Racak massacre; William Walker

Press Review from Diana Johnstone in Paris

THE "RACAK MASSACRE" QUESTIONED BY FRENCH MEDIA

Paris, 20 January 1999

French newspaper and television reports today feature evidence apparently
ignored by U.S. media, suggesting that the "Racak massacre" so vigorously
denounced by the U.S.-imposed head of the OSCE (Organization for Security
and Cooperation in Europe) "verifiers" mission to Kosovo, William Walker,
was a setup.

This coincides with reports in the German press indicating strong
irritation with Walker among other OSCE members.

Meanwhile, the ineffable State Department spokesman James Rubin appeared
tonight on CNN for short glimpses between Clinton impeachment dronings,
plodding forward amid questions from journalists even more gung-ho for NATO
bombings than he and his bride Christiane Amanpour, whose love story
apparently owes so much to the common anti-Serb cause. It seems the U.S. is
clueless as to the doubts being cast elsewhere on the "massacre" story, and
the only questions well-paid U.S. journalists could conjure up were
variations on the theme, "why isn't cowardly NATO already bombing the Serbs?"

RENAUD GIRARD has covered virtually all the Yugoslav wars of disintegration
on the spot for the French daily "Le Figaro". Here is my rough but accurate
translation of his lead article published on January 20, 1999:

KOSOVO: OBSCURE AREAS OF A MASSACRE

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. 

================

January 26, 1999

Irony at Racak: Tainted U.S. Diplomat Condemns Massacre

By Don North

(from http://www.consortiumnews.com/)

One grieving villager uncovered the headless corpse of his 65-year-old
brother. "Jesus Christ," exclaimed a distressed U.S. diplomat as he picked
his way past blood-soaked massacre victims in Racak, a tiny village 18
miles southwest of Kosovo's capital of Pristina.

"At least let's give him the dignity of covering him up," said the
diplomat, U.S. Ambassador William Walker. Beyond shock, the bespectacled
diplomat, with thinning red hair and a wispy moustache, barely could
contain his fury.

"I see bodies like this with their faces blown away at close range in
execution fashion and it's obvious people with no value for human life have
done this," Walker told journalists. "Unfortunately, I do not have the
words to describe my personal revulsion at the site of what can only be
described as an unspeakable atrocity."

Walker demanded that the Serb government supply the names of police
officers and soldiers involved in the operation. He wanted the killers
tracked down and delivered to the international war crimes tribunal at the
Hague.

"From what I personally saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a
massacre, a crime against humanity," he said. "Nor do I hesitate to accuse
the government security forces of responsibility."

Yet, as genuine as Walker's outrage appeared to be, there was a dark irony
about his personal role in demanding that Serb authorities be held
accountable for civilian massacres. During the 1980s, Walker was a key
figure working with U.S.-backed military operations in three countries of
Central America: Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

In all three violence-torn nations, U.S.-backed forces committed
well-documented atrocities against unarmed civilians and enemy captives.
Yet, the Reagan administration routinely ignored, disputed or minimized
those slaughters. 

Though tens of thousands of civilians died in the three countries at the
hands of allied forces, no war crimes tribunal was convened or even
seriously contemplated. No one was judged guilty of crimes against
humanity: not the perpetrators, not their superior officers and not their
political allies in Washington. Only a few -- mostly low-level soldiers --
were punished at all.

To make matters worse, President Reagan and his subordinates often tried to
discredit journalists and human rights investigators who uncovered evidence
of war crimes.

I had a personal taste of how this worked when I was on a reporting
assignment for Newsweek magazine in El Salvador in 1983. I had been
traveling with a patrol of leftist guerrillas who were engaged in
hit-and-run fighting against the Salvadoran army near the Guazapa Volcano.

The guerrilla unit was in retreat, followed by peasants who feared
retaliation from the Salvadoran army that was known for butchering
guerrilla sympathizers. As we made our way through the mountainous terrain,
the army caught up with some civilian stragglers who had lagged behind,
slowed by the presence of children.

>From a distance of about two miles, I watched through binoculars. Soldiers
of the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion used guns and machetes to execute
two dozen men, women and children near the village of Tenango. A guerrilla
who was closer to the scene radioed a detailed account of the massacre as
it was underway.

About two weeks later, after the government offensive ended, the guerrillas
made their way back to the village and heard reports that the army had
killed a total of 68 civilians. As I later wrote in Newsweek: "Outside
Tenango, the signs of the slaughter were everywhere: charred and scattered
bits of clothing, shoes and schoolbooks. ... When I saw the bodies of the
victims, vultures had already picked their skeletons clean and village dogs
had begun to carry away the bones."

The Reagan administration reacted to the Tenango reports as it had toward
many other accounts of war crimes in El Salvador: deny and denounce.

Several years later, an American journalist read a U.S. embassy cable about
my report. He summarized the cable as stating: "The alleged Tenango
massacre described in Newsweek never happened. It is a fabrication.
Reporter Don North is lying."

