French newspaper and television reports today feature 
 evidenc 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 Serbian 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 seemsincomprehensible. 

 -- END -- 

 Short comment: Not entirely incomprehensible, since 
 Belgrade is convinced that the U.S.-led "international 
 community" is determined to frame the Serb side in 
 order to justify NATO bombing. The hasty and 
 virulent William Walker condemnation of the Serbs for 
 "the most horrendous" massacre he had ever seen 
 (and that after four years in El Salvador!), not to 
 mention the latest in a series of fatal "captures" of 
 Bosnian Serbs accused of war crimes, has only 
 confirmed the view of most Serbs that they can expect 
 only unfair condemnation, not justice, from such 
 "investigators". 

 Doubts are cast on the reality of the "Racak 
 massacre" even by LE MONDE, which for years has 
 led the crusade against the Serbs. But Le Monde's 
 own correspondent, Christophe Chatelot, sent the 
 following report from Pristina: 

 WERE THE RACAK DEAD REALLY COLDLY  
 MASSACRED? The version of the facts spread by the 
 Kosovars leaves several questions unanswered. 
 Belgrade says that the forty-five victims were UCK 
 "terrorst, fallen during combat, but rejects any 
 international investigation. 

 Isn't the Racak massacre just too perfect? New eye 
 witness accounts gathered on Monday, January 18, by 
 Le Monde, throw doubt on the reality of the horrible 
 spectacle of dozens of piled up bodies of Albanians 
 supposedly summarily executed by Serb security 
 forces last Friday. Were the victims executed in cold 
 blood, as UCK says, or killed in combat, as the Serbs 
 say? According to the version gathered and broadcast 
 by the press and the Kosovo verification mission 
 (KVM) observers from the Organization for Security 
 and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the massacre 
 took place on January 15 in the early after-noon. 
 "Masked" Serbian police entered the village of Racak 
 which had been shelled all morning by Yugoslav army 
 tanks. They broke down the doors and entered people's 
 homes, ordering the women to stay there while they 
 pushed the men to the edge of the village to calmly 
 execute them with a bullet through the head, not 
 without first having tortured and mutilated several. 
 Some witnesses even said that the Serbs sang as they 
 did their dirty work, before leaving the village around 
 3:30p.m. 

 The account by two journalists of Associated Press TV 
 television (AP TV) who filmed the police operation in 
 Racak contradicts this tale. When at 10 a.m. they 
 entered the village in the wake of a police armored 
 vehicle, the village was nearly deserted. They 
 advanced through the streets under the fire of the 
 Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK) fighters lying in 
 ambush 
 in the woods above the village. The exchange of fire 
 continued throughout the operation, with more or less 
 intensity. The main fighting took place in the woods. 
 The Albanians who had fled the village when the first 
 Serb shells were fired at dawn tried to escape. There 
 they ran into Serbian police who had surrounded the 
 village. The UCK was trapped in between. The object 
 of the violent police attack on Friday was a stronghold 
 of UCK Albanian independence fighters. Virtually all 
 the inhabitants had 
 fled Racak during the frightful Serb offensive of the 
 summer of 1998. With few exceptions, they had not 
 come back. "Smoke came from only two chimneys", 
 noted one of the two AP TV reporters. The Serb 
 operation was thus no surprise, nor was it a secret. On 
 the morning of the attack, a police source tipped off 
 AP TV: "Come to Racak, something is happening". At 
 10 a.m., the team was on the spot alongside the police; 
 it filmed from a peak overlooking the village and then 
 through the streets in the wake of an armored vehicle. 
 The OSCE was also warned of the action. At least two 
 teams of international observers 
 watched the fighting from a hill where they could see 
 part of the village. They entered Racak shortly after 
 the police left. They then questioned a few Albanians 
 about the situation, trying to find out whether there 
 were wounded civilians. Around 6 p.m., they took four 
 persons -- two women and two old men -- who were 
 very slightly wounded toward the dispensary of the 
 neighboring town of Stimje. The verifiers said at that 
 time that they were "incapable of establishing the 
 number of casualties of that day of fighting". 

 The publicity given by the Serbian police to that 
 operation was intense. At 10:30 a.m., it gave out its 
 first press release. It announced that the police had 
 "encircled the village of Racak with the aim of 
 arresting the members of a terrorist group who killed 
 a policeman" the previous Sunday. At 3 p.m., a first 
 bulletin announced fifteen Albanians killed in fighting. 
 The next day, Saturday, it welcomed the success of the 
 operation which, it said, had resulted in the death of 
 dozens of UCK "terrorists" and the capture of a large 
 stock of weapons. The attempt to arrest an Albanian 
 presumed to have murdered a Serb policemen turned 
 into a massacre. At 5:30 p.m., the police evacuated the 
 site under the sporadic fire of a handful of UCK 
 fighters who continued to hold out thanks to the steep 
 and rough terrain. In no time, the first of the Albanians 
 who had got away come back down into the village, 
 those who had managed to hide came out in the open 
 and three KVM vehicles drove into the village. One 
 hour after the police left, night fell. The next morning, 
 the press and the KVM came to see the damage 
 caused by the fighting. It was at this moment that, 
 guided by the armed UCK fighters who had recaptured 
 the village, they discovered the ditch where a score of 
 bodies were piled up, almost exclusively men. At 
 midday, the chief of the KVM in person, the American 
 diplomat William Walker, arrived on the spot and 
 declared his indignation at the atrocities committed by 
 "the Serb police forces and the Yugoslav army". The 
 condemnation was total, irrevocable. And yet 
 questions remain. How could the Serb police have 
 gathered a group of men and led them calmly toward 
 the execution site while they were constantly under 
 fire from UCK fighters? How could the ditch located 
 on the edge of Racak have escaped notice by local 
 inhabitants familiar with the surroundings who were 
 present before nightfall? Or by the observers who 
 were present for over two hours in this tiny village? 
 Why so few cartridges around the corpses, so little 
 blood in the hollow road where twenty three people 
 are supposed to have been shot at close range with 
 several bullets in the head? Rather, weren't the bodies 
 of the Albanians killed in combat by the Serb police 
 gathered into the ditch to create a horror scene which 
 was sure to have an appalling effect on public opinion? 
 Don't the violence and rapidity of Belgrade's reaction, 
 which gave the chief of the KVM forty-eight hours to 
 leave Yugoslavia, show that the Yugoslavs are sure of 
 what they are saying? Only an international inquiry 
 above all suspicion will make it possible to clarify these 
 obscure points. Finnish and Belurussian legal doctors 
 were expected to arrive in Pristina on Wednesday to 
 attend the autopsies being carried out by Yugoslav 
 doctors. The problem is that the Belgrade authorities 
 have never been cooperative in this matter. Why? 
 Whatever the conclusions of the investigators, the 
 Racak massacre shows that the hope of soon reaching 
 a settlement of the Kosovo crisis seems quite illusory. 

 END report by Christophe Chatelot, "Le Monde," 
 dated 21 January 1999. 

 (Diane Johnstone was the European editor of In These  
 Times from 1979 to1990, and press officer for the  
 Green group in the European Parliament from 1990 to  
 1996. She is the author of The Politics of  
 Euromissiles: Europe in America's World  
 (London/New York: Verso/Schuchken, 198?, and is  
 currently working on a book on the former  
 Yugoslavia.)