The Račak massacre () or Račak operation () was the massacre of 45 Kosovo Albanian civilians that took place in the village of Račak () in central Kosovo in January 1999. The massacre was perpetrated by Serbian security forces in response to Albanian separatist activity in the region. The Serbian government refused to let a war crimes prosecutor visit the site, and maintained that the casualties were all members of the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) killed in combat with state security forces. This was untrue, although there were nine KLA militants killed in the village along with the 45 civilians.Judah 2000, p. 193
The killings were investigated by two separate forensic teams, the first a joint Yugoslav–Belarusian team and the second an external Finnish team representing the EU. The first team's report, which was commissioned by the Yugoslav government, concluded that those killed, who included a woman and 12-year-old child, were all separatist guerrillas and not civilians. The findings of the second team sharply contradicted the Yugoslav investigation's report, determining that the deaths constituted killings of unarmed civilians. The lead Finnish investigator, anthropology expert Dr. Helena Ranta, called it a "crime against humanity", though refusing as a scientist to directly label it a massacre or assign blame to any specific party. Details of the Finnish team's findings were left undisclosed for two years. At the time, reporting of the incident varied from publication to publication and country to country. Media outlets covering it more definitively described the event at Račak as a gruesome terrorist atrocity by a repressive Serbian government.
Bill Clinton, then president of the United States, condemned the massacre as a deliberate and indiscriminate act of murder, and the administration sought to convince the American people that intervention in Yugoslavia was necessary. Public support for intervention among Americans remained at only about 50%, even after the extensive media attention on Račak, suggesting that war with Yugoslavia would be less popular than previous conflicts and interventions the US had undertaken in its recent history.
Regardless, the actions taken and bloodshed at Račak represented a "turning point in the war", drawing sympathy among the Western public, and ultimately played a role in NATO's decision to mount an organized military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO's involvement in the Kosovo conflict in the months following the Račak incident altogether lasted 78 days and consisted of a series of tactical airstrikes.
There is a memorial to the victims of the massacre in the village, where an annual ceremony to honour them is held.
Background Račak is a small Albanian-inhabited village in the Štimlje municipality of southern Kosovo. By 1998 it had become the scene of activity by the Albanian separatist organization the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). It had a population of around 2,000 people prior to the displacement of most of its inhabitants during Yugoslav military activity in the summer of 1998. By January 1999, around 350 people were reported by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) to be living in the village. The KLA was highly active in the region and almost certainly had a presence in Račak itself, with a base near a local power plant.
On 8 January 1999, the KLA mounted an ambush on Serbian police units near the city of Suva Reka, resulting in the deaths of three Serbian policemen. The ambush was followed by a further attack on Serbian police units near the city of Uroševac two days later on 10 January, killing one policeman. The village of Račak had served as a staging area for these ambushes and in response, Yugoslav security forces established a security cordon in the area of Račak and the neighboring communities of Dulje and Caraljevo. At 06:30 on 15 January, the assault on the village of Račak began when Serbian police and KLA units began to exchange fire. Some residents of Račak were able to escape to the nearby village of Petrovo, while KLA units fought their way out to positions outside the village. KLA resistance lasted a number of hours with Serbian police units finally securing the village in the morning, later departing the village at 16:30.
Reports On 15 January, reports were received by the Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), an unarmed observer force from the OSCE, of civilians being killed in Račak. KVM monitors attempted to gain access to the area but were refused permission by security forces despite strong protests. Instead, they watched the fighting from a nearby hill. They later gained access to the village, where they found one dead man and a number of injured people and received reports of other deaths and of people being taken away by the Serbian security forces. They were denied permission to interview the villagers or explore the area around the village.
The monitors finally gained access to the surrounding area on 16 January. Accompanied by a number of foreign journalists and members of the European Union's Kosovo Diplomatic Observer Mission (KDOM), they found a total of 40 bodies in and around the village. Another five bodies had allegedly been removed by family members. In all, 45 were reported killed, including a 12-year-old boy and three women. All had been shot and the KVM team reported that it found several bodies decapitated. KVM head William Walker later described what he had seen:
"In a gully above the village, I saw the first body. It was covered with a blanket, and when it was pulled back, I saw there was no head on the corpse — just an incredibly bloody mess on the neck. Someone told me that the skull was on the other side of the gully and asked if I wanted to see that. But I said, "No, I've pretty much got this story." [Three more bodies were found.] They looked like older men, with gray hair or white hair ... They had wounds on their heads, and there was blood on their clothes. [Then a larger group of bodies.] I didn't count them. I just looked and saw a lot of holes in the head - in the top of the head and the back of the head. A couple had what appeared to be bullet wounds knocking out their eyes. I was told there were other bodies further up and over the crest of the hill, and I was asked by journalists and inspectors if I was going to go up and see the rest. I said, 'I've seen enough.'"Quoted by Ivo H. Daalder, Michael E. O'Hanlon, Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo, pp. 63-64. Brookings Institution Press, 2001.
