[kcc-news] Taps Reveal Serbian Military Coverup of Racak Massacre

[Sokol Rama]

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Reproduced without permission, for fair use only.



Taps Reveal Coverup of Kosova Massacre


By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 28, 1999; Page A1 

RACAK, Yugoslavia, Jan. 27 – 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 Kosova, 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 Kosova. 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 – 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 Kosova Liberation Army. 

The objective was to challenge claims by survivors – later supported by
international monitors – 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 Kosova, 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 – albeit
sporadically – 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 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 Kosova 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


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