Račak massacre


The Račak massacre or Račak operation was the mass killing of 45 Kosovo Albanians that took place in the village of Račak in central Kosovo in January 1999. The massacre was prompted by the presence of Albanian separatist activity in the region, and perpetrated by Serbian security forces. The Serbian government refused to let a war crimes prosecutor visit the site, and maintained that the casualties were all members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army killed in combat with state security forces.
The killings were investigated by two separate forensic teams, the first a joint Yugoslav–Belarusian team and the second an external Finnish team representing the EU. The first team's report, which was commissioned by the Yugoslav government, concluded that those killed, who included a woman and 12-year-old child, were all separatist guerrillas and not civilians. The findings of the second team, however, sharply contradicted the Yugoslav investigation's report, determining that the deaths constituted unarmed citizen killings. The lead Finnish investigator, anthropology expert Dr. Helena Ranta, called it a "crime against humanity", though refusing as a scientist to directly label it a massacre or assign blame to any specific party. Many of the details of the Finnish team's findings were left undisclosed for two years, for fear that it would negatively impact tribunal proceedings in the Netherlands, seeking to punish Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević for alleged war crimes.
At the time, reporting of the incident varied from publication to publication and country to country. Media outlets covering it more definitively described the event at Račak as a gruesome terrorist atrocity by a repressive Serbian government.
Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, condemned the massacre as a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder, and the administration launched a "propaganda blitz" in order to convince the American people that intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary. Public support for intervention among Americans remained at only about 50%, even after the extensive media attention of Račak, denoting that war with Yugoslavia would be significantly less popular than previous conflicts and interventions the US undertook in its recent history.
Regardless, the actions taken and bloodshed at Račak represented a "turning point in the war", drawing sympathy from several nations worldwide, and ultimately played a major role in NATO's decision to mount an organized military operation known as Operation Noble Anvil against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO's involvement in the Kosovo conflict in the months postdating the Račak incident altogether lasted 78 days and consisted of a series of tactical airstrikes against critical targets of military or strategic import. The bombardments led to possibly over 1000 Yugoslavian security forces deaths, several hundred civilian collateral deaths, billions of dollars worth of public and private-sector damage to infrastructure, the deterioration of Serbian leverage in Kosovo, and a mass withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from the region.
A memorial exists to the victims of the massacre at Račak. Kosovo annually holds a ceremony to honour the victims of the massacre.

Background

Račak is a small Albanian-inhabited village in the Štimlje municipality of southern Kosovo. By 1998 it had become the scene of activity by the Albanian separatist organization Kosovo Liberation Army. It had a population of around 2,000 people prior to the displacement of most of its inhabitants during Yugoslav military activity in the summer of 1998. By January 1999, around 350 people were reported by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe to be living in the village. The KLA was highly active in the region and almost certainly had a presence in Račak itself, with a base near a local power plant.
On 8 and 10 January, the KLA mounted attacks on Serbian police posts in the neighboring municipalities of Suva Reka and Uroševac, killing four Serbian policemen. In response, Yugoslav security forces established a security cordon in the immediate area of the attacks and around Račak and its neighboring communities.

