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SIT-REP 1-28; Thursday, January 28, 1999

In this Issue - Racak: Does the US Have Credible Evidence?

Today, the Washington Post has a story by R. Jeffrey Smith, regarding NSA "Echelon" system wire tapping of conversations out of Belgrade and Pristina prior to the January 15 police attack on the fortified KLA village of Racak, where 45 Albanians were killed. The article attempts to paint these conversations as a conspiracy at premeditated massacre, when they really reflect more mundane orders to arrest and discussions of how to put official spin on an incident already being misrepresented by Ambassador Walker. I found the article's reportage badly flawed, to the point of being wildly deceptive in ways that would make even George Orwell wonder. Yet this article is part of the basis justifying armed intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign power, one the US Administration does not find "politically correct."

For starters, Smith, from his Olympian vantage point in Washington, DC, initially asserts 45 dead were found on a hillside, then, later on, reports that 23 were found in the gully. The spin put on the telephone intercepts is also misleading: there was an agreement to put on a strong force to make arrests in a fortified village, but I strongly doubt the leaders premeditated a mass execution, since local security forces invited in the TV crew and OSCE observers hours before the alleged massacre "happened." The authorities wanted arrests and wanted to break up the KLA's fortress and never hid the fact that there had been combat deaths.. After all, some 1500 villagers were not killed that day and nobody evacuating the village after the fighting ended mentioned a pile of corpses.

The evidence demonstrates that the police operation was conducted in a village already nearly empty and suggests that the shooting started from the KLA fighters on the hills above the village. The Yugoslav security forces deliberately invited APTV and the OSCE observers to watch the operation --an attempt to arrest particular suspected killers. But the US persists in spinning a tale of the massacre of 45 "innocent civilians," despite videotape evidence from unbiased observers documenting a very different and more justifiable operation, where a combination of fighters and civilians caught in a crossfire died because the KLA chose to "resist arrest" with "extreme prejudice."

The Clinton Administration, when accidentally bombing Iraqi civilians blames the deaths on Saddam: at the same time, when people die coincident with a police operation against armed terrorists, the Yugoslav police are accused of perpetrating a "massacre."

I reprint both the Le Figaro account (backed up by other reports from LeMonde and Agence France-Presse) and the Washington Post article so the reader may compare and judge the wide gulf of interpretation.

More on the Albright peace plan in my next report.

© Copyright 1999 by Benjamin C. Works --SIRIUS www.siri-us.com

KOSOVO: OBSCURE AREAS OF A MASSACRE

January 20, 1999

By Rene Girard; Le Figaro

The images filmed during the attack on the village of Racak contradict the Albanians' and the OSCE's version

Racak. Did the American ambassador William Walker, chief of the OSCE cease-fire verification mission to Kosovo, show undue haste when, last Saturday, he publicly accused Sserbian security forces of having on the previous day executed in cold blood some forty Albanian peasants in the little village of Racak?

The question deserves to be raised in the light of a series of disturbing facts. In order to understand, it is important to go through the events of the crucial day of Friday in chronological order.

At dawn, intervention forces of the Serbian police encircled and then attacked the village of Racak, known as a bastion of UCK (Kosovo Liberation Army, KLA) separatist guerrillas. The police didn't seem to have anything to hide, since, at 8:30 a.m., they invited a television team (two journalists of AP TV) to film the operation. A warning was

also given to the OSCE, which sent two cars with American diplomatic licenses to the scene. The observers spent the whole day posted on a hill where they could watch the village.

At 3 p.m., a police communique reached the international press center in Pristina announcing that 15 UCK "terrorists" had been killed in combat in Racak and that a large stock of weapons had been seized.

At 3:30 p.m., the police forces, followed by the AP TV team, left the village, carrying with them a heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, two automatic rifles, two rifles with telescopic sights and some thirty Chinese-made kalashnikovs.

At 4:40 p.m., a French journalist drove through the village and met three orange OSCE vehicles. The international observers were chatting calmly with three middle-aged Albanians in civilian clothes. They were looking for eventual civilian casualties.

Returning to the village at 6 p.m., the journalist saw the observers taking away two very slightly injured old men and two women. The observers, who did not seem particularly worried, did not mention anything in particular to the journalist. They simply said that they were "unable to evaluate the battle toll".

