Since the beginning of the conflict which in 1991 brought to
an end the Second Yugoslavia (1944-1991), the accepted view in Catholic,
Protestant, and Moslem countries has been that the Serbs did it. Whatever would
go wrong in the Balkans, the Serbs had to be responsible. On the other hand, in
countries of the Orthodox faith there was much sympathy for the Serbs, but such
feelings were very effectively controlled by the need not to displease the
bankers in London, Bonn, and Washington: it is not appropriate for poor farmers
to argue politics, or anything else, with those who hold the mortgage to their
homes. Very few voices of sympathy for the Serbs have been heard in the west,
usually charges that the Serbs have been demonized out of ignorance and lack of
historical perspective. Another view, rarer still in the west, is that the
Serbs have been targeted for disinformation, fraud, and frame-up.
Using a minor and avoidable incident as a pretext for
starting a war is a practice as ancient as Rome, in the least. Somehow the
Romans were so devoted to law and legality that they felt the need for a good
excuse every time they disturbed constituted order and started a new war. Such
a pretext was called casus belli. In the United States we are as devoted
to legalism as the Romans were, and we feel very strongly the moral imperative
to have a good casus belli every time we start a new war. For the war of
1898 we used the USS Maine, for WWI we used the Lusitania, and
every police action, invasion or intervention has had some widows and orphans
to save. Occasionally, though, we can't find any innocents to protect, we can't
find even that minor and avoidable incident to respond to, and then someone
must dedicate himself, with great creativity, to the special task of producing
incidents where none exist as yet. For Vietnam we had to use the Tonking Gulf
Incident, in which Vietnamese boats, invisible because inexistent, attacked a
U.S. Navy destroyer. Our ship then fired into the night in self defense, just
in case the blips on the screen which a nervous sailor had seen, represented
actual boats. Was this an act of war, an interference with commerce in the high
seas? Just in case it was, the US government launched a massive bombing
campaign against Vietnam. But that was the 60's. In the 90's a new, higher
morality has grown upon us. No more "dirty tricks" allowed in
Washington. Of course, if our little Balkan allies create little incidents as
pretexts for our getting involved in the Balkan wars, how can we stop them?
Here are some good examples of NATO-Balkan creative collaboration.
The pictures of starving Bosnian Moslem prisoners behind concentration camp barbed wire caused world public opinion to take the side of the Moslems against the Serbs. The images of the Bosnian concentration camp victims were even introduced by the President of the United States as an argument for bombing Yugoslavia in March 1999. The same images were used in "why we fight" NATO propaganda clips, presented on television in slow motion for added emotional impact. Those images were fakes. The death camp prisoners were not prisoners. A television crew, on August 5 , 1992, entered a barbed wire enclosure built years before to protect agricultural equipment, and filmed a group of refugees who had recently arrived at a Bosnian Serb-run refugee transit center in the village of Trnopolje. The refugees were standing outside the barbed wire enclosure. The result was correctly called "one of the key images of the war in former Yugoslavia" (The Independent, 5 August 1993). When the British journal LM published an article by the German writer Thomas Deichman in which he proved that the death camp images were fakes, the television company which had done the job, instead of answering the charges, sued the little magazine which had published the article, asking the court to order LM to destroy all the copies of the issue in question. This is one of the tricks by which in the Free World we achieve a pretty good self-censorship regime. Small publications often refrain from publishing material which, although it may be true, could anyhow land them into court. The Censorship Office, which in the Free World resides in the courts, knows well that even though the journalists may at the end be found innocent, they will have had to spend so much time, money, and energy in their defense from defamation suits, that their ability to do journalism will be seriously affected.
The bombing of the marketplace in Sarajevo on February 5, 1994, in which 68 people died, finally galvanized NATO into action, and an ultimatum was issued to the Bosnian Serbs, which led to NATO air support for Bosnian Moslems and Croats. The Serbs denied responsibility for the marketplace attack. Western nations scoffed at such denials and bombed. United Nations officials claimed they were not positive about the origin of the mortar shell. Lord David Owen, former British Foreign Secretary, writes in Balkan Odyssey, that military reports agreed that it was the Bosnian Muslims who had bombed themselves:
when this highly charged information reached the UN in New York... everything was done... to reduce the chance of a press leak... NATO, having just taken its decision, would also be in disarray if the public perception of the Serbs being responsible for the market-place bomb were suddenly shattered. What was needed was a little news management... I could not allow a cover-up, but equally it was not for me to break the story. (Balkan Odyssey, pp.261-262)
There goes a rare man, an honest Foreign Secretary. He just couldn't tell a lie.