Walker immediately condemned what he labelled "an unspeakable atrocity" which was "a crime very much against humanity"." He told the party of journalists accompanying him: "I do not hesitate to accuse the (Serb) government security forces. We want to know who gave the orders, and who carried them out. I will insist that justice will be done. They certainly didn't deserve to die in circumstances like this."
The journalists also provided first-hand accounts of the discovery of the bodies. One of them, the BBC's reporter Jacky Rowland, reported that the dead "were all ordinary men; farmers, labourers, villagers. They had all been shot in the head." The dead were aged from 14 to 99 years old. ITN's correspondent Bill Neely was also present and described how other KVM monitors reacted at the scene: "A Swedish monitor notes that the dead are all in civilian clothes and unarmed and that there are no signs of a battle... After working for two hours one monitor, a London police officer, tells me he believes many of the victims have been shot at close range."
Two days later, on 18 January, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Louise Arbour, attempted to enter Kosovo to investigate the killings but was refused access by Serbian authorities."Serbs snub massacre probe", BBC News, 19 January 1999 On the same day, heavily armed Serbian police entered Račak under fire from the KLA, and removed the bodies, taking them to a morgue in Pristina to await a forensic examination.Tom Walker. "Serbs take village massacre bodies", The Times, 19 January 1999
A joint Yugoslavian-Belarusian team of pathologists conducted post-mortems at the end of January. A Finnish forensic team working for the European Union subsequently conducted a second post-mortem, which was more detailed than the first, but conducted after a greater time from the actual killings. The bodies were finally released to the families and buried on 10 February 1999.
Investigations The killings at Račak became the focus of an investigation by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. In its indictment of Slobodan Milošević and four other senior Yugoslav and Serbian officials, the ICTY's Chief Prosecutor stated that:On or about 15 January 1999, in the early morning hours, the village of Račak was attacked by forces of the FRY [Yugoslavia] and Serbia. After shelling by VJ [Yugoslav Army] units, the Serbian police entered the village later in the morning and began conducting house-to-house searches. Villagers, who attempted to flee from the Serbian police, were shot throughout the village. A group of approximately 25 men attempted to hide in a building, but were discovered by the Serbian police. They were beaten and then were removed to a nearby hill, where the policemen shot and killed them. Altogether, the forces of the FRY and Serbia killed approximately 45 Kosovo Albanians in and around Racak.Eyewitness reports from the surviving villagers unanimously supported the account of a massacre. The British journalist Julius Strauss, writing for The Daily Telegraph, described how he had "spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Račak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serbian sources who spoke privately and at some risk." According to the survivors that he interviewed, "a small group of men dressed all in black and wearing gloves and balaclavas ... co-ordinated the attack on the village and the subsequent executions." Men had been separated from women and children before being led away to be executed. One survivor told him that "some of the Serbs were in blue, some in black. The men in black appeared to be in control and wore balaclavas over their heads. Some had uniforms with insignia which included a Serbian flag; some had none. They carried automatic guns and, as we were led up the hill, both units started shooting us." Strauss speculated that the men had been from the Specijalna Antiteroristička Jedinica, the Serbian Interior Ministry's elite anti-terrorist unit.Julius Strauss. "Military 'death squads' behind Kosovo massacre". The Daily Telegraph, 27 January 1999 Some eyewitnesses told reporters that "Serb troops shot and mutilated their victims, and the six-hour orgy of violence ended with a nationalist song."
The Serbian government rejected this version of events. On the day after the killings, the Serbian Interior Ministry issued a statement asserting that its police units had come under fire from "ethnic Albanian terrorist groups ... on routes leading to Račak village in the Stimlje municipality." In the subsequent counter-attack "several dozen terrorists were killed in the clashes with the police. Most of them were in uniforms bearing the insignia of the ethnic Albanian terrorist organization calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).