Reports

On 15 January, reports were received by the Kosovo Verification Mission, an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, of civilians being killed in Račak. KVM monitors attempted to gain access to the area but were refused permission by security forces despite strong protests. Instead, they watched the fighting from a nearby hill. They later gained access to the village, where they found one dead man and a number of injured people and received reports of other deaths and of people being taken away by the Serbian security forces. They were denied permission to interview the villagers or explore the area around the village.
The monitors finally gained access to the surrounding area on 16 January. Accompanied by a number of foreign journalists and members of the European Union's Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission, they found a total of 40 bodies in and around the village. Another five bodies had allegedly been removed by family members. In all, 45 were reported killed, including a 12-year-old boy and three women. All had been shot and the KVM team reported that it found several bodies decapitated. KVM head William Walker later described what he had seen:
Walker immediately condemned what he labelled "an unspeakable atrocity" which was "a crime very much against humanity". He told the party of journalists accompanying him: "I do not hesitate to accuse the government security forces. We want to know who gave the orders, and who carried them out. I will insist that justice will be done. They certainly didn't deserve to die in circumstances like this."
The journalists also provided first-hand accounts of the discovery of the bodies. One of them, the BBC's reporter Jacky Rowland, reported that the dead "were all ordinary men; farmers, labourers, villagers. They had all been shot in the head." The dead were aged from 14 to 99 years old. ITN's correspondent Bill Neely was also present and described how other KVM monitors reacted at the scene: "A Swedish monitor notes that the dead are all in civilian clothes and unarmed and that there are no signs of a battle... After working for two hours one monitor, a London police officer, tells me he believes many of the victims have been shot at close range."
Two days later, on 18 January, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Louise Arbour, attempted to enter Kosovo to investigate the killings but was refused access by Serbian authorities. On the same day, heavily armed Serbian police entered Račak under fire from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Pristina to await a forensic examination.
A joint Yugoslavian-Belarusian team of pathologists conducted post-mortems at the end of January. A Finnish forensic team working for the European Union subsequently conducted a second post-mortem, which was more detailed but less contemporaneous than the first. The bodies were finally released to the families and buried on 10 February.

Investigations

The killings at Račak became the focus of an investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In its indictment of Slobodan Milošević and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials, the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor stated that:
Eyewitness reports from the surviving villagers unanimously supported the account of a massacre. The British journalist Julius Strauss, writing for the Daily Telegraph, described how he had "spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Račak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serbian sources who spoke privately and at some risk." According to the survivors that he interviewed, "a small group of men dressed all in black and wearing gloves and balaclavas... co-ordinated the attack on the village and the subsequent executions." Men had been separated from women and children before being led away to be executed. One survivor told him that "some of the Serbs were in blue, some in black. The men in black appeared to be in control and wore balaclavas over their heads. Some had uniforms with insignia which included a Serbian flag; some had none. They carried automatic guns and, as we were led up the hill, both units started shooting us." Strauss speculated that the men had been from the Specijalna Antiteroristička Jedinica, the Serbian Interior Ministry's elite anti-terrorist unit. Some eyewitnesses told reporters that "Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims, and the six-hour orgy of violence ended with a nationalist song."
The Serbian government rejected this version of events. On the day after the killings, the Serbian Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that its police units had come under fire from "ethnic Albanian terrorist groups... on routes leading to Račak village in the Stimlje municipality." In the subsequent counter-attack "several dozen terrorists were killed in the clashes with the police. Most of them were in uniforms bearing the insignia of the ethnic Albanian terrorist organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army."
They received some support from the French newspapers Le Figaro and Le Monde, which suggested that the KLA could have fabricated evidence. A film crew working for the Associated Press accompanied the Serbian forces in Račak for part of 15 January. Two French journalists from the Agence France Press and Le Figaro interviewed the cameramen and saw at least some of the footage, from which they concluded that it was possible that the KLA could have staged the massacre, and that "only a credible international inquiry would make it possible to resolve those doubts." According to the paper,
Another French journalist writing for Le Monde, Christophe Chatelot, gave an account from the perspective of the two AP journalists:
The Serbian President, Milan Milutinović, accused the KVM head William Walker of fabricating the killings "by securing the co-operation of his protegés in the Kosovo Liberation Army". The Serbian media took a similar line, arguing that the Albanians had removed the KLA uniforms from the bodies and replaced them with civilian clothes. Unnamed French diplomats also criticised Walker for publicly blaming the Serbs for the killings, arguing that he should have waited for a more thorough investigation. The Yugoslav government declared Walker to be persona non grata and demanded that he leave the territory of Yugoslavia within 48 hours.
At the end of January 1999, the United States was reported to have leaked telephone intercepts that were said to prove the role of the Serb government in the killings. According to the Washington Post, the intercepts showed that the Serb government had ordered security forces to "go in hard" to the Račak area. Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Šainović and Interior Ministry General Sreten Lukić reportedly expressed concern about reaction to the Račak assault and discussed how to make the killings at Račak appear to be the result of combat between government troops and KLA rebels. On the day of the attack on Račak, Sainović was aware that the assault was underway and asked how many people had been killed. Lukić replied that as of that moment the tally stood at 22. Following the international uproar about the killings, Sainović told Lukić to re-enter Račak and retrieve the bodies. He also told Lukić that the ICTY prosecutor Louise Arbour was not to be allowed into the country.