By 1983, deny-and-denounce had become the administration's habitual retort
to nearly all reports about the Salvadoran government's "dirty war." To
President Reagan, Central America was the front line of the Cold War and
extreme actions were justified.

The pattern started just days after Reagan's election with comments by U.N.
Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Al Haig suggesting that
the rape-murder of four American churchwomen in El Salvador could be blamed
on the women for their supposedly leftist political views and actions.

Perhaps, the best documented cover-up was the case of El Mozote, a village
in northeastern El Salvador where the U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion
rounded up and executed about 800 men, women and children in December 1981.

When the massacre was reported in the U.S. press, senior State Department
officials, Thomas Enders and Elliott Abrams, went to Capitol Hill and
ridiculed the massacre reports. Those denials were disproved a decade later
when a United Nations forensic team dug up hundreds of skeletons in El Mozote.

During the 1980s, William Walker was regarded as a professional foreign
service officer who saw his job as carrying out administration policy
regardless of personal qualms. Friends and associates said Walker tried
quietly to moderate Reagan's support for right-wing elements, but he did
not challenge those policies directly nor was he willing to put his career
at serious risk.

Throughout the decade, this loyal diplomat often found himself at the front
lines of Reagan's most controversial strategies. In the early 1980s, Walker
was assigned as the deputy chief of mission in Honduras, another country
pulled into the region's political violence. The CIA was then collaborating
with Argentine military advisors to build the Nicaraguan contra army into a
force for attacking leftist-ruled Nicaragua from bases in Honduras.

The contras and the Argentines also were assisting hard-line elements of
the Honduran army in forming death squads that "disappeared" about 200
politically suspect students and labor leaders. In a 1994 report, a
Honduran truth commission corroborated those cases of political murders and
blamed military officers who were participating in the CIA's covert war.

By 1985, Walker had advanced to the post of deputy assistant secretary of
state for Central America, making him one of Elliott Abrams's top deputies.
In that role, Walker continued aiding the contras as they expanded their
unsavory reputation for brutality and corruption.

Walker popped up on the periphery of the Iran-contra scandal, but his
diplomatic career kept advancing. In 1988, Walker became ambassador to El
Salvador, where the army's brutality had grown more selective but had by no
means ended.

On Nov. 16, 1989, uniformed soldiers from the notorious Atlacatl Battalion
dragged six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her 15-year-old daughter
from their beds. The soldiers forced the victims to the ground and then
executed them with high-powered rifles at close range, literally blowing
their brains out.

The evidence pointed to the Salvadoran army and implicated the high
command. But Walker defended Col. Rene Emilio Ponce, the Salvadoran army
chief of staff, a U.S. favorite. "Management control problems exist in a
situation like this," Walker said at a news conference.

On the wider repression of Salvadoran dissidents, Walker stated that "I'm
not condoning it, but in times like these of great emotion and great anger,
things like this happen." [AP, Dec. 5, 1989] Observing Walker's mushy
reaction to war crimes, a New York Times editorial chastised the ambassador
for making only "a bureaucratic peep." [Dec. 25, 1989]

As criticism of the Jesuit murders mounted, Walker went to Washington to
poke holes in the case against the army. "Anyone can get uniforms," Walker
told Rep. Joseph Moakley, D-Mass., on Jan. 2, 1990. "The fact that they
[the killers] were dressed in military uniforms was not proof that they
were military." [WP, March 21, 1993]

Walker was even more protective in internal cables to the State Department.
He warned Secretary of State James A. Baker III that the United States
should "not jeopardize" the progress in El Salvador "by what we do to solve
past deaths, however heinous."

In a "secret" cable, Walker added that "I have reached the conclusion that
the [U.S.] Embassy [in El Salvador] must cease the pursuit of unilateral
overt information-gathering or face continued no-win decisions and
criticism. I recommend that the Embassy be so instructed and that all
further investigative effort be left to the GOES [government of El
Salvador]." [Declassified State Department cables as compiled by the
National Catholic Reporter, Sept. 23, 1994]

After the Salvadoran civil war ended, a United Nations report concluded
that the Salvadoran army was guilty of widespread human rights violations.
Declassified U.S. government records also confirmed that the Reagan
administration knew of the army's responsibility for many of the war's
worst atrocities, but hid the information from Congress and the public.
[For more details, see NYT, March 21, 1993.]

In staking out a more pro-human rights position in Kosovo, Walker has
referred both publicly and privately to his diplomatic performance in
Central America. Referring to the cover-up of the Jesuit murders, Walker
said he "would hate like hell to be accused of that again." [WP, Jan. 23,
1999]

A State Department associate said Walker regretted his failure to condemn
atrocities in Central America in the 1980s and hoped to make up for those
mistakes in Kosovo. The associate noted that Walker was in mid-career at
the time of the Central American wars and feared for his future.

Now in his early 60's, near the end of his career, Walker feels freer to
condemn wrongdoing, even if his statements conflict with a U.S. policy that
has been ambivalent about the best course in Kosovo, said the associate who
spoke on condition of anonymity.

