On Jan. 21, the French newspaper Le Monde ran an article by
its Kosovo correspondent that cast doubts on the Jan. 18
massacre story spread by U.S. agent William Walker and his
observers. Le Monde reports that the Serbian police operation
was seen the entire time by international observers, it took
place in a mountain village that was almost entirely composed
of KLA combatants, and the absence of both blood and shells
around the bodies made it likely they were killed in combat
elsewhere and then gathered by the KLA for propaganda use.
Following is a translation of that story:
Thursday Jan. 21, 1999
The Racak dead:
Were they truly massacred in cold blood?
The version of the facts spread by the Kosovars leave
many questions. Belgrade says the 24 victims were KLA
"terrorists," fallen in the course of a battle, but refuses any
international investigation.
A film on the police operation contradicts the version
spread by the OSCE
PRISTINA
(Kosovo) by Le Monde's special correspondent Christophe
Chatelot
Wasn't the Racak massacre a little too perfect? Le Monde
received some new eyewitness testimony on Monday, Jan. 18, that
throws doubt on the reality of the horrible spectacle of
heaped-up corpses of dozens of Albanians who were supposedly
executed summarily by Serbian security forces last Friday. Had
these victims been executed in cold blood, as the KLA says, or
were they killed in combat, as the Serbs affirm?
According to the version received and distributed by the
press and the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the
massacres took place in the early afternoon of Jan. 15.
"Masked" Serbian police entered the village of Racak, which had
been bombed since the morning by Yugoslav army tanks. They
broke down the doors of homes, entered the houses, ordering the
women to stay there while they drove the men to the outside of
the village to calmly shoot them with a bullet in the head--not
without having previously tortured and mutilated some of them.
According to certain witnesses, the Serbs sang as they did this
dirty work, before leaving the area about 3 :30 p.m.
The account of two journalists from Associated Press TV,
which filmed the Racak police operation, contradicts the above
account. At 10 a.m., when they entered the locality in the wake
of a police armored vehicle, the village was practically
deserted. They advanced through the streets under fire from the
combatants of the Kosovo Liberation Army, hidden in the woods
that overlook the village. This exchange of fire lasted
throughout the engagement, with more or less intensity. The
main fighting was in the woods. The Albanians who had fled the
village when the first Serb shells landed at dawn tried to find
safety there. There they ran into the Serbian police who
surrounded the village. The KLA was trapped in a pincer.
The place the police attacked so violently on Friday was a
stronghold of the Albanian KLA independence fighters. Almost
all the inhabitants had fled Racak during the frightful Serb
offensive of the summer of 1998. With few exceptions, they had
not returned. "Smoke came from only two chimneys," remarked one
of the APTV reporters.
The Serb operation was neither a surprise nor a secret. On
the morning of the attack, a police source tipped off APTV :
"Come to Racak, something is happening there." From 10 a.m. the
team was on site, alongside the police, filming from a crest
jutting out over the village and then in the streets behind an
armored vehicle. The OSCE was also warned of the action. At
least two teams of international observers were present
observing the combat from a hill from which they could see part
of the village. They entered Racak soon after the police
departed. They investigated the situation by questioning some
Albanians, insisting on learning if there were any wounded
civilians. Toward 6 p.m., they came back down to the clinic of
the neighboring village of Stimje with four people--two women
and two elderly men--who were very slightly wounded. These
verifiers said that they were then "incapable of establishing
the casualties of this day of battle."
The publicity the Serb police gave out about this operation
was intense. At 10 :30 a.m., it sent out the first
communiqué. It announced that it had "encircled the
village of Racak with the aim of arresting the members of a
terrorist group that had killed a police officer" the previous
Sunday. At 3 p.m., a first bulletin estimated four Albanians
killed in the combats. The next day, Saturday, the police
congratulated themselves for the success of an operation,
which, according to they own estimates, resulted in the deaths
of dozens of KLA "terrorists" and the seizure of a significant
cache of arms.
The attempt to arrest an Albanian, the alleged murderer of a
Serbian police officer, had turned into a massacre. At 3 :30
p.m. the police left the area under the sporadic firing of a
handful of KLA combatants who were still holding out, aided by
the difficult and steep terrain. Quickly, the first Albanian
survivors returned to the village, those who had succeeded in
hiding themselves came out of the shadows and three KVM
vehicles entered the village. An hour after the police left,
night fell.
Guided by the KLA
The next morning, the press and the KVM came to tally up the
losses caused by the battle. It is at this moment, that, guided
by the armed KLA combatants that had reoccupied the village,
they discovered the ditch where there were lying, piled up,
about 20 bodies, almost exclusively men. In the middle of the
day, the head of the KVM in person, the US 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. However, some questions are in
order. How were the Serbian police able to gather together a
group of men and calmly direct them toward the place of
execution when they were constantly under fire from the KLA?
How could this ditch--situated at the edge of Racak--have
escaped the view of the local inhabitants, who are familiar
with the surroundings and were present before nightfall? And of
the observers present for more than two hours in this extremely
small village? Why were there so few shells around the bodies,
so little blood in the hollow road where 23 people were
supposed to have been shot down at point-blank range with
several shots to the head? Is it not more likely that the
bodies of the Albanians killed in combat with the Serbian
police had been gathered in the ditch to create a horror scene
that was sure to cause revulsion in public opinion ? Doesn't
the violence and rapidity with which Belgrade reacted--it gave
the KVM head 48 hours to leave Yugoslavia--in itself mean that
the Yugoslavs are sure of the story they are raising ?
Only an international investigation above all suspicion will
light up all the shadowy areas. Some Finnish and Belorussian
forensic specialists were expected Wednesday (Jan. 20) at
Pristina to take part in the autopsies carried out by the
Yugoslav doctors. The problem is that the authorities in
Belgrade have never shown themselves to be cooperative in this
affair. 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.
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