Forensic reports

Three forensic examinations were carried out on the bodies, by separate teams from FR Yugoslavia, Belarus and Finland. All three examinations took place in controversial circumstances; the Yugoslav and Belarusian forensic teams carried out their autopsies against the opposition of the KVM and ICTY, which had demanded that the outside experts from Finland should be the first to carry out post-mortems on the dead. The Yugoslav and Belarusian autopsies were conducted on 19 January under the auspices of the Pristina Forensic Medical Institute. Its director, Professor Saša Dobričanin, stated that "Not a single body bears any sign of execution. The bodies were not massacred." He told the media that he suspected that the bodies had been mutilated posthumously to fabricate the appearance of an execution.
The Finnish team, headed by pathologist Helena Ranta, began its own autopsy on 21 January and released its initial findings on 17 March. The introduction to the report stressed that it was Ranta's personal view, and not the position of the team. The report concluded that "there was no evidence that the victims had been anything other than unarmed civilians and that they had probably been killed where they were later found by the international monitors." Addressing the claims that the dead had been killed wearing KLA uniforms which had then been replaced with civilian clothes, the report states that "...the clothing bore no badges or insignia of any military unit. No indication of removal of badges of rank or insignia was evident. Based on autopsy findings and photographs of the scenes, it is highly unlikely that clothes could have been changed or removed." Ranta testified at the subsequent ICTY trial of Slobodan Milošević, stating that retrieved bullets, bullet casings and entry and exit wounds indicated that the victims were killed where their bodies were found and at approximately the same time. A later Finnish report showed that only one victim had provably been shot at close range.
The report from the Finnish team, however, was kept confidential by the EU until long after the war, and the team leader, Helena Ranta, issued a press release at the time containing her "personal opinion" and indicating different findings. Ranta stated that "...medicolegal investigations cannot give a conclusive answer to the question whether there was a battle ...", but she leaned towards the victims being non-combatants in part because "...no ammunition was found in the pockets" of the bodies she investigated. The report was widely understood as saying that the Finnish team had disproved the finding released by the Yugoslav and Belarusian pathologists, whose tests had shown a positive for gunshot residue on the hands of 37 out of the 40 bodies.
Criticism was levelled against the paraffin method used by the Yugoslav and Belarusians to test for powder residue on the victims' hands, since it regularly gives false positives for many other substances, including fertilizers, tobacco, urine and cosmetics, and sometimes provides false negatives. The test is still used by the police of many countries who cannot afford more modern methods, but has been described since as early as 1967 as 'of no use scientifically.'
The international reaction to the Yugoslav and Belarusian report on one hand, and that of the EU expert team on the other differed considerably, not least in the NATO-countries who were preparing to intervene to stop widespread human rights violations in Kosovo. The former was ignored or dismissed as propaganda, and the latter was accepted as evidence of a massacre against civilians. Several pro-war activists and writers wrote about, and quoted, the Finnish team's press-release. Both reports were used as evidence by the prosecution and also by the defence of Slobodan Milošević at his trial, until the Račak case was dropped from the indictment because of lack of evidence.
The full report of the EU team was handed over to the ICTY at the end of June 2000. An executive summary was published in 2001, but the full report has never been released publicly.
In October 2008 Helena Ranta stated that she had been asked to modify the contents of her report, both by the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and by William Walker, the head of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe Kosovo Verification Mission, in order to make it more explicit, she had refused to do so, saying this was "a task for the war crimes tribunal”.