Currently, Walker is head of a 700-member observer team of the Organization
for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Their job is to monitor a truce
reached last fall between the Serb-dominated government of Yugoslavia and
ethnic Albanian separatists in Kosovo, a southwestern Yugoslav province.

Last spring and summer, the Serbs mounted a military offensive against the
Albanian guerrillas known as the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. The Serbs
shocked the world with a scorched-earth campaign that killed scores of
civilians and destroyed whole villages. [For details, see iF Magazine,
Nov.-Dec. 1998]

Under NATO pressure, the Serb campaign was halted last October. But NATO
has been uncomfortable acting as the protector of the KLA, which some
diplomats consider a terrorist organization. The KLA also has violated the
truce and balked at serious peace negotiations.

During the new crisis, NATO has threatened air strikes against the Serbs as
retaliation for Racak. But Western diplomats don't want NATO, effectively,
to serve as an air force for the KLA. 

"The KLA ignore the cease-fire," one American diplomat complained in a
recent Reuters dispatch. "They are rude, sneering and uncooperative. And
they can be shockingly brutal, not just against Serbs, but against their
own people."

Instead of hibernating for the winter -- as NATO had hoped -- the KLA
quickly re-supplied, re-armed and renewed their struggle to gain control of
strategic areas of Kosovo.

"I don't know who the hell they think they are," a Western diplomat told
Reuters. "For guys who haven't done anything on the battlefield but
embarrass themselves, they are incredibly arrogant."

Despite Western ambivalence about the KLA, Walker was not willing to play
politics with the dead of Racak. His denunciation of the massacre sharpened
the diplomatic dispute between NATO and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.

After the blunt words, the Serbs declared Walker persona non grata and
demanded his departure. "You're acting as a prosecutor and a judge at the
same time," complained Serb Prime Minister Milan Milutinovic in televised
comments about Walker.

Like other Serb leaders, Milutinovic insisted that the Racak victims were
not civilians but Albanian guerrillas killed in combat, an assertion that
echoed a frequent claim made by the Reagan administration in defense of
allied-sponsored massacres in Central America during the 1980s.

Walker refused to budge from his post. Then, faced with a possible NATO air
strike, the Serbs backed down. But the Serbs continued to abuse the Muslim
Albanians in Racak.

Defying a Muslim tradition that requires prompt burial of the dead, Serb
police assaulted Racak again as the grieving village was preparing to bury
the victims. The Serbs advanced behind a shield of mortar and machine-gun
fire.

Terrified villagers, journalists and OSCE observers retreated. The police
barged into the mosque where 40 shrouded bodies were lying in a row. The
police carried the bodies to trucks and transported them back to Pristina
for autopsies.

Skeptics suspect that the Serbs will use the autopsy findings to support a
charge that the victims died in battle and that the Albanian guerrillas
mutilated the corpses to discredit the Serbs. The OSCE observer group,
however, has already concluded that Serb police were responsible for the
atrocity.

Some foreign observers who have studied the blood feuds of the Balkans see
the Serb brutality at Racak as another chapter in the ugly nationalistic
conflicts that have roiled the region for centuries. There is even a word
in the Serb language that captures the senselessness of the violence. The
word is "inat," meaning "irrational, spiteful defiance, regardless of the
consequences."

Still, many Serbs are in denial about their government's responsibility for
many atrocities in recent years, including the 1996 massacre of 7,000
Muslims after the fall of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.

The Serb media often presents strained explanations for brutal actions that
have been blamed on the Serb military. When Serb police bullets killed a
three-month-old baby in Kosovo last fall, Serb TV insisted that the story
was a hoax, a rubber doll planted by Albanians.

Though the propaganda arguments fall on deaf ears of foreign journalists,
the rationalizations have proved effective with the Serb population. The
Independent Media Center in Belgrade has estimated that up to 95 percent of
Serbs accept state propaganda.

Serb leaders have enjoyed success, too, denouncing independent journalists
who challenge the government's line. The Milosevic government also accuses
domestic opponents of treason when they criticize Serb military actions.

In another bitter irony, Walker and his colleagues in the Reagan
administration employed similar tactics when denying evidence of war crimes
in Central America. First, they would challenge the charges or rationalize
the actions. Then, they would denounce American journalists and dispute the
patriotism of critics.

Yet, some acts of war are so universally brutal that they stain the guilty
even as the perpetrators seek to conceal the crimes. Racak has become the
latest watchword for Serb brutality - just as El Mozote and the many
killing fields in Central America were testaments to what New York Times
reporter Raymond Bonner called the "weakness and deceit" of U.S. policy in
the 1980s.

In loudly denouncing the brutality at Racak, Walker may be demonstrating
regret for his mute support of the political slaughters in Central America.
But I am reminded of the moral dilemma that Peter Marin described in Coming
to Terms with Vietnam.

"All men like all nations are tested twice in the moral realm; first by
what they do, then by what they make of what they do. A condition of guilt
denotes a kind of second chance. Men are, as if by a kind of grace, given a
chance to repay the living what it is they find themselves owing the dead." 


Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)