2. Racak Massacre
Home ] Up ] 1. Who and What is KLA? ] [ 2. Racak Massacre ] 3. The Big Lie ] 4. Scale and Audacity of Lying ] 5. Mindset of Racism and Lies ] 6. A Need for Victory ] 7. Away from the Problems ] 8. Continue the Distractions ] 9. Deliberately Create Hardship ] 10. Refugee Burden ] 11. NATO losses and Military Costs ] 12. Media Complicity (Part 1) ] 12. Media Complicity (Part 2) ]

 

 
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US troops out of Europe!
1. Who and What is KLA?
2. Racak Massacre
3. The Big Lie
4. Scale and Audacity of Lying
5. Mindset of Racism and Lies
6. A Need for Victory
7. Away from the Problems
8. Continue the Distractions
9. Deliberately Create Hardship
10. Refugee Burden
11. NATO losses and Military Costs
12. Media Complicity (Part 1)
12. Media Complicity (Part 2)



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avgust 20, 2008

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"RACAK MASSACRE" - Perfectly staged trigger

The "trigger" was pulled on January 16, 1999, when William Walker, the [US] Ad-ministration official assigned to Kosovo with a team of observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), announced that a "massacre" of more than 40 ethnic Albanian peasants by Serbian security personnel had taken place in the village of Račak. The January 20 New York Times observed that the Ra č ak "massacre" followed "a well-established pattern: Albanian guerillas in the Kosovo Liberation Army kill a Serb policeman or two. Serb forces retaliate by flattening a village. This time they took the lives of more than 40 ethnic Albanians, including many elderly and one child."

However, as the French newspaper Le Fi-garo reported on the same day, there was ample reason to believe that Walker’s assessment of the situation was made in "undue haste". Walker, the US official who headed a 700- man OSCE "verification" team monitoring a ceasefire in Kosovo, accused Serbian police of conducting a massacre "in cold blood". According to Le Figaro’s account, Serb policemen, after notifying both the media and OSCE officials, conducted a raid on a KLA stronghold. After several hours of combat, Serbian police announced that they had killed 10 KLA personnel and seized a large cache of weapons. Journalists observed several OSCE officials talking with ethnic Albanian villagers in an attempt to determine the casualty count.

"The scene of Albanian corpses in civilian clothes lined up in a ditch which would shock the whole world was not discovered until the next morning, around 9am," reported the French newspaper. "At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed [KLA] soldiers who led the foreign visitors, as soon as they arrived, toward the supposed massacre site. Around noon, William Walker in person arrived and expressed his indignation." All of the Albanian witnesses interviewed by the media and OSCE observers on January 16 related the same version of events: namely, that Serbian police had forced their way into homes, separated the women from the men, and dragged the men to the hilltops to be unceremoniously executed.

The chief difficulty with this account, according to Le Figaro, is that television footage taken during the January 15 battle in Racak "radically contradict[s] that version. It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning ... The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from [KLA] trenches dug into the hillside. The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village." Rather than a pitiless attack on helpless villagers, the unedited film depicts a firefight between police and encircled KLA guerillas, with the latter group getting by far the worst of the engagement.

Further complicating things for the "official" account is the fact that "journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place".

"What really happened?" asks Le Figaro. "During the night, could the [KLA] have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bul-lets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre?" Similar skepticism was expressed by Le Monde, a publication whose editorial slant is decidedly antagonistic to the Serbian side in any Balkan conflict.

"Isn`t the Racak massacre just too perfect?" wondered Le Monde correspondent Christophe Chatelot in a January 21 dispatch from Kosovo. Eyewitness accounts collected by Chatelot contradicted the now official version of the "massacre", describing instead a pitched battle between police and well-entrenched KLA fighters in a nearly abandoned village.

"How could the Serb police have gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward the execution site while they were constantly under fire from [KLA] fighters?" wrote Chatelot.

"How could the ditch located on the edge of Racak where the massacre victims were later found" have escaped notice by local inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were present before night-fall? Or by the observers who were present for over two hours in this tiny village? Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so little blood in the hollow road where 23 people are supposed to have been shot at close range with several bullets in the head? Rather, weren’t the bodies of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which was sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion?"