Another bomb hit a marketplace on August 28, 1995, killing
37 people, and a massive NATO air campaign ensued. President Clinton called it
"an appropriate response to the shelling of Sarajevo." David Binder,
reporter for The New York Times, wrote that Assistant Secretary of State
Richard Holbrooke had already promised more intense NATO air strikes: the
marketplace bombing pretext arrived with perfect timing, cleanly and
efficiently. Binder gave four different military sources which challenged the
UN report that blamed the Bosnian Serbs. Among the detailed reasons for
believing that the bomb came from close by or from a nearby roof, not from the
Serb lines, was the shallowness of the crater and the absence of the
characteristic whistling sound that a shell is supposed to make. David Binder's
piece would not be published in The New York Times but made it to the
pages of The Nation on October 2, 1995. The regime press did not talk
much about it. Debate is dangerous. The truth might emerge.
In the village of Racak, Kosovo, 46 Albanians died on January 15, 1999. The
survivors in Racak were certainly victims, they had lost family members.
Certainly we have a natural sympathy for widows and orphans, but just because
the Serbs are demons and the Albanians are angels, should the angelic witnesses
be spared the rigors of a cross-examination, before the devils are drawn and
quartered? On the other hand, shouldn't we leave the investigative job to the
International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague?
Unfortunately, selective enforcement and acceptance of tainted testimony has
turned that court into an International Kangaroo Court, invested with the job
of justifying the assault upon Yugoslavia and all of its nationalities, Serbs,
Montenegrins, Albanians, Romany, Turks, and Moslems. Even though we sorely lack
the legal paraphernalia, bailiffs, black robes, and wigs so essential to the
upholding of justice, in the absence of an impartial court it behooves us to
debate the culpability of the Yugoslavs in the court of public opinion. This
shall be a brief for the defense.
THE EVENTS OF JANUARY 15, 1999
Public opinion in western countries sees the Racak massacre as the straw that broke the camel's back, the camel being the do-nothing attitude of the west towards a new little Hitler who brought death and instability to the Balkans. Thus the Racak massacre would have brought the leaders of the west to realize that the evil dictator in Belgrade must be crushed before he can realize his sick dream of an ethnically cleansed Greater Serbia. Still, a few voices have been heard, which suggest that the Racak massacre was a frame-up. Could it have been a fabrication, created to provide the leaders of NATO, most of them repentant pacifists, reformed socialists, converted communists, and pragmatized environmentalists, with the chance to openly accept and revel in their own primitive instincts, paint their faces, and go play war? Let's examine the evidence.
On Friday morning, January 15, 1999, the western media and OSCE observers were invited to military operations around the village of Racak, in which at the time less than 400 people lived. KLA units were engaged by at least seven police armored vehicles and three army tanks. At 11:30 a.m. the political branch of the KLA announced that the fighting had resulted in deaths on both sides. The Yugoslav gave considerable publicity to the operation on that morning and on the following day, and claimed killing fifteen "terrorists," while different Albanian sources mentioned the loss of seven or eight soldiers. Clearly the KLA was not wiped out in that area, as fighting resumed over the next few days, resulting in Yugoslav casualties. Police withdrew in the afternoon of January 15, carrying out dozens of automatic weapons they claimed to have captured. OSCE observers, some of them Americans, then entered Racak, according to reports in Liberation, Le Monde, and Le Figaro. Throughout the day, the event was treated as a battle, reported upon by Agencie France Presse, Reuters, and Associated Press. At 3:20 p.m. OSCE contacted the Yugoslav army, asking them to cease fire. (Liberation, Jan. 21, 1999)
The next morning newsmen were invited to Racak, now again under KLA control, and were taken to what is described as a sunken path or a gully, at the edge of the village, where they encountered 23 bodies. The story was told --"always by the same two or three witnesses," says Liberation, on January 21-- that on Friday, at about midday, the police entered the houses and took the men out. Reports in the western press agree that some of the victims were tortured or that the bodies were mutilated after execution. Human Rights Watch later collected statements from 14 witnesses. The KLA had an interest in depicting battle deaths as killings. In war, deception is not a vice, it's a virtue. Thus we are not dealing with impartial witnesses. They had just lost their sons or fathers, they had pretty good reasons for hating the Serbs, and it would have been their patriotic duty to lie about some details of those deaths if asked to do so by KLA officers. Besides, Albanians who do not collaborate with the KLA do get in trouble, while those who are accused of opposing the KLA are normally killed. Thus those witnesses would have had excellent reasons for lying and ought to be subjected to cross-examination.
It is odd that only 14 witnesses out of hundreds of survivors to the massacre would be produced. There were many investigators on the scene. Did they not have the time to tape or videotape all of the witnesses? What else was there for them to do, except collect statements? OSCE had dozens of observers available and could have collected hundreds of statements in a few hours, when memories were still fresh, had OSCE chosen to do so. It would have been essential to take statements from the victims before the Serbs could exert pressure upon them. To have 300 depositions on tape would have made it very difficult for the Serbs to terrorize everyone into giving favorable accounts. Once you give a taped testimony it is not easy to recant or to "forget". Giving a taped statement also protects one from "disappearing". Even if they kill you, your taped testimony remains and it can be used at a trial. This would make it impractical to disappear any witnesses.
