From: Sandeep Vaidya <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> By Armen Georgian in Red Pepper, April 2001 There were no howls of outrage from world leaders, or press cries for action when the Forensic5cience International Journal published its report on the alleged massacre of Albanian civilians by Serb forces in the Kosovan village of Racak. Yet the Journal's report cast serious doubt on the incident which played a central part in justifying Nato's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in 1999. It could not establish that the victims were civilians, that they were from Racak, or even that they'd been killed there. Published on 15 February, the report by a Finnish EU Forensic Experts Team (EU-FET) was based on autopsies carried out on 40 bodies found at Racak on l6ianuary 1999. The team was commissioned by the EU in October 1998 following international calls to investigate human rights abuses in Kosovo. The Milosevic regime had previously obstructed ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia) investigators, but accepted the EU-mandated team as a compromise. When the bodies were discovered at Racak, EU-FET received an urgent request from the OSCE (Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe), and returned to Kosovo immediately. The apparent massacre at Racak stunned the world. It 'transformed the West's Balkan policy as singular events seldom do', the Washington post editorialised. Many feared mass civilian slaughter. Pressure for action bounced previously reluctant Nato allies into line. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, approving German military participation abroad for the first time since World War Two, averred: 'Racak was the turning point for me.' On 19 March, 1999, President Clinton told the world's press: 'We should remember what happened in the village of Racak, where innocent men, women and children were taken from their homes to a gully, forced to kneel in the dirt, sprayed with gunfire - not because of anything they had done, but because of who they were.' Five days later NATO planes went into action. In the fog of war, such statements were taken at face value but the Finnish report found that only one of the dead was a woman, and one was under 15. Only six suffered single gun shot wounds. Most had multiple wounds coming from many different angles and elevations, as might be expected from victims of a firefight. Only one had been shot 'at close range or contact discharge'. Contrary to claims made at the time by William Walker, the American OSCE chief in Kosovo in 1999, the pathologists found 'no signs of postmortem mutilation'. Crucially, the team were 'unable to confirm the chain of custody, concerning the localisation of the victims at the site of the incident and their transportation to the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Pristina'. Thus, they 'could not confirm that the victims were from Racak'. On the alleged day of the killings, a fierce battle between besieging Serb forces and Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) units was fought around Racak, 'a fortified village with lots of trenches', according to LeFigaro's Renaud Girard. That morning, Serb police had invited journalists to accompany them and, as fighting raged in the nearby woods, Le A4onde's Christophe Chatelet traveled to Racak with OSCE monitors in search of civilian casualties at the alleged time that Serb forces were slaughtering villagers. He found four wounded and was told atone dead. The following day however, the OSCE team discovered up to 18 bodies in the village, and KLA units guided the press to a gully where 22 corpses were laid out. Later that day, William Walker arrived to announce the 'horrendous massacre' to the world. Few reports mentioned that at the time the massacre was supposedly taking place, the Information Press Centre in Pristina was getting reports that 15 KLA fighters had been killed around Racak. Interestingly, the Sunday Times, a paper with close links to British security sources, last year reported claims by Pristina-based European diplomats that William Walker was 'inextricably linked with the CIA'. In their story, intelligence sources alleged that the team led by Walker had been a 'CIA front' helping the KLA with logistical and technical support. Walker had previously been an ambassador to El Salvador in the 1980s, when Washington backed extreme-right wing paramilitaries in that country's civil war. Echoes of the Gulf of Tonkin, the CIA-manipulated story of the 'torpedoing' of two US destroyers that escalated the Vietnam war, are resonant. On 12 August1998, the US Senate Republican Policy Committee had commented: 'Planning fore US-led Nato intervention in Kosovo is largely in place The only missing element seems to be an event-with suitably vivid media coverage - that could make the intervention politically saleable... That Clinton is waiting for a "trigger'.., is increasingly obvious.' The EU-FET team returned to Racak in November1999 and March 2000to conduct further detailed investigations. The 1,400-page result was submitted to the ICTYon21 June 2000 but has never been made public. StiIl, Racak heads the list of Milosevic's ICTY indictments for murder, but while Article 28 refers to '45 unarmed Kosovo Albanians murdered in the village of Racak', Florence Hartman, the spokesperson for the prosecutor in the ICTY case against Milosevic, could not confirm that all the dead were civilians. 'Some are in doubt' she conceded. 'But part of them for sure, maybe most maybe all, were civilians. 'We have established that the dead were not wearing military dress. Is that enough to conclude that they were not fighters? No, it's not enough but we have other information from investigators and other sources, and we have photographs taken on the day and the day after.' The current media silence over Racak is puzzling. Professor Saukko, editor of Forensic Science lnternational, told Red Pepper that he had only received inquiries from Dutch and Yugoslav journalists. According to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR),the failure to question basic assumptions about the event 'bolsters the KLA' and its ongoing campaign to ethnically cleanse Kosovo of non-Albanian minorities. In southern Serbia and Macedonia, the self-styled Liberation Army for Presevo, Medvedja and Bujanovac (UCPMB) are receiving weapons from the KLA and targeting Serbs in a bid to graft the territory on to KFOR-administered Kosovo as a prelude to full independence, and possible unification with Albania. The ghosts of Racak will haunt the Western alliance for years to come. -- Sandeep Vaidya http://www.pucl.org _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