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 9 a.m., by journalists soon followed by OSCE observers. At that time, the village was once again taken over by armed UCK 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 the Albanian witnesses gave the same version: at midday, the policemen forced their way into homes and separated the women from the men, whom they led to the hilltops to execute them without more ado.

The most disturbing fact is that the pictures filmed by the AP TV journalists -- which Le Figaro was shown yesterday -- radically contradict that version.

It was in fact an empty village that the police entered in the morning, sticking close to the walls. The shooting was intense, as they were fired on from UCK trenches dug into the hillside.

The fighting intensified sharply on the hilltops above the village. Watching from below, next to the mosque, the AP journalists understood that the UCK guerrillas, encircled, were trying desperately to break out. A score of them in fact succeeded, as the police themselves admitted.

What really happened? During the night, could the UCK have gathered the bodies, in fact killed by Serb bullets, to set up a scene of cold-blooded massacre? A disturbing fact: Saturday morning the journalists found only very few cartridges around the ditch where the massacre supposedly took place.

Intelligently, did the UCK seek to turn a military defeat into a political victory? Only a credible international inquiry would make it possible to resolve these doubts. The reluctance of the Belgrade government, which has consistently denied the massacre, thus seems incomprehensible.

Copyright by Le Figaro

Taps Reveal Coverup of Kosovo Massacre

By R. Jeffrey Smith Washington Post Foreign Service

Thursday, January 28, 1999; Page A1

RACAK, Yugoslavia, Jan. 27 ö The attack on this Kosovo village that led to the killing of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians 12 days ago came at the orders of senior officials of the Serb-led Belgrade government who then orchestrated a coverup following an international outcry, according to telephone intercepts by Western governments.

Angered by the slaying of three soldiers in Kosovo, the officials ordered government forces to "go in heavy" in a Jan. 15 assault on Racak to search out ethnic Albanian guerrillas believed responsible for the slayings, according to Western sources familiar with the intercepts.

As the civilian death toll from the assault mounted and in the face of international condemnation, Yugoslavia's deputy prime minister and the general in command of Serbian security forces in Kosovo systematically sought to cover up what had taken place, according to telephone conversations between the two.

Details of the conversations, which were made available by Western sources, shed new light on the attack and its aftermath, which have again brought NATO to the brink of confrontation with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic over his government's repression of separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. The calls show that the assault on Racak was monitored closely at the highest levels of the Yugoslav government and controlled by the senior Serbian military commander in Kosovo ö a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia's dominant republic.

The bodies of 45 ethnic Albanian civilians were discovered on a hillside outside the village by residents and international observers shortly after the government forces withdrew.

"We have to have a full, independent investigation of this to get to the bottom of it," a senior Clinton administration official told staff writer Dana Priest in Washington. "Those responsible have to be brought to justice."

In a series of telephone conversations, Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic and Serbian Interior Ministry Gen. Sreten Lukic, expressed concern about international reaction to the assault and discussed how to make the killings look as if they had resulted from a battle between government troops and members of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army.

The objective was to challenge claims by survivors ö later supported by international monitors ö that the victims had been killed in an execution-style massacre and to defuse pressures for a NATO military response.

Sainovic is the highest-ranking official in the Yugoslav government responsible for Kosovo matters and has been present at most negotiations with top Western officials; several Western officials said they understand that he reports to Milosevic on Kosovo issues. "We often see him as the link between the government in Belgrade and the administration down here" in Kosovo, one official said.

Yugoslav army and Serbian Interior Ministry troops have waged an 11-month campaign against ethnic Albanian guerrillas seeking independence for Kosovo, where ethnic Albanians outnumber Serbs 9 to 1 but Serbs hold all the power. At least 1,000 civilians have been killed in the conflict.

Under an October accord imposed on Milosevic with the threat of NATO airstrikes, the Yugoslav leader agreed to withdraw some of his forces from Kosovo, and the conflict eased as both sides maintained ö albeit sporadically ö an unofficial truce.