Human Rights Watch could have had only one representative in Racak on Saturday, who could have been unable to pursue the matter over the next few days because of sickness. It's quite possible. However, if OSCE was unable to secure more than 14 witnesses, there could be only one explanation: the need to limit the number of witnesses in order to avoid contradictions.
The only serious case for the prosecution available at present consists of two Human Rights Watch papers, both part of the 1999 World Report : a brief document entitled Yugoslav Forces Guilty of War Crimes in Racak, Kosovo , dated January 29, 1999, and a longer document, undated, called Yugoslav Government War Crimes in Racak. I will refer to them as HRW1 and HRW2, respectively. The organization Human Rights Watch has done for many years very important work, bringing to the attention of the world human rights violations and atrocities, all of it done with great impartiality. In this Kosovo conflict they have been very critical of all sides. However, the most honest prosecutor can make mistakes, and we can't exclude the possibility that in this case Human Rights Watch may have been fooled by its 14 witnesses. The claim is made, in HRW1, that "once the KLA retreated, government forces.... rounded up, tortured, and then apparently executed the twenty-three ethnic Albanians on a hill outside of the village."
CONTRADICTIONS
The first question is how and why would the police have calmly led the men to the edge of the village and into open ground, even though they were under KLA fire throughout the operation, from the high ground above the village? Why did they not kill the Albanians inside the village, where the police had protection from KLA fire and from the prying eyes of the OSCE observers, who were still watching the village from a nearby hill? Why were the bodies not discovered on Friday afternoon either by villagers, or by KLA men, or by the OSCE observers who entered the village when the Yugoslavs left? The French journalist who entered Racak on Friday afternoon did not see any bodies. An APTV team arrived at 10 a.m., filmed the battle from a nearby hill, and later entered the village behind an armored vehicle. Their film shows the police advancing in Racak under heavy fire. (Liberation, Jan 21) The APTV people were there for the entire battle, but they did not see any bodies.
The place where the 23 bodies were found is on the edge of the village. The survivors said that some of the Serbs were singing while they did the killing or the torturing. (Le Monde, January 22, 1999) If the crime took place so close to the survivors that they could hear the killers sing, they must have also heard gunfire. If they take away your husband and then you hear bursts of automatic fire, maybe you wait a while, but then you crawl to the window, peek out, and if the enemies are not in sight, you start frantically looking for him, hoping to find him only wounded. You run all around the village, asking your neighbors what have they seen, what have they heard. You run to the edge of the village, calling. You run to a high place, from where you can have a good view of the area --it's winter, there are no leaves on the trees. One would expect to see distraught women searching for their men. Instead, villagers are seen calmly talking with American OSCE observers. (Le Figaro, January 22, 1999) A French journalist enters the village at 4:30 and again at 6 p.m. No one runs up to him, crying: "Our men have disappeared, did you see the Serbs taking them from the village? Has anyone seen them being driven away? If anyone has seen them, then they may still be alive, inshallah, God willing." No, the women of Racak did not appear to be worried at all. According to HRW2, "All of them believed that the police had only arrested their male relatives and taken them away to the police station in Stimlje. It was only the next day when they realized that the twenty-three men had been killed... During the night, the remaining men of the village searched for the wounded, still thinking that the twenty-three men were in the Stimlje police station." They were so certain their men were in Stimlje that they did not make inquiries with the newsmen who entered the village. Neither did they ask the OSCE observers to go to Stimlje and make sure their men were not mistreated. Such tranquillity, such confidence seems odd, but it gets real weird when you read in HRW2:
The boy told Human Rights Watch, "Two or three policeman beat them with wooden sticks. One was kicking them in the face with his boots. The others were just watching. It was terrible. The men were screaming, and their heads were covered with blood. A policeman locked me in the cellar with the women, but I could hear screaming for the next half an hour..." One young woman said that the police stayed on the hill singing songs and calling her relative by name in the Albanian language ("Aziz, come here to see your dead relatives!")... Some time around 1:00 p.m. the police led the twenty-three men out of Osmani's yard. One witness, S. A., was hidden at that time behind a compound wall fifty meters from the Osmani house. He told Human Rights Watch that he heard the police leading the detained men through the Racak streets. He said: "I heard the police ask them [the men] where is the headquarters of our army [the KLA], and they answered where it was. Then they went together toward the power station in the direction of our army. I think it was maybe 3:00 p.m. when I heard shooting, but I did not know that they were killed.
Strangely enough, the women were not worried. They did not bother to run towards the power station, hoping and praying not to find fathers, husbands, and sons. The statement of the witness S.A. implies that there was no shooting between 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., and contradicts the statements of western journalists, who said that the Serbs were under Albanian fire throughout the day. All this horror, all this loud, murderous brutality, all this beating and screaming, is supposed to have taken place while newsmen were in the village and while OSCE observers, all invited to the show by the police, were on a hill, presumably armed with binoculars, video cameras, disk recorders, and directional microphones. Oddly enough, not one of them saw or heard anything that fit with the stories reported by Human Rights Watch . HRW2 says that, according to 11 different witnesses, the police entered Racak at 7 a.m., and that by 9 a.m. they had control of the village:
groups of about thirty policemen each were entering Racak from different directions beginning around 7:00 a.m. By 9:00 a.m., most of them had gathered in the village center near the mosque. These policemen also wore blue uniforms but they had masks on their faces with slits for their eyes and mouth, and they wore helmets. Some of them had "rocket propelled grenades" strapped to their backs. These police searched house by house, witnesses said, looking for people and weapons.
