None of this fazed the accused. A “setup,” he called it, smiling knowingly. Far from being civilians, the 40-odd victims found in Racak were “terrorists” of the Kosovo Liberation Army, killed in a battle with police. The guerrillas put the bodies where they were found, dressing them in civilian clothes. Perhaps the ruse was devised by Walker himself, the former Yugoslav president suggested, to create a pretext for America’s “aggression” against his country.
This version of history is not entirely ludicrous–the word Walker chose to describe it. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and others in the Clinton administration seized on Racak, eagerly, to force Belgrade into peace talks at Rambouillet, the failure of which would justify allied bombing. And the KLA was indeed active in the area, perhaps inviting retribution. Days earlier, guerrillas killed several Serbian police in ambushes. Their former commander, Shukri Buja, also confirmed to the court that eight of his men died when Serbian forces attacked. Their bodies were retrieved and buried elsewhere, he recounted. Villagers were left where they lay.
Even acknowledging these truths, it’s hard to reconcile Milosevic’s account with my own experience of Racak. At this moment, I am holding a collection of photographs, taken the morning after and assembled by the families of the victims. I first saw them on a bitter winter’s day one year later, hanging in a bare room at the local school in commemoration of the first anniversary of the killings.
They are as chilling today as then. Here is Shukri Jashari, 19, movie-star handsome, his shirt covered with blood from multiple shots to the chest. Here also is Halim Beqiri, 13, wearing a blue knit sweater, blood matting his tousled blond hair. An old man in a motley cardigan, still clutching his cane, gazes at the sky with a hole in his forehead, blackened from the powder of a shot that must have come from only inches away.
More pictures. Across a field from the village, in a shallow gully, a dozen bodies are clumped in a line, as though they had been marched to this spot or were huddled together in hiding. One man looks as though he were sleeping; another is curled next to him, twisted as if to avoid the shots that killed him. There are close-ups testifying to a barbarity beyond mere shooting. Shyqeri Ismajli, 60, has his throat cut. Sadik Osmani, 45, has his eyes gouged out and skull smashed in, as if with an ax. Three men have been decapitated. One lies with his index finger seemingly positioned to point to his missing head. Another has the skin peeled entirely off his face and head. “Why are you inventing this?” Milosevic asked a witness who told of a villager with his chest hacked open and heart ripped out, a photo of which I also have. “I saw it,” the man replied, telling how he and others emerged from the forest to find the bodies after the Serbs had left.
Such are Milosevic’s terrorists, killed in battle, at least as I saw them on the anniversary of their deaths. Since then I’ve come across less graphic but no less convincing evidence. The report of a Danish forensic team, sent in by the EU to examine the victims, debunks the possibility that they were guerrillas whose clothes had been changed, as Milosevic suggests. Scientific scanning of their hands showed also that none could have been holding weapons. “There were no indications of the people being other than unarmed civilians,” the investigators concluded.
Monitors from Walker’s Kosovo Verification Mission witnessed the Racak operation and confirmed it was no mere police action. Special forces from the Yugoslav Interior Ministry and Army units moved into the village around 7 a.m. “KVM verified that tanks fired into houses occupied by civilians,” the observers reported. “No firing was seen originating from the houses.” Monitors arriving early the next morning compiled a grim dossier. “Ridge beyond the village: 23 adult males, most shot in front, back and top of head. Ravine near village: three adult males, shot running away…”
Little of this will be news to Kosovars, or to those who know the Balkans. Such incidents took place with dreary regularity during the war, and Racak was only part of a larger pattern. What’s dismaying is Milosevic’s insouciant disregard for the truth of what happened in that village that day. It’s not that he knows, or doesn’t. It’s that he considers it irrelevant, a laughing matter. For Milosevic’s game at The Hague is an exercise in collective amnesia. To his mind, he is winning–not because he thinks that he will escape conviction, but because his real jury is home in Serbia. There, people are quick as ever to dismiss Racak as yet another lie in an unjust crusade against them. It’s a telling measure of how far the former Yugoslavia has to go in coming to terms with its past.