Consequences

Many western governments, human rights groups and international organisations insisted that the Račak operation was a deliberate massacre, conducted in defiance of earlier Serbian agreements to end the violence in Kosovo. The OSCE, Council of Europe, EU, NATO and the UN Security Council all issued strongly worded statements condemning the killings. On January 22, the Contact Group of countries with an interest in Yugoslavia issued a joint statement condemning "the massacre of Kosovo Albanians in Račak on 15 January. All members expressed their revulsion at this act of mass murder. No amount of provocation could justify it. The Contact Group condemns UCK provocations which can only contribute to rising tensions and further violence... The Contact Group also condemns the decisions by the FRY authorities to refuse entry into Kosovo by ICTY Chief Prosecutor Judge Arbour." The Contact Group also called for Yugoslav authorities to "work with the International Tribunal to ensure that those responsible for Račak are brought to justice suspend those VJ and MUP officers operating in Račak on 15 January pending the results of this investigation becoming available".
The UN Security Council and Secretary General on January 31 described the event as a massacre perpetrated by Yugoslav security forces.

ICTY indictment

The ICTY issued a sealed indictment on 27 May 1999 for crimes against humanity and violations of the laws and customs of war against a number of senior Yugoslav officials. These were Slobodan Milošević, Milan Milutinović, Nikola Šainović, Dragoljub Ojdanić and Vlajko Stojiljković. The Račak massacre was added by the ICTY prosecutors in an amended indictment, but was subsequently dropped from the case, due to lack of evidence to support the accusation.

Aftermath

On June 18, 2001, a court in Pristina sentenced Zoran Stojanović, a 32-year-old police officer, to 15 years imprisonment for murder and attempted murder in Račak. Stojanović, a Kosovo Serb, was convicted by a joint UN-Kosovo Albanian panel of judges. Stojanović's trial was highly controversial. It was speedy, one of the first trials by a hastily organized new court. Stojanović was alleged to have killed one man and wounded two more by firing one bullet. During the trial, according to one UN legal officer, both the international judges and the Albanian judge had considered dismissing the case, but did not do so, allegedly for political reasons. During the trial, some witnesses allegedly presented testimonies that contradicted the forensic evidence, suggesting.
The reconstruction of events in Račak for the trial was prevented by two men, who chased off court officials, telling them, "we don't want any Serbs in our village." The second reconstruction was prevented by an angry mob of Albanians. A subsequent reconstruction was held without the presence of either the defendant or his lawyer. The prosecutor, Tome Gashe, told the court during the trial that unless Stojanović were found guilty, the people would "take justice in their own hands". The trial and sentencing of Stojanović was criticised by the United Nations and Amnesty International.
Zoran Stojanović was pardoned in 2007 and released from custody. In late 2009, President of Serbia Boris Tadić pardoned Zoran Stojanović, declaring that the trial was unjust, which opened the question as to whether he had jurisdiction because Stojanović was sentenced by an international High court.

Denial of the massacre

Serbian politician in Kosovo, Ivan Todosijevic denied the massacre took place, and said that the story was made up by "Albanian terrorists". In 2019, he was convicted of incitement to ethnic, racial, or religious intolerance and was sentenced to two years in prison by a court in Pristina for making the claims. The Serbian president, Aleksandar Vučić supported Todosijevic, claiming that the massacre was indeed made up. This was met with stark reaction from Kosovo Albanian politicians and the civil society. The president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi said that peace in Balkan will only be established when Serbia expresses shame, and not pride when discussing war crimes. There were reactions by the former prime minister of Kosovo Ramush Haradinaj, former Kosovar minister of foreign affairs Behgjet Pacolli, and the European Commission. The European Commission stated that “Denial and revisionism are contrary to the values of the European Union and are contrary to the project of integration of the Western Balkans into the European Union. Sentencing has to be proportionate and take into account all elements of the case”.

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