On 17.3.1999 the Finnish
pathologist Helena Ranta presented her final report on the events in the
Kosovo Albanian village of Racak on 15.1.1999. It is now clear that the 45
people murdered by Serbian Special Police Forces with the support of the
Yugoslav Army were unarmed civilians. The theory circulated by Serbian
propaganda that the dead were Albanian "terrorists" who had been killed in
armed combat can therefore be considered to have been disproved. It is
probable that we will never learn the full truth of the matter. However the
testimony of eye-witnesses, journalists, OSCE personnel and, not least, the
Finnish pathologist responsible for carrying autopsies of the dead men makes
one thing completely clear: there is no anti-Serbian conspiracy. The dead of
Racak were the victims of a terrible crime.
On 16.1.1999 the OSCE found
more than 40 corpses with horrendous injuries in Racak, a village in the
south-east of Kosovo, the remains of a massacre. Visibly shaken by the grim
scene William Walker, the American head of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification
Mission (KVM), held the Serbian police publicly responsible for the killings.
The Serbian Government declared him an undesirable person and called for his
departure from the country. They put forward the theory that overnight the
Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had removed the dead men's uniforms and
dressed them in civilian clothing, fired shots into their heads after death
and rearranged the bodies dramatically in a narrow defile in order to display
them to the OSCE next morning as victims of a massacre.
Two French newspapers
supported this account by claiming, that skull contents were missing from the
head injuries, not enough bullet cases were found to substantiate the
allegations of an execution. Both newspapers have referred in particular to
the film shot by two Serbian cameramen who were filming in Racak on 15.1.1999,
allegedly at the invitation of the Serbian police, and insist that they saw no
execution take place. However the theory is contradicted not only by the
pathologist's findings but also by investigations carried out at the scene the
day after the crime and by eyewitness reports.
The background
The Albanian village of Racak
is situated half a kilometre from the town of Shtime/Stimlje. Before the
outbreak of the war (March 1998) approximately 2,000 people used to live
there. Most of them fled after a major Serbian offensive in August 1998.
Before the Serbian attack on 15.1.1999 there were between 300 and 400 people
in the village. The Kosovo Liberation Army had a base in Racak. On 8.1.1999
the KLA carried out a raid on Dulje, near Shtime, in which three Serbian
policemen were killed and one wounded. On 10.1.1999 the KLA attacked a police
patrol at Slivovo; one policeman was killed. The Serbian police then proceeded
to carry out a retaliatory attack on Racak.
The testimony of
eye-witnesses
The U.S. human rights
organisation Human Rights Watch Helsinki spoke to relatives and eye-witnesses
of the Serbian operation that took place on 15.1.1999, beginning at 6.30 a.m.
Yugoslav Army T-55 tanks and police armoured vehicles were deployed. The first
families fled from Racak to Petrovo. Racak was surrounded by Serbian units.
The KLA also fled during the course of the attack on the village. A woman
eye-witness saw at least 40 police officers in blue uniforms, with their faces
uncovered, opened fire from the hillside, at a range of 20 metres, on the
people fleeing below. Her husband and her son were hit by bullets and fell to
the ground. A 70-year-old man in the same group saw his 22-year-old grandson
shot and his 18-year-old grand-daughter wounded together with her mother.
Those villagers who did not manage to get away hid in the house of Sadik
Osmani. Around 11 a.m. the Serbian police took 30 men from the house. They
were forced to lie on the ground in the courtyard. Around 1 p.m. 23 men were
led away by the police. The people who were left in the house suspected that
the police were taking the men away into custody at the police station in
Shtime/Stimlje. Around 3 p.m. an Albanian man heard shots coming from the
direction where the bodies were later found.
What OSCE personnel and
journalists saw the next day
On 15.1.1999, on the specific
instructions of the Serbian forces, OSCE observers were prevented from
entering Racak. They first went to the village in the late afternoon and heard
unconfirmed reports that men and women had been separated and the men taken
away by the Serbian forces. The OSCE were then obliged to leave the area as
darkness fell. Early in the morning of 16.1.1999 more OSCE Kosovo Verification
Mission teams arrived in Racak, accompanied by foreign journalists. Their
report on what they found there (Special report: "Massacre of civilians in
Racak") states that bodies were found with both long-range and short-range
gunshot injuries. Among the bodies was that of a boy approximately twelve
years old who had been killed by a shot in the neck.
OSCE spokesman Berend
Borchardt, who was present during the inspection of the scene, later added
that the dead men were "ordinary farming people", most of them wearing
wellington boots and none of them wearing the sort of footwear appropriate to
military activity. The British newspaper The Guardian was given a description
of the bodies by an OSCE source (excerpt): one body of a man beheaded, two old
men, killed by shots to the head fired at close range, three men aged
approximately 45, 60 and 70 years old, lying dead, to the left hand side of a
path at a frost-covered spot on the hillside, with gunshot wounds in the neck
and head caused by large-calibre weapons, probably fired from a distance of
more than 50 cm (no traces of gunpowder); one man was found with a knife wound
below the shoulder inflicted while he was still alive. Two British journalists
in Racak on the morning of 16.1.1999 who were able to take a close look at the
dead men made similar observations.
The second Serbian attack on
Racak on 17.1.1999
According to the U.S.
newspaper The Washington Post, on 15.1.1999 the US secret service tapped into
a number of telephone conversations between the Serbian Deputy Prime Minister
Nikola Sainovic and the Serbian Interior Minister General Sreten Lukic in
which Sainovic, speaking from Belgrade, inquired about the situation regarding
the ongoing operation in Racak. Concerned about international protests,
according to the newspaper, the Serbian Ministers engaged in a detailed
discussion of measures to be taken following the massacre - sealing-off of the
border with Macedonia, in order to prevent the entry of the Chief Prosecutor
of the UN Tribunal at The Hague, Louise Arbour, restoration of control over
the scene using Interior Ministry troops, recovery of the bodies. On 17.1.1999
Serbian troops returned to the area to launch another attack on the village. A
hundred or so people - journalists, OSCE and local people - were in the
village. They fled in panic. The laid-out corpses were left behind unattended
in the mosque. On 19.1.1999 the Chief Prosecutor of the International War
Crimes Tribunal at The Hague, Louise Arbour, was prevented from entering
Kosovo by the Serbian authorities.
The Finnish and
Serbian/Byelorussian pathologists' investigations
On 17.1.1999 the bodies were
taken by the Serbian police to the Serbian Forensic Medicine Institute in
Pristina. On 19.1.1999 a Serbian/Byelorussian team began the autopsy without
waiting for the Finnish experts to arrive and without first taking X-rays, as
the Finns had suggested. On 21.1.1999 the Finnish team arrived, under the
leadership of Helena Ranta. She challenged the conclusion reached by her
Serbian colleagues that none of the bodies showed signs of execution as being
premature, since according to various witnesses they had not had suitable
equipment at their disposal to conduct a proper autopsy. On 17.3.1999 she also
rejected the Serbian authorities' use of the paraffin test method to test for
the presence of traces of smoke as out-dated. As far back as 1968 an Interpol
conference had described the method as unreliable. More modern methods would
have yielded negative results - in other words, would have found that none of
the dead men had fired a weapon.
Conclusions of
the reports published to date
The final report of the Finnish pathologists, presented in
Pristina on 17.3.1999 by the leader of the team, Helena Ranta, concluded that
the dead were unarmed civilians, who had fired weapons. Many of the bodies had
been moved. Ms Ranta described what had happened at Racak as a "crime against
humanity".
-
The reports of the OSCE
observers and several journalists, who were the first to inspect the scene
on the morning of 16.1.1999, the day after the massacre, indicate very
clearly that most of the dead had been shot at very close range - as
confirmed by the evidence of injuries, smoke-marks and bloodstains. As for
the facts that in some cases bodies had been moved and were not found where
the men had been killed, there are various possible explanations and the
fact does not in itself invalidate the observations which the observers made
on the day after the crime.
-
The Serbian investigating
authorities and pathologists were referring to the fabrication of evidence
before they even saw the bodies, which hardly speak for their impartiality.
-
When the second Serbian
attack took place on 17.1.1999 the OSCE left the village in haste. The
bodies that had been laid out in the mosque were left without international
supervision for several days before they were taken to Pristina, opening up
the possibility of them having been moved and tampered with.
-
The manner in which the
Serbian/Byelorussian team conducted their post-mortem was clearly not very
professional. The criticism made by the Finnish pathologists concerning the
fact that the autopsy was begun without X-rays being taken beforehand is
highly significant in this regard. The competence of the Finns, on the other
hand, has not been disputed by the Serbian pathologists.
-
An impartial investigation
of the facts by investigating authorities from the UN Tribunal in The Hague
was prevented by the Serbian authorities.
-
To date there has been no
impartial examination of the videotapes of the Serbian cameramen from
Associated Press, the decisive evidence on which the theory of the
"anti-Serbian conspiracy" is based. This would clarify the question whether
their film is factually relevant and whether it offers a true picture of
what actually happened in Racak.
