the Yugoslav authorities to "work with the International Tribunal to ensure that those responsible for Račak are brought to justice [and] suspend those VJ
Yugoslav Army
Aside from the Yugoslav People's Army, the terms Yugoslav Army, Army of Yugoslavia, or Military of Yugoslavia may refer to:* Yugoslav Partisans , the Yugoslav resistance army during World War II...
and MUP officers operating in Račak on 15 January pending the results of this investigation becoming available".
The United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
also condemned the killings, with the Security Council and Secretary General
United Nations Secretary-General
The Secretary-General of the United Nations is the head of the Secretariat of the United Nations, one of the principal organs of the United Nations. The Secretary-General also acts as the de facto spokesperson and leader of the United Nations....
describing them on January 31 as a massacre perpetrated by Serbian security forces.
The ICTY issued a sealed indictment on May 27, 1999 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war
Laws of war
The law of war is a body of law concerning acceptable justifications to engage in war and the limits to acceptable wartime conduct...
against a number of senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials. These were Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević
Slobodan Milošević was President of Serbia and Yugoslavia. He served as the President of Socialist Republic of Serbia and Republic of Serbia from 1989 until 1997 in three terms and as President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000...
(President of Yugoslavia), Milan Milutinović
Milan Milutinovic
Milan Milutinović is a former President of Serbia. He served as Director of the National Library of Serbia , Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to Greece, Yugoslavia's Federal Minister of Foreign Affairs , and as President of Serbia from 1997 until 2002.After his presidential term...
(President of Serbia), Nikola Šainović
Nikola Šainovic
Nikola Šainović , born 7 December 1948 in Bor, Serbia, Yugoslavia) is a former Prime Minister of Serbia of Montenegrin descent...
(Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister), Dragoljub Ojdanić
Dragoljub Ojdanic
Dragoljub Ojdanić was former Chief of the General Staff and Defence minister of Yugoslavia...
(Chief of the General Staff of the Yugoslav Army) and Vlajko Stojiljković
Vlajko Stojiljkovic
Vlajko Stojiljkovic was Yugoslavia's Minister of Internal Affairs from 1997 until the deposal of Slobodan Milosevic....
(Serbian Interior Minister). The Račak massacre was added by the ICTY prosecutors in an amended indictment, but was subsequently dropped from the case, due to lack of evidence to support the accusation.
On June 18, 2001, a court in Pristina
Pristina
Pristina, also spelled Prishtina and Priština is the capital and largest city of Kosovo. It is the administrative centre of the homonymous municipality and district....
sentenced Zoran Stojanović, a 32-year-old police officer, to 15 years imprisonment for murder and attempted murder in Račak. Stojanović, a Kosovo Serb, was convicted by a joint UN-Kosovo Albanian panel of judges (two United Nations magistrates and one ethnic Albanian). Stojanovic's trial was heavily controversial. It was speedy, one of the first trials by a hastily organized new court. Stojanovic was found guilty for a logical fallacy - alledgedly murdering one man and wounding two more by firing one single bullet. During the trial, both international judges and the Albanian judge had wanted to dismiss the case, but they changed their minds later, allegedly for political reasons and due to presence of intimidation. During the trial, all six witnesses of the prosecution were rebuffed, none of them telling the same story - four of them had repeatedly changed their testimonies during the trial, while the remaining two had presented testimonies that contradicted all known forensic evidence, suggesting that they had very little involvement with the case.
The reconstruction of events in Racak were prevented by two armed Albanians, one with a Kalashnikov
AK-47
The AK-47 is a selective-fire, gas-operated 7.62×39mm assault rifle, first developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It is officially known as Avtomat Kalashnikova . It is also known as a Kalashnikov, an "AK", or in Russian slang, Kalash.Design work on the AK-47 began in the last year...
and another with a pistol, who chased off court officials, telling them "We don't want any cockroachs (Serbs
Serbs
The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...
) in our village." The second reconstruction was prevented by an angry mob of Albanians. A subsequent reconstruction was held without the presence of both the defendant and his lawyer. The prosecutor, Tome Gashe, threatened the court during the trial that unless he is found guilty, innocent blood will be spent and the people will "take justice in their own hands". The sentencing of Stojanovic was condemned and deemed unlawful by the United Nations
United Nations
The United Nations is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace...
and Amnesty International
Amnesty International
Amnesty International is an international non-governmental organisation whose stated mission is "to conduct research and generate action to prevent and end grave abuses of human rights, and to demand justice for those whose rights have been violated."Following a publication of Peter Benenson's...
. Despite announcements of a dismissal, Stojanovic's sentence remained. In late 2009, President of Serbia Boris Tadić
Boris Tadic
Boris Tadić is the President of Serbia and leader of the Democratic Party. He was elected to a five-year term on 27 June 2004, and was sworn into office on 11 July. He was re-elected for a de facto second five-year term on 3 February 2008 and was sworn in on 15 February...
pardoned Zoran Stojanovic, declaring that the trial was unjust, which opened the question as to whether he had jurisdiction because Stojanovic was sentenced by an international High court. Stojanovic's ethnic Albanian wife and their two children have been exposed to intensified intimidation, most notably because other Albanians consider her a traitor for marrying a Serb.
Due to lack of evidence, Zoran Stanojević was pardoned in 2007 and released from custody. As of 2011, none are found guilty for participation in the Racak massacre and no known investigations are being held.
See also
- List of massacres in Yugoslavia
- List of massacres in the Kosovo War
- List of massacres in Serbia
- The killing of Bytyqi brothersThe killing of Bytyqi brothersThe Bytyqi brothers were three American-Kosovo Albanians killed by Serb police shortly after the end of the war in Kosovo, while they were in custody in Petrovo Selo, Serbia. The bodies of the three brothers were discovered in July 2001 in a mass grave containing 70 Albanians in rural Petrovo Selo,...
- Serbian-Albanian Conflict
- War crimes in Kosovo
- UN Mission in Kosovo
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)
- Helena Ranta: Foreign Ministry tried to influence Kosovo reports, Helsingin Sanomat article
- B92: Controversy over events that triggered NATO attacks
- http://www.glypx.com/balkanwitness/racak.htm Articles on the Racak Massacre (Balkan Witness)