That changed in this farming village when army and Interior Ministry troops converged on the area. As a result of the attack, the village has been transformed into a ghostly place, bathed in dense, damp fog that cloaks ice-covered thickets and leafless trees. Many of its houses were shattered by direct fire from three T-55 army tanks. Now there are only a few dogs, a handful of braying donkeys and scores of other barnyard animals where more than 1,500 ethnic Albanians once lived.

One source familiar with the phone calls between military leaders in Kosovo and officials in Belgrade on Jan. 15 and succeeding days said they show that "the intent was to go in heavy" to find three guerrillas whom government security officials blamed for the ambush of an Interior Ministry convoy on Jan. 8 southwest of Racak in which three soldiers died. "It was a search and destroy mission" with explicit approval in Belgrade, the source said.

As tank and artillery fire and the chatter of machine-guns echoed off the hills surrounding Racak, Sainovic called Lukic from Belgrade, according to Western sources. Sainovic was aware that the assault was underway, and he wanted the general to tell him how many people had been killed. Lukic replied that as of that moment the tally stood at 22, the sources said.

In calls over the following days, Sainovic and Lukic expressed concern about the international outcry and discussed how to make the killings look like the result of a pitched battle. Their efforts to cover up what occurred continued, the Western sources said.

One measure Sainovic advocated in his calls was to seal Kosovo's border with Macedonia to prevent Louise Arbour, a top U.N. war crimes investigator, from entering. Arbour was turned back. Another was to demand that Interior Ministry troops fight to regain control of the killing site and reclaim the bodies. Serbian forces launched a second assault on the village Jan. 17, and the following day they seized the bodies from a mosque and transferred them to a morgue in Pristina, the provincial capital.

A third was to explore whether the killings could be blamed on an independent, armed group that supposedly came to the region and attacked the residents of Racak after government troops had left. Sainovic was told that making this claim was not feasible.

Shortly after the attack, a Yugoslav government spokesman said that the bodies found on the hillside were armed, uniformed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. The account was challenged by international inspectors and journalists who arrived on the scene Jan. 16 and found dozens of corpses on the ground, all in civilian clothes.

Government officials later alleged that some of the victims were accidentally caught in a cross-fire between security forces and the rebels or were deliberately slain by the guerrillas to provoke international outrage. But survivors, diplomatic observers and rebels who were in the area at the time of the killings say that little shooting occurred inside the town early in the assault and that no battle was underway at around 1 p.m., when most of the victims are said to have died. These sources say that Kosovo Liberation Army forces were not deployed near a gully where at least 23 of the bodies were found, and that none of the trees in the area bore bullet marks suggestive of a battle.

A team of forensic pathologists that arrived in Kosovo from Finland last Friday, a week after the killings, has found nothing to contradict these accounts, according to a Western official. "A picture is beginning to emerge from the autopsies, and it is a tragic one," said another source, explaining that the types of wounds on the victims indicate that they were "humiliated" before being fired on from several directions.

The last of 40 autopsies were to be completed today, and the Finnish pathologists say their final report will be ready by next week. But their preliminary conclusion is consistent with an account given on Jan. 16 by Imri Jakupi, 32, a resident of Racak who said he escaped death by running into the woods. He said that he and other men had been rounded up by security forces in house-to-house searches and ordered to walk along a ravine before troops "started shooting from the hills at us. . . . Firing came from all over."

According to Shukri Buja, 32, the commander of guerrilla forces in the area, Racak was home to many rebels, as government security officials suspected. But he said that most of them were driven into the hills early Jan. 15 by a wave of artillery and tank fire. "We were shot at from three sides . . . and they moved their forces during the day, so it was very hard for us to come down into the village," Buja said.

Villagers told inspectors and reporters at the scene on Jan. 17 that many of the dead were last seen alive in the hands of Interior Ministry troops, who said they were under arrest. Many of the troops involved in the operation wore black ski masks, but survivors said they recognized some local policemen and Serbian civilians in uniforms.

Jakupi and another Racak resident, Rem Shabani, told reporters that they overheard some of what the troops were saying on their walkie-talkies as two groups of men were being led away from the village.

"How many of them are there?" one soldier asked. When the reply came back as 29, Shabani recalled, the order given was: "Okay, bring them up." Yakupi said he then overheard another order: "Now get ready to shoot." He fled before the shots rang out.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company