This, HRW2 says, contradicts the Serb claim that they encountered resistance for four hours before they could enter the village. Whom should we believe? Here is the version of events as given by APTV journalists to Le Monde :
the morning of the attack, a police source informs APTV: "Come to Racak, something is happening." At 10 a.m., the team is on the spot, by the side of the police officers; they videotape first from the hill overlooking the village, then from the streets behind an armored vehicle... They advance along the streets under fire by the Kosovo Liberation Army soldiers, positioned in the woods which dominate the village. Such exchange of fire will last throughout the action, with more or less intensity. Most of the fighting took place in the woods. (Le Monde , January 22, 1999)
The French journalist who was in Racak in the afternoon, saw the American OSCE observers in the village at 4:30 p.m. and at 6 p.m. They had been speaking to villagers, but they made no mention to the journalist of the disappearance of 23 villagers. Maybe they did not understand Albanian, although it is difficult to believe that the three OSCE teams did not have with them a single interpreter, or an English-Albanian dictionary. In the absence of a dictionary, it is difficult to believe that the women could not have communicated, with gestures, the story of the arrest of the men of Racak. Sounds very odd. So the explanation is offered that the villagers talking to OSCE were not the women whose men were taken away. Those women could not talk to the journalist or to the observers because the Serbs had locked them in a basement. (HRW2) If they take your father away, and then you hear gunfire, and then silence, would you not after a while try to break down the door? Would you not be banging on the door, crying for help? Massacre victims sometimes survive and can be saved, if you get there in time. None of the women thought of that? None of the women in the basement thought that her father or husband might be bleeding to death, a minute away from the house? Maybe some of the women were paralyzed with fear, from midday until after 6 p.m., when the OSCE people were still seen in Racak. But do they expect us to believe that all of the women and teenagers quietly sat in the locked basement for hours after all shooting stopped? Then we find that at least six people were seen talking to OSCE observers. (Le Figaro, January 22, 1999) So who were these six strange villagers? The men have just been dragged away, the sounds of a possible execution were heard from the edge of the village, the women and children are locked up in the basement, and these six villagers are calmly conversing with the OSCE people. As is the case in normal frame-ups, every explanation raises more questions and creates more contradictions. Now we have an admission: OSCE knew of the disappearances on Friday. Someone, somewhere--but not in Racak-- told some OSCE official that a couple of dozen men had gone missing. Somehow the news got to OSCE observers in the Racak area, who somehow made some kind of inquiries, could not find the missing men, and since it was getting dark, somehow or other got back to the hotel. The big question is, "if the villagers really informed the observers that 24 men had been taken away, why does OSCE not say where they got that information nor who were those observers and why does it insist that none of its teams were in the village on that famous evening?" (Liberation, January 21, 1999)
Anyhow, OSCE knew. Could OSCE have gotten the information from some other source, besides the women of Racak? Certainly. KLA soldiers in the hills above the village could have watched the massacre and could have radioed in the report. An American spy satellite, a European spy satellite, a NATO drone, or an American U2 could have watched the battle and could have provided detailed intelligence on the massacre and the location of the bodies. The witness S.A., who was hiding behind the wall, could have told OSCE. The problem remains the same, and every avenue we take brings us against a solid wall of contradictions: if OSCE knew of the arrests, they had to know that the Yugoslavs had not brought out prisoners, they had to know of the massacre, and had to know of the approximate location of the bodies. According to Liberation of January 21,
a journalist with AFP [Agencie France Presse] met a foreign observer Saturday morning in Racak who confidentially told him that he had entered the village in the evening. It was 5 p.m. Fighting had stopped, Serb forces had withdrawn, and the inhabitants were returning to the village... The observer, does not mention seeing or hearing anything special, but prefers to remain anonymous.
