The Washington Post’s 1999 reporting on the Recak massacre: How Belgrade’s cover-up was revealed

The prestigious American Newspaper The Washington Post reported on the massacre of Recak in 1999.

In a lengthy article, WP says that the attack on this Kosovo village led to the killing of 45 Albanian civilians, and that the order came from officials of the then Government of Belgrade.

Citing the sources, according to wiretaps by Western governments, the massacre took place after the killing of three Serbian soldiers by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) – and angered by this, the Serbian army on January 15 launched a revenge offensive, killing Albanian civilians.

“As the civilian death toll from the attack mounted and in the face of international condemnation, the deputy prime minister of Yugoslavia and the general in command of the Serbian security forces in Kosovo systematically tried to cover up what had happened.”

“According to the telephone conversations between the two, details of the conversations which have been made available by Western sources, shed new light on the attack and its consequences, which have once again brought NATO to the brink of confrontation with Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic for his government’s repression of separatist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo”, the WP article states.

The phone calls show that the attack on Racak was closely monitored at the highest levels of the Yugoslav government and controlled by the top Serbian military commander in Kosovo.

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

“Sainovic is the highest official in the Yugoslav government responsible for Kosovo affairs and has been present in most of the negotiations with senior Western officials; some 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.

“It was a search and destroy mission” with clear approval in Belgrade, the source said.

Until the fire of tanks and artillery did not stop in the hills around Racak, according to Western sources, Sainovic called Lukic from Belgrade. Sainovic was aware that the attack was underway and he wanted the general to tell him how many people had been killed. Lukic replied that at that moment the number was 22, the sources said.

In phone calls over the next few days, Sainovic and Lukic expressed concern about the international outcry and discussed how to make the killings appear to be the result of a fierce battle.

Their efforts to cover up what happened continued, Western sources said.

A measure that Sainovic during telephone conversations had requested was the closure of Kosovo’s border with Macedonia to prevent the entry of Louise Arbour, a senior UN investigator for war crimes. Arbour was turned back – so she was not allowed to enter Kosovo.

Serbian forces launched a second attack on the village on January 17, and the next day they retrieved the bodies from a mosque and transferred them to a morgue in Pristina. A third was to identify whether the killings could be blamed on an independent, armed group that allegedly came to the region and attacked 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 the bodies found on the hillside were armed, uniformed members of the Kosovo Liberation Army. This was disputed by international inspectors and journalists who arrived at the scene on January 16 and found dozens of corpses on the ground, all in civilian clothes.

Government officials later claimed that some of the victims were accidentally caught in a shootout between security forces and rebels or were deliberately killed by guerrillas to provoke international outrage.

But survivors, diplomatic observers and KLA 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.

Finnish pathologists who examined the victims said their preliminary conclusion is consistent with an account given on January 16 by Imri Jakupi, 32, a resident of Racak, who said he escaped death by running into the forest.

He said he and other men were rounded up by security forces in house-to-house searches and ordered to walk along a valley before troops “started shooting from the hills at us… Shots were coming from all over”…