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Re: L-I: MORE ON WILLIAM WALKER
Jared Israel (Borba100) denies the Racak massacre, citing that
Mr. William Walker is an imperialist. He has posted an article, "Meet
Mr. Massacre", by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi that claims that the
(equally imperialist) French press, Le Monde and Le Figaro, disproved
the existence of the Racak massacre. Actually, if we examine the
stories told in these newspapers, not the conclusions that they drew,
it turns out that the Racak massacre not only took place, but that the
Serbian police boasted about it. Moreover, it turns out that the
Serbian police boasted of following procedures which will be familiar
to those who were part of the movement against the U.S. war on
Vietnam--the Serbian police used the same methods and the same excuses
against the village of Racak as the U.S. imperialist army used against
the Vietnamese people. There are, to be sure, differences between what
certain articles in Le Monde and Le Figaro reported and what the Racak
villagers claimed happened. But either account shows that the Racak
massacre took place. Moreover, later medical reports not only verified
that Racak was a bestial act, but that the Albanian Kosovar claims
about Racak were more accurate than the French media accounts cited by
Jared.
Because of the importance of the question of Racak, I include
below some excerpts from an article I wrote on the subject last year,
which discusses the French media reports. The full article also
contains the Le Monde report and a brief statement by WWP's Greg
Butterfield.
The title of the article was:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Le Monde: "The [Serbian] police congratulated themselves
for the success of an operation"
-- The Racak controversy --
by Joseph Green
To this day, the Milosevic government denies its atrocities in
Kosovo. Its defenders deny every massacre that has occurred, or
explain them away as justified because the Serbian forces were only
killing "terrorists" or separatist sympathizers. An important example
is the Racak massacre of January this year. Here the Serbian military
forces surrounded a village and slaughtered several dozen inhabitants.
It was a signal that the expected spring offensive of the Serbian
military had come early; after Racak there was an increasing tempo of
attacks on Albanian villages and even town.
Below is an excerpt from an exchange about Racak that occurred on a
left Internet mailing list in January this year. Since then, the
international (Finnish) team of forensic experts led by Dr. Helen
Ranta issued its report, condemning what happened at Racak as a "crime
against humanity". It showed that, as far as could be determined by
medical evidence, the Albanian story was correct. In his article in
the Spring-Summer 1999 issue of Covert Action Quarterly Gregory Elich
claims that "forensic tests" show that the victims had been engaged in
combat. This is a lie. If you check his references, it turns out that
he either refers to newspaper stories that appeared before the medical
findings, or to the fabricated reports produced to please Milosevic
and company.
But the discussion below indicates that, even if one accepts the
Serbian account, what took place at Racak was a cold-blooded massacre,
just like those in a typical imperialist counter-insurgency war. When
Covert Action Quarterly, WWP, and other sources defend such actions,
it shows that their only objection to imperialist atrocities is which
imperialist commits them.
[The article went on to give an exchange between myself and WWP's
Greg Butterfield. Below only my statement is printed. Greg's statement
and the Le Monde report can be found in the full article, at the link
given at the end of this posting.]
From: "Joseph Green"
Date sent: Mon, 25 Jan 1999
Subject: Re: L-I: Kosovo:Le Monde casts doubt on Walker's story
Greg Butterfield doubts there was a massacre at Racak and cites a
story in the French newspaper Le Monde. This story tries to pick at
contradictions in the story of the Racak massacre. This story,
however, has its own contradictions. It ends with the puzzle of why
the Serbian authorities fear an investigation: if the Serbian
government's account is really true and verified by TV film, what did
they have to fear?
There are other contradictions in Le Monde's account. For example,
on one hand, the Serbian police claim they were just looking to arrest
a single "murderer". On the other hand, they had planned out an entire
military operation against a village and proudly claimed to have
killed "dozens" of "KLA terrorists".
But let's look it at from another angle. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that the Le Monde story is basically true. What it says is
that the Serbian police and armed forces believed that Racak was a KLA
village, where everyone left in the village was KLA. Therefore, in a
carefully planned attack, they surrounded the village, shelled it at
dawn, forced most of the people to flee into the woods, and then mowed
the people down in a crossfire. This is supposed to be justified
because the villagers shot back. And there seems to be a note of pride
in an operation well-done. That's the official story from the Serbian
police, which is the basis for the Le Monde account. It puts the best
possible light on the Serbian operation, which more likely was an
outright massacre of civilians, particularly as most of the victims
were shot at short range in the head and sometimes from the back. But
taking the Serbian police story at face value, how does it differ from
what the American imperialist troops did in Vietnam's famous "Iron
Triangle"?
The American aggressors claimed that the villages in the "Iron
Triangle" were "Vietcong" strongholds, which they were. (The American
press always talked of "Vietcong", as the Serbian government always
talks of Albanian "terrorists".)
The Americans claimed that they came under fire when their troops
sought to enter villages in the Iron Triangle, which was also true.
Therefore, the American imperialists claimed they were justified in
destroying villages, in shooting down whoever moved, etc. One famous
statement, concerning a town whose name I have unfortunately
forgotten, was that "we had to destroy the (village) in order to save
it". At the time, I and other anti-war protesters thought that these
operations in the "Iron Triangle" were fascistic, blood-thirsty, and
genocidal. We also believed that if the American troops were meeting
this sort of opposition in the villages, this verified our view that
the U.S. should get out of Vietnam. If the people opposed the U.S.
presence, this didn't justify slaughtering them, but meant that the
U.S