Everyone involved is acting in a very odd manner. The women of Racak are not acting as you would expect people who had gone through the experience they recounted the next day. The OSCE observers are not acting as you would expect normal people to act when told that 23 men have been brutally beaten, and taken uphill, whence firing was heard. Many OSCE people had experience in law enforcement, and who does not know that often the criminal returns to the scene of the crime to try to repair some error? There was reason for fearing that the Serbs might be back at dawn to clean up the scene of the crime and alter the evidence. You would have expected OSCE observers to stay in the village overnight, sleeping in a hayloft, protecting the crime scene. If the observers, poor dears, were really too delicate for camping out in an Albanian village, you would have expected them to return before dawn, to investigate the disappearance and most importantly to record the scene of what clearly looked like a crime and was soon to be characterized as an "unspeakable atrocity" by Ambassador Walker. Instead, neither did the Yugoslavs rush to Racak at dawn, to alter the evidence, nor did the OSCE people hasten there to preserve the crime scene. It appears that neither the criminals nor the police had any worries at all, they slept soundly, they slept late. The OSCE policemen arrived hours after dawn, while the Serb criminals never showed up. Very odd. OSCE observers acted the way one would have expected them to act if they had orders to give the KLA men sufficient time to rearrange the scene of the crime, search the entire battle area for bodies, move them close to the village, and arrange them in the most appropriate positions, at the most convenient locations. When OSCE observers and newsmen finally arrived, there was no need to organize a search, everything was ready, and they were led by KLA men directly to the sunken path or gully, at the edge of the village, where 23 bodies laid.
Why did OSCE claim, as late as January 20, that its observers were not in Racak in the afternoon and evening of January 15? (Liberation, January 21, 1999) I suppose the answer will be that the OSCE spokespersons had not familiarized themselves with all the details as yet. Fine, but then why make the contorted , detailed claim that they had received a report of the disappearance on Friday from a source other than their own observers on the spot? (Liberation, January 21, 1999) Are we to believe that any member of OSCE in Pristina, let alone a spokesperson, could be unaware of the fact that OSCE had three cars at Racak on Friday, with presumably at least six observers? Racak was the central event, there was nothing else to talk about on January 16th. OSCE directors acted as if their main concern was to protect their people in Racak from being questioned. Is OSCE hiding something? Only cross-examination of OSCE officials could resolve this, but OSCE is not about to submit to cross-examination: OSCE is not on trial, the Serbs are, and OSCE will provide judge, jury, and prosecutor.
It is odd that the Yugoslavs, who believed that the US was seeking a casus belli--an opportunity to start a war--would deliver it to them, and even invite OSCE observers to the show. According to the Albanian witnesses on whose testimony is based OSCE's assessment, the show involved police yelling and taunting, while the prisoners were beaten, tortured, and shot, all in the open. The screaming of the prisoners was heard by the people locked in the basement. If it had happened quickly, or inside the houses, the massacre story would have been credible. But to have long beatings, all outdoors, and a death march of the 23 detained men from Osmani's house to the gully, all of which took more than two hours, without newsmen and OSCE observers taking notice, stretches credulity.
True, such an event could not be excluded. It could have happened, theoretically, if the Yugoslavs had had a highly sophisticated command and control situation, making sure that the screaming, beating and killing all took place outside the line of sight and out of hearing of newsmen and observers, who were all at different places. Had the Yugoslavs had such mastery of the situation, they would have undertaken the obvious next steps: to drop weapons at their victims' side, put some extra clips in their back pockets, and call in the waiting newsmen. Nothing of the sort was done. On the contrary, the Yugoslavs showed their total lack of sophistication when they abandoned the crime scene to their enemies. It is as if after the Waco massacre, the federal authorities had just abandoned the scene to journalists, human right activists, and surviving Branch Davidians. On the contrary, the Davidians' lawyers were never able to inspect the scene for evidence in their favor and all that remained of the whole Branch Davidian village was promptly bulldozed.
Since much of the fighting took place in the woods and the high ground above the village where the KLA were entrenched, should we not expect to find Albanian casualties up in those hills? According to Le Monde of January 21, and Liberation of January 21, the battle involved shelling, by Yugoslav army tanks, which lasted all morning and was answered by KLA automatic fire and mortars. The fighting spread to the nearby villages of Belince, Malopoljce, and Petrovo. Are we to believe that there were no casualties in the whole operation except for the unfortunate villagers of Racak? Are we supposed to believe that Yugoslav artillery caused no victims over the course of one morning of shelling? Another oddity is the fact that there was so "little blood" and "just a few empty cartridges"(Le Monde, Jan. 22 and Le Figaro, Jan. 22) at the site of the massacre-- where President Clinton says these poor 23 men were "sprayed with gunfire". (Reuters, March 19, 1999) We ought to have 23 cartridges at the scene had we stuck to the original tale of villagers dispatched with a shot to the head. But if you want to make sure that there are no survivors, no witnesses, when you open up on 23 people with automatic fire, you must waste a lot of ammo, which leaves spent shells on the ground. If there are only a few spent shells on the ground, it means that the officers in charge of the operation ordered their removal. Thus they were aware they had a problem now, a problem which required fixing. Are we really expected to believe that the officers thought of ordering the empty shells to be picked up, but that they did not think of dropping a few weapons on the ground and call in the newsmen? Very odd. Besides, are these Serb policemen so incompetent that they cannot even pick up all of the spent ammo? All this seems even stranger if you remember that these officers were not oblivious to the value of the media in this war; after all it was the police who had called in the newsmen.
