MEDIA ADVISORY:
DOUBTS ON A MASSACRE:
Media Ignore Questions About Incident That Sparked Kosovo War
February 1, 2001
In 1999, the discovery of bodies in the Kosovo village of Racak helped push
NATO into war. New evidence casting doubt on claims that the bodies were
civilian victims of a massacre has stirred debate in the European media-- but
there has been a virtual blackout on the news in the U.S. press.
In January of 1999, the American head of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) mission in Kosovo announced that 45 Kosovar
Albanians from the village of Racak had been massacred by Serb soldiers. U.S.
diplomat William Walker condemned the killings as a "horrendous" massacre,
stating that the dead were all civilians who had been brutally executed, many
of them mutilated after death.
Once the massacre story was reported in heart-wrenching detail by media
across the globe, pressure for war intensified and previously reluctant
European allies took a major step toward authorizing airstrikes. A Washington
Post article (4/18/99) reconstructing the Kosovo decision-making process
found that "Racak transformed the West's Balkan policy as singular events
seldom do."
Troubling questions soon emerged, however, about whether or not there had
actually been a massacre at Racak, or whether the incident had been
manipulated to push NATO into war-- questions almost completely ignored by
the U.S. media at the time.
Front-page news articles by veteran Yugoslavia correspondents questioning
William Walker's account were published in French newspapers like Le Figaro
("Dark Clouds Over a Massacre," 1/20/99) and Le Monde ("Were the Dead in
Racak Really Massacred in Cold Blood?," 1/21/99). The German daily Berliner
Zeitung reported in March (3/13/99) that several European governments,
including Germany and Italy, were pressing the OSCE to fire William Walker
based on information from OSCE monitors in Kosovo that the Racak bodies "were
not-- as Walker declared-- victims of a Serbian massacre of civilians," but
were mostly KLA fighters killed in battle.
The Sunday Times of London (3/12/00) reported that Walker's team of American
observers was covertly working with the CIA, pursuing a policy intended to
push NATO into war. "European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it
was betrayed by an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable," the
Sunday Times reported.
After the massacre, the European Union hired a Finnish team of forensic
pathologists to investigate the deaths. Their report was kept secret until
now, two years later. The U.S. media is ignoring the story, despite the
report's finding that although people did indeed die at Racak, there is no
evidence of a massacre.
According to the Berliner Zeitung (1/16/01), the Finnish investigators could
not establish that the victims were civilians, whether they were from Racak,
or even exactly where they had been killed. Furthermore, the investigators
found only one body that showed traces of an execution-style killing, and no
evidence at all that the bodies had been mutilated.
The Berliner Zeitung also reports that these findings were completed as early
as June 2000, but that their publication had been blocked by the UN and the
EU.
Except for one brief wire story from United Press International (1/18/01),
not a single U.S. media outlet has run a story on the Finnish team's
findings. News outlets continue to refer to the Racak massacre without
qualification, despite the cloud of uncertainty hanging over the story.
A recent Chicago Tribune report (1/23/01) about the Albanian separatist
militia in southern Serbia speculated that the Serbs might "revert to form
and respond to an Albanian provocation with a Racak-style retaliation." (The
KLA-linked militia, called the UCPMB, are reportedly preparing for a new war
and recently fired on British KFOR troops-- London Guardian, 1/26/01.) The
Tribune made no mention of any questions surrounding the Racak incident.
A recent Philadelphia Inquirer story (1/23/01) about Yugoslavia's
relationship with the war crimes tribunal at The Hague claimed that "Serbs
refuse to accept the world's vision of them as aggressors," and noted that
Yugoslav president Vojislav Kostunica "alleges the killings [at Racak] were
staged to look like a massacre to embarrass Yugoslavia." The Finnish team's
findings about Racak, which prompted Kostunica's recent allegations, went
unmentioned.
An Associated Press article (1/18/01) did elliptically note the new report's
existence, reporting that Kostunica wants to discuss with The Hague "reports
attributed to Finnish pathologists saying there was no evidence of a Serb
massacre" at Racak (1/18/01).
With tensions in southern Serbia mounting and fears of a new Kosovo war
escalating daily, the U.S. media's silence on this story is troubling.
