The Racak massacre

By Julius Strauss in Racak

17 January 1999

In a shallow stony gully on the sloping hillside that overlooks Racak, the dead men of the village lay where they had fallen yesterday. The pale winter sunshine glistened on the early morning frost caught in their eyebrows and their hair.

The day before, eye-witnesses say, they had been rounded up, marched out of the village and shot at point blank range by Serbian police. They were all civilians. With the death toll already climbing towards 50, it ranks as the largest massacre that the Serbs have carried out in Kosovo in a year of atrocities.

We were directed up the hillside by villagers down below through a small neat back garden, over a wooden fence and up past the first rise in the hill. By the time we reached the gully we were puffing with exertion.

The first corpse was of a middle-aged man. His face glistened like that of a shiny plastic doll. But his features were contorted into a grimace. He had been shot in the head at close range. The blood around the bullet's entry point had congealed into a dark red glutinous mass. His clothes were crisp with cold.

A little further up was another body, one arm raised grotesquely in the air as if he was trying to remonstrate with his killers when he died. His eye had been shot away, a bullet passing through his brain.

Two more bodies lay spaced slightly apart. Next to one, probably a man in his thirties, lay an opened wallet, its contents lying in bloodied disarray nearby. The other had a congealed pool of blood next to his head.

But the three corpses did little to prepare us for the grimness of the main execution site. Seventeen men of all ages ranging from teenagers to the elderly lay in one place, some entangled. Each wore the pale waxen look of death.

Most of the men lying on the ground had gaping bullet holes in their faces, some in their chests or other parts of the body. One wore a cheap, shiny watch and a western-style brown belt.

Another lay face down, his red moon boots at a crooked angle to the rest of his body. Yet another, who must have been a handsome man in life, had mud in his mouth and on his lips as he lay with eyes wide open and staring.

There was not a sign of a uniform or a weapon. Contrary to the Serbs' claim the previous day to have killed 15 "terrorists" in battle, they now appear to have murdered more than 50 civilians in cold blood.

When the final body count in known it may stand as the worst massacre in the Balkans since Bosnian Serbs killed an estimated 7,000 Muslims after the enclave of Srebrenica fell in July 1995.

As we studied the orgy of death, the villagers began to arrive. They had fled to nearby woods after the Serbian attack began on Friday morning . Their faces were now etched deeply with fear as they searched among the dead men for their relatives.

One old lady shuffled down the hill nervously looking for her husband. "I haven't found him yet, not yet," she muttered before hurrying on. Others were not so lucky. Metush Ramadani, a thirteen-year-old boy, suddenly began to wail. As other villagers tried to calm him he shook himself free and sat with bowed head by a small bush letting out a deep animal noise. He had just found his three brothers among the heap of bodies. Of the few journalists and translators who had reached the scene, most also began to weep quietly.

Fifty yards further on, Ejup Bajrami, a 45-year-old farmer had also found a brother, Ragip. He was lying between some gorse bushes his head thrown back, eyes open. His greying hair was swept back from his temples and he had the tarred teeth of a smoker. His chin appeared to have been wrenched sideways, perhaps in a spasm as he died. His shirt had been pulled up to his neck and a huge gaping wound could be seen in his chest. His black boots had the laces undone. On his bare chest lay a bloody lump of flesh about a cubic inch in size.

"We fled the village together when the Serbs came," Ejup said. "But then I lost sight of him. I spent the night in the forest and came back to look for him at 7 o'clock this morning. At 7.30 I found him here." As he spoke, tears welled in his eyes and ran down his craggy face.

Down in the village more tears flowed. Even local Kosovo Liberation Army fighters who had vainly tried to defend the civilians the day before were crying. Some sat near their trenches staring listlessly into space. Another, who said he hadn't slept the night before held his gun at the ready. He appeared to be in shock and dangerous because of it.

Near the village centre a middle-aged woman became hysterical. She shouted in Albanian and then threw herself on the ground and began to beat the back of her head against a concrete step, oblivious to the pain.

In a small courtyard nearby a large 60-year-old man, Banush Azemi, was carrying short planks and a ladder. As I watched he placed the ladder on one side of the headless corpse that lay in his yard. On the other he placed another larger piece of wood and then began to lay the planks horizontally across the two to shield the body from view. Tears ran down his fat cheeks. He said: "This is my brother. But I can't find his head. I have searched everywhere."

I peered under the collar of the dead man's soiled beige leather coat and saw the stump of his neck which was almost beetroot in colour. Some white bone was poking through. Nearby lay a severed ear. The fat man turned to me and in broken German said: "When will it be enough for the Americans so that they will do something?" I lowered my head.

The identities of the killers is no secret. Many of the Albanians who survived gave matching descriptions of the men. One local, whose name can not be published because of fears for his safety, said: "Most of them wore balaclavas but we knew who they were. They were the police from nearby Stimlje and local Serb volunteers."

Another witness said he clearly identified two policemen from Stimlje known as "Ceda" and "Boza". All the witnesses interviewed said that Serb volunteers from the area also took part in the attack.

But nobody is ever likely to be tried for this crime. In September Serbian forces butchered more than 20 women, children and old men with knives in a small village 30 miles to the north, but no investigation was ever made.

As we left the hill-side western monitors with the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe were beginning to arrive. Two Americans, one white, one black, began to take photographs of the bodies. Both were visibly shaken.

But most ethnic Albanians have now had enough of the western monitors who patrol in expensive armoured cars but seem incapable of stopping the Serb killing machine that claimed more than 2,000 Albanian lives last year.

Near the main road two tired KLA soldiers kept watch over the entrance into the village. "What is the OSCE doing here? They just watched when the Serbs came to this. They are no better than the Serbs themselves. They too are treading in the blood of the Albanians."