Everyone involved in this drama is acting out of character. Villagers, widows, orphans, OSCE observers, OSCE officials, and Yugoslav cops are all behaving in the oddest manner possible, doing things which would be laughed off the script of a massacre movie. But if you change one factor in the whole story, if you accept the idea that the battle of Racak took place just as the APTV reels show, then everything falls into place and all contradictions are explained. There was a battle, involving KLA fighters against tanks and artillery, the KLA men fought and lost, and some non-combatants were killed in error--or on purpose, which to some extent or other happens whenever armed men meet. There was no death march, there was no mass execution, the 23 men were killed over the course of the battle, the bodies were carried to the gully during the night or at the first light, but the KLA did not collect and drop enough empty cartridges at the scene of the crime. (Mistake!) Out of about 300 survivors, 14 were questioned and they made up stories, just as they were supposed to do. They embellished their stories too much, so that the details did not fit well anymore, just as they do not fit well in normal frame-ups.
On Friday, January 15th, the OSCE observers present in Racak did not see what did not happen, and acted accordingly. The next morning everyone again acted the way you would have expected normal people to act under those circumstances. The KLA did what was in their interest. The surviving villagers followed orders. A massacre, the opportunity for good photographs and dramatic reports was offered to newsman. The newsmen drunk it up. The OSCE officials were quite pleased to have caught the Serbs red-handed and thought it was not their job to question or challenge the claims of their KLA allies. The OSCE observers, who knew otherwise, decided to keep their jobs and their battle pay by keeping their mouths shut. The Yugoslavs were so furious about being hoodwinked that instead of calmly accusing Ambassador Walker of fraud they decided to expel him. Yes, the world does still make sense.
The very few newsmen present in Racak on the 15th of January, on Friday, were minor figures of the press corps in Pristina. They were foot soldiers, doing dangerous work in flack jackets. The next day the bigwigs of the press arrived in convoy, saw the KLA show, fell for it, and rent their clothes in indignation. That Saturday trip to Racak created the Official Kosovo Truth for the Free World. An important newsman exclaimed, when I asked him about contradictions in the massacre story, "The Serbs did it! How do I know? I was there! I saw it!" He had missed the real story, on Friday, and had gone on the guided tour on Saturday.
DELIVERING THE WAR
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... Even though there was footage available, shot by APTV, showing the police coming under heavy fire in Racak on January 15, (Liberation, January 21, 1999) in the US media we did not learn of a battle for Racak, we just heard of a "killing spree" resulting in "carnage" which was discovered on Saturday morning by OSCE observers and journalists "after having been barred from the site by Serbian police the previous day." (The Sunday Gazette, Schenectady, NY, January 17) There was an obvious effort to hide the fact that there had been a battle for control of Racak on January 15. It is possible that this may have been a massacre, but before impartial, balanced people accept it, the discrepancies should be clarified. The oddest thing is that, with rare exceptions, such questions were not entertained in the U.S. media. Certainly no editorial pressure to solve the problem of evidentiary conflict ever developed, certainly no debate was ever allowed in American media. It was as if the " Ministry of Truth", the "Minitrue," of which we read in Orwell's 1984 had decided that investigation of the Racak massacre would be inappropriate. Conspiracy? Instructions from Washington? It's much simpler: the media have as strong an interest in preventing war as the legal profession has in preventing litigation.
In an August 12, 1998 analysis by the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee we read that
planning for a U.S.-led NATO intervention in Kosovo is now largely in place.... The only missing element seems to be an event - with suitably vivid media coverage - that would make the intervention politically salable, in the same way that a dithering Administration finally decided on intervention in Bosnia in 1995 after a series of 'Serb mortar attacks' took the lives of dozens of civilians - attacks which, upon closer examination, may in fact have been the work of the Muslim regime in Sarajevo, the main beneficiary of the intervention.
Along those lines, Le Monde of January 22, 1999 asks, "Isn't the Racak massacre too perfect?", while Le Figaro of January 22, 1999, asks whether "maybe by night the KLA has assembled the bodies... in order to present this event as a cold-blooded massacre?... Maybe the KLA has thus wisely turned its military defeat into a political victory."
The day after the Racak incident, a spin effort was organized to deliver the war. The AP wire published on January 17 in The Sunday Gazette of Schenectady, NY, under the title "Killing spree in Kosovo--45 ethnic Albanians are found shot or mutilated in a gully" went as follows:
Verifiers and journalists came across the carnage Saturday morning in Racak... Some of the dead had their eyes gouged out or head smashed in, and one man lay decapitated in the courtyard of his compound... Many had been shot at close range. ...Visibly upset and his voice shaking after visiting the site, the U.S. head of the Kosovo monitoring mission called it a massacre, 'an unspeakable atrocity,' and 'a crime very much against humanity'." USA Today wrote on January 18, "By the time... Americans reached this remote village, the killing was complete. As [OSCE] orange vehicles... idled just a mile or two away, Serbian paramilitaries had hunted down and shot at least 45 ethnic Albanian peasants. Most were dispatched with a single bullet to the head from inches away. At least two of the dead... had been decapitated. Another corpse had no ears. One had no eyes.
Fake transcripts of fake telephone intercepts of conversations between a police general and a Yugoslav official were leaked to The Washington Post. The transcripts suggest that the Serbs had planned the killings of the men of Racak as well as the cover-up. An absurd movie plot, but an excellent little piece of propaganda. When police decide to get rough with a prisoner, they do not call in the TV crews to watch. It is quite common for armed men in combat to lose control and kill prisoners, but it is not believable that a government may order a massacre, invite in the TV crews and international observers, and forget to drop guns by the side of its victims. Was it not enough to accuse the Serbs of the killing? No, they had to add premeditation. Any charge, no matter how ridiculous, is useful to the organizers of the daily newscast, modern version of the "Two Minute Hate" of Orwell. There was only one question, to quote George Orwell again: "Was it possible that they could swallow that...? Yes, they swallowed it." Indeed, Human Rights Watch reported: "The evidence suggests that government forces had direct orders to kill village inhabitants over the age of fifteen." (HRW1)
Western statesmen flocked to the TV cameras in shock and indignation. A lovely example were the words of British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, who spoke as follows on the BBC: "This atrocity is appalling... deeply shocked and distressed... it plainly was not a battle, they were shot in the head at close range. Our observers saw absolutely no evidence of fighting." We have here all the classical signs of a poorly planned frame-up. Should we expect any heads to roll, were we to find that His Excellency lied a little? Of course not. Prosecutors are not prosecuted when they are caught red-handed in a frame-up. The situation reminds me of the Attica massacre, in New York State, where in the 1970's the Attica prison was seized by convicts, who were demanding better dying conditions and showers. They seized a couple of dozen guards and tried to negotiate with authorities. Nelson Rockefeller, Governor of New York State, retook the prison and explained that the order to attack had been given when the prisoners cut the throats of a number of guards in the prison yard. There was no reason to disbelieve the good Governor, until a doctor, who had done the autopsies, reported that all the dead guards had been shot. None of the guards had suffered knife wounds, and the convicts had no firearms. Did the governor resign in a storm of protest? Of course not, nobody noticed, and Rockefeller went on to be Vice-President of the United States under Ford, one misstep away from the Presidency.
Back to the current frame-up. An autopsy report, signed by forensic pathologists from Yugoslavia and Belarus on January 30th, limited itself to "the facts": there were no mutilations, no smashing of heads, there were no signs of beatings, no evidence of torture or of executions with shots to the head, but there was evidence that most of the dead had been involved in combat. It is odd that an autopsy in so flagrant a conflict with the official story would not be challenged by OSCE, or by the dissenting pathologists. If the pathologists from Yugoslavia and Belarus had falsified something or had ignored some important detail, they should have been challenged and sharply criticized. Instead, little or no mention of the first autopsy was seen in the U.S. press. According to Dr. Vladimir Kuzmikov, pathologist from Belarus, as reported in Belgrade's Politika, dated March 22,1999, the doctors sent in by the European Union did not challenge his conclusions, and said they would sign the report later, after a few more tests. Was this a clever ploy chosen for avoiding a debate between forensic doctors? Debate can be dangerous, two people get on the podium and get equal time: the truth might come out. Instead of challenging the first forensic report, the European Union's doctors wrote a new report which was kept secret until March 17 when it was needed as casus belli for starting the war. NATO's "Ministry of Truth" decided that the original autopsy report should not exist. The best way to kill it was not to challenge it. Thus it was done. The original report was disappeared by refusing to mention it, and now only the European Union autopsy exists, for readers and viewers of the Free World.
The new autopsy report, lively, full of engaging flights of fantasy , and oh so very "independent" --i.e. paid by NATO countries--was such an essential part of NATO's preparations for war, that it was decided to deliver a preview, in the form of a piece that appeared in The Washington Post on March 17,1999:
An independent forensic report into the killings of 40 ethnic Albanians in the Kosovo village of Racak in January has concluded that the victims were unarmed civilians executed in an organized massacre, some of them forced to kneel before being sprayed with bullets, according to Western sources familiar with the report... Although the bodies of some other victims in the village were moved into homes or a mosque before international observers arrived, the forensic experts were able to determine where all but four of the 40 victims had died. From the pattern of the bullet wounds on their bodies and other evidence - such as their civilian clothing and possessions - the team found no reason to conclude they were killed accidentally or were members of the Kosovo Liberation Army, said the sources, who asked not to be identified. Western officials say the team found that the angle of the bullet wounds in the victims' bodies was consistent with a scenario in which some of them were forced to kneel before being sprayed with gunfire from automatic weapons. This "spray pattern" finding is among the sensitive details that officials said may be withheld at Wednesday's news conference. Wounds on the bodies of some other victims evidently suggest they were shot while running away...
A magnificent example of forensic fantasy. "Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary. This poor fellow was shot by a 6'2" bearded man in his thirties, recently returned from India, who had eaten fried chicken for lunch and owns a long-haired brown dog, most probably an elderly Irish setter..." Even though some of the horrid details were later described as "speculation", the corrections were not heard throughout the world. What was heard and remembered was the image of the poor guys running--don't guerrillas ever run?--and shot down or made to kneel before they were shot. Should anyone have missed the story, President Clinton piously led the nation into prayer with the following words: "We should remember what happened in the village of Racak back in January, innocent men, women and children 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." (Reuters, March 19, 1999) Please notice how the "shot in the head at close range" tale of Foreign Secretary Cook just disappeared from NATO's propaganda and was never heard of again, replaced by the much more evocative image of the kneeling victims sprayed by automatic fire.
Quoting again The Washington Post, "Because of the extreme sensitivity of the case, leaders of the European Union, which sponsored the probe, have asked the forensic team to withhold some of its most potentially inflammatory findings when its members appear at a news conference Wednesday, officials said." Remarkable is here the pious hypocrisy of NATO's spin doctors who reveal some made-up "shocking details" but ask their forensic visionaries not to discuss them: "Doctor, please do not mention it, for God's sake. It might hurt the chances for the peace agreement we so fervently desire." The good pathologists are entirely out of the loop, they do not suffer the embarrassment of having to mouth the fabrications of the spin doctors. The story is delivered by the Ministry of Truth (Orwell's "Minitrue") to the press, and from there, after appropriate digestion, the vile fantasy is delivered to the "ignorant masses" of television watchers, for whose intelligence the spin doctors of "Minitrue" have such contempt. The propaganda manure is trundled off and spread over the great fields of cabbages, extending far beyond the horizon, each cabbage the head of a TV viewer, each head growing and swelling, under the life-giving rays of television, the sun of the media universe. Thus is shaped public opinion.
The final argument regarding Racak could be the sanity of the Yugoslavs. If they are insane, I have no argument. But if they are not, why would they accept that an autopsy be performed by a team paid by NATO countries, if they had anything to hide? They certainly did not have to allow it. Would the US government have allowed the European Union or the United Nations to run the autopsy of the victims of the 1992 Waco massacre, where some eighty people, thirty of them children, died suffocated, burned, or crushed by tanks? Had the Yugoslavs been blessed with a normal dose of suspiciousness and xenophobia instead of an extra dose of naivete and trust in the fairness of their traditional allies, the Americans, the British, and the French, they would have accepted only pathologists from neutral or friendly countries. Neutral forensic experts would not have had the gall of claiming to be able to tell with a high degree of certainty that the 23 people in the gully had been shot there, after the bodies had been moved more than once, and would have mentioned the scarcity of spent shells at the site. Neutrals would not have dared to say that there was no reason to believe that the victims were guerrillas. Neutrals would not have dared to say that this was most probably an execution of prisoners. Neutrals would have mentioned that a serious battle had taken place in that area on that day and that KLA casualties had been mentioned by KLA spokespeople. Neutrals would not have introduced the possibility that the Yugoslavs might have tampered with the bodies, without mentioning the opportunity that the KLA and OSCE had of rearranging the bodies during the evening, night, and early morning, before the newsmen were led to the bodies, as well as the opportunity that the KLA had of tampering with the bodies on Saturday and Sunday. Neutrals would not have dared to omit the powder test that tells you whether the victim has used firearms. Neutrals would have vehemently protested if important people, even the President of the United States, had decided to use a fraudulent rendition of their report to whip up hysteria and anti-Serb hatred.
The Racak massacre quickly and efficiently achieved its purpose of rousing the NATO posse into a paroxysm of moral indignation. A peace conference was called in Rambouillet, at which Yugoslavia was delivered an ultimatum: if it refuses to permit the occupation of Kosovo or of any other part of the country which NATO may choose to occupy, Yugoslavia will be attacked. That was an odd "peace conference". Yugoslavs draw a parallel between Munich in 1938 and Rambouillet in 1999. The Czechs signed. The Yugoslavs chose not to sign.
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"No Massacre in Racak " Says Belarus Forensic Expert Dr Kuzmicov: "There Were No Shots in the Head, No Torture, No Massacre"
Belgrade daily Politika, March 22, 1999 by Borko Gvozdenovic
There was no massacre in Racak, stated yesterday Belarus forensic expert Vladimir Kuzmicov in a telephone conversation. He is very well informed with the event that took place in this Kosovo-Metohia village, which head of OSCE Verification Mission William Walker had named a massacre. Dr. Kuzmikov said, "We have investigated the cause of death, how they died, the distance from which they were shot, and what weapons were used. We wrote down everything in Serbian, Russian and English and nobody had any remarks. We and the Yugoslavs signed while the Finns said they would sign it after some additional tests..." Dr Kuzmicov said that they had worn several pants and warm clothes. They also had lots of cigarettes and some objects which suggested they had lived in cold and hard conditions. This clearly implies they were not civilians. There were no shots in the heads. Neither slitting of throats. Also, there are no grounds for the assertions they had been tortured. There had been no massacre, concluded Dr Kuzmicov.