FAIR MEDIA ADVISORY: Update on Racak

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Despite the U.S. media's lack of interest, the question of what really happened at the Kosovo village of Racak is still unresolved. Although the Finnish investigators' autopsy findings discussed in the Berliner Zeitung (1/16/01) did not represent, in themselves, compelling evidence of a massacre of civilians, that neither proves nor disproves the official account of the incident. But new information about the Racak incident has since come to light.

Several weeks after FAIR's February 1, 2001 media advisory was released, the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad published an interview (3/10/01) with Dr. Helena Ranta, the Finnish pathologist who led the European Union's team of investigators. She said she wanted to dispell some of the "nonsense" that had been published about the Racak investigation.

She emphasized that her investigation into the Racak incident comprised not just the autopsies discussed in the Berliner Zeitung but also a forensic inspection of the crime scene--a small gully in the village of Racak--which was carried out by her team of investigators several months afterward.

"If we had found nothing in the ditch, the Finnish investigator Helena Ranta now says, then it would have been entirely a set-up by the Albanians," the Handelsblad reporter wrote. "But lying there were bullets, bullet shells, and even still a body part of one of the victims. That this was lying here was important, and how it was lying even more important." According to Ranta, the physical evidence was consistent with a massacre--not a set-up.

Ranta declined to say definitively whether or not she thought it was a massacre, explaining that she wanted to avoid prejudicing the international war crimes tribunal at the Hague that is working on the case.

All of the evidence will presumably be debated and disputed at the Hague tribunal if the accused perpetrators of the Racak killings are brought to trial. Defense lawyers faced with Ranta's crime-scene evidence would likely point to the fact that her team's November 1999 inspection of the scene took place several months after the area came under the control of NATO troops. (Since June 1999, Racak has been patrolled by British soldiers.)

The tribunal might also hear the observations of the French journalists who were among the first to arrive at the scene of the killings. According to the Canadian Broadcasting Company documentary "The Road to Racak," (The World at Six, 5/29/00), when reporter Renaud Girard of the French daily Le Figaro arrived in the village, he was surprised to find that William Walker, the American head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe observer mission in Kosovo, had not sealed off the crime scene for war crimes investigators.

Girard was equally puzzled to find almost no bullet casings on the ground. "It was weird," he told the CBC. "Maybe somebody had picked them up." Back in Pristina that day, he told his colleague Christophe Chatelot of Le Monde about the apparent absence of bullet casings. Chatelot asked one of Walker's observers, an American army captain, why there were none on the ground. The captain replied, "That's because I took them, I collected them." The captain "confided to Chatelot that he'd picked up all the bullet casings once he'd arrived at the scene."

Intrigued, Chatelot went to Racak the next day to investigate. When he tried to find the American army captain again, he was "suddenly nowhere to be found." "We don't know him. He's never been here," Chatelot says he was told by the OSCE mission. When he asked to talk to the four monitors who had been in and around Racak the day of the killings, he was told that their names had suddenly been made "a classified secret." "It's very strange," Chatelot told the CBC.

Later, it emerged that Walker's team of American observers had been largely composed of undercover CIA operatives who, European diplomats asserted, were carrying out "an American policy that made [NATO] airstrikes inevitable" (London Sunday Times, 3/12/00). International outrage over the Racak killings was instrumental in pushing NATO to threaten Yugoslavia with airstrikes.

The German magazine Der Spiegel (3/19/01) recently obtained a secret dossier of evidence on the Racak killings compiled by prosecutors at the war crimes tribunal in the Hague. According to Spiegel's report, tribunal investigators found that the victims in Racak were probably unarmed at the time they were killed; but the dossier "also reveals manipulations, deceptions and cover-ups-- on all sides."

"U.N. investigators concede that perhaps half the victims were aides to or sympathizers with the KLA," the report says. Though "defenseless civilians at the time of their deaths," these victims had also "carried out attacks and assassinations of Serbian officials and establishments or had approved of them." Just "a few days before the massacre," the report says, some of these victims "fought against the advancing Serbs" near Racak. (According to the Geneva conventions, it is a crime to deliberately kill unarmed enemy sympathizers or prisoners of war.)

The Spiegel report adds that the French intelligence services in Kosovo monitored all KLA radio traffic and possess detailed logs of these communications. According to Spiegel, these radio logs "compromise" the KLA with regard to its role in Racak. (According to Albanian witnesses, KLA fighters were present in the hills surrounding Racak at the time of the killings.)

But the French (who were more sympathetic to the Serbian side in the Kosovo war than the United States) have released only a fraction of these logs to anxious war crimes prosecutors trying to build a criminal case. "Now," the Spiegel report concludes, "the controversy over the radio logs begins: Washington, Berlin and above all Belgrade are trying to gain possession of the explosive material."

As FAIR argued at the time, it is striking how little interest the U.S. media has shown in this controversy. Mainstream journalists working for British, French, Canadian, German and Dutch news outlets have unearthed new information while U.S. media outlets have been passive. Neither Helena Ranta's interview with the Handelsblad, Der Spiegel's report on the Hague tribunal investigation nor the CBC's award-winning "Road to Racak" documentary have received mention in any major U.S. paper in the Nexis database.

In President Bill Clinton's March 19, 1999 address to the nation announcing NATO's determination to launch airstrikes against Yugoslavia, he said:

It is the responsibility of U.S. journalists to try to find out whether or not this official account is true.