Two articles from
[A Dutch newspaper]
The Bloodbath in Racak was a
Massacre
By our editor Petra de Koning
HELSINKI, 10 March 2001
Finnish citizen Helena Ranta conducted the investigation of the massacre in Racak, Kosovo. For two years she did not want to talk about it. Now, she does. Quite a relief, she says, after "all the nonsense that has been said on this subject."
We looked at very centimeter of ground in the ditch, with small shovels, spoons, and metal detectors. It was the ditch in which the dead bodies of 23 Albanian men had lain, just outside the town of Racak in Kosovo. Finnish forensic experts crept through the mud, the bushes, the rocks. That was in November 1999, ten months after the massacre in Racak, in which a total of 45 Albanians were killed, including two women and a child.
If we had found nothing in the
ditch, the Finnish investigator Helena Ranta now says, then it would have been entirely a
set-up by the Albanians. But lying there were bullets, bullet shells, and even still a
body part of one of the victims. That this was lying here was important, and how it was
lying even more important.
Ranta sits in her office at the
University of Helsinki. A small, sturdy woman with blond highlights in her hair and her
glasses on a chain around her neck. She is a dentist, anthropologist, and molecular
biologist. Ranta led the forensic investigation into the death of Albanians in Racak,
commissioned by the European Union, and later also by the Yugoslavia tribunal in The Hague
to do so.
The slaughter was not the first in
Kosovo, but now indeed it is the best known. Western political leaders had already decided
that the violence of Serbian soldiers against Albanians must finally come to an end. The
television images out of Racak, of badly mutilated bodies in the ditch and in the village,
horrified the West, and military intervention became even more urgent. Two months later,
on March 24, 1999, the first NATO bombs fell on Yugoslavia.
There were already doubts about
Racak at that time. French newspapers wrote that the Albanians had staged a massacre
scenario in order to provoke NATO actions. Serb authorities had let it be known that in
Racak "several dozens" of soldiers of the Albanian freedom forces UCK [KLA] were
slain in the conflict. Other Albanians were supposed to have laid bodies in the ditch so
that it would seem that they had been executed by Serbs.
The Finnish investigation team had
examined the bodies in the hospital in Pristina, the capital city of Kosovo. In the
village itself, they couldn't carry out an examination, because of the snow. At a press
conference, shortly before the beginning of the air attack, Ranta presented no proof of a
massacre, but hypotheses -- which everyone interpreted according to their own opinions and
sympathies.
Thereafter Ranta said nothing more,
for two years. About the research scarcely anything came out in the open. Doubts about
Racak became stronger. Especially after the bombardments public opinion changed. Albanians
drove Serbs out of Kosovo. They were no longer pitiable and had they really deserved the
NATO actions? The Berliner Zeitung and the VPRO-program Argos (Dutch TV) opined that on
the basis of autopsy reports by the Finns that the victims of Racak hadn't been shot from
up close. That would mean that the Serbian version made sense, that the Albanians had been
killed in battle. The BBC reported last year in a retrospective look at the Kosovo war
that the UCK in Racak had "provoked" the Serbs. Last month the German WDR
transmitted a documentary with the title "It began with a lie. The Racak lie."
Indeed it was too bad, says Ranta,
that she couldn't react to "all the nonsense" that was said and written on this
matter. She was afraid that she would harm a possible lawsuit against Milosevic
adjudicated by the Yugoslavian tribunal if she reported about her investigation. Racak is
an important part of the accusation against the Yugoslavian ex-president, and Ranta
herself will appear as a witness in a possible trial
Last month the EU found that indeed
something about the forensic investigation needed to be made public. Colleagues of Ranta
had, without her knowing about it, written a scientific article about the investigation of
the dead bodies. The Berliner Zeitung had seen the piece prior to publication and had
ascertained that there still was no evidence of a massacre. The EU decided that a summary
of the investigation report should be available to anyone who requested it. But the
summary is vaguely worded and barely understandable. A Russian diplomat at the UN Security
Council was furious. Now still no one knew who was responsible for the slaughter.
Ranta smiled; she had kept the
summary vague intentionally. Now she is willing to talk about it, to explain what was
meant by the summary. No one should think that she had gathered no evidence -- but as for
drawing conclusions, that will be left up to the judges of the tribunal. It was her duty,
she says, to rule out scenarios. Of the Serbian scenario, nothing remained. "We have
found no indication that it did not have to do with unarmed citizens." On the morning
of the massacre there was fighting in the area, nine UCK fighters were killed, but they
did not belong to the 45 whose bodies were found the following day. "In the pockets
of the dead, we encountered no munitions, but only banknotes." The dead were wearing
citizens' clothing, seven or eight layers over one another, it was winter. In these
clothes they were killed, according to the forensic investigation.
It can also be ruled out that the 23
men in the ditch were somehow killed in some other manner. They were not laid in there
later, there was nothing "staged." Ten months after the massacre, the Finnish
investigators found bullets in the ditch. They lay under the ground, at the places where
the bodies were found. Next to one of the bullets lay also a body part. Results of the
autopsy in the Pristina hospital were compared with what was found in the trench: the man
whose body part had been found was lying on the ground when he was shot dead. About the
other victims there was, according to Ranta, a similar pattern observable.
From the investigation it appeared
that the Albanians in the ditch couldn't have been shot from a long distance. If that had
indeed been the case, then the bullets couldn't have been lying in the ditch itself.
Moreover bullet shells were found in the bushes next to the ditch. So it can be calculated
from what distance the shooting took place. Ranta is not willing to name the exact
distance. "What difference does it make if it was one or two meters? It was not in
battle."
The investigators have also ascertained that the bullets that were found in the bodies and in the ditch came from a "small number" of weapons. How many exactly is something Ranta will not say. In the autopsy, described in the scientific article by her colleagues, it seems that eleven bodies exhibited signs of a "series of shots."
Immediately after the massacre the tribunal established an ad-hoc office in Macedonia and queried witnesses. With the examination of the bodies and the research in the ditch the Racak affair is the "best investigated matter in the history of the tribunal," Ranta thinks. "I think that we are probably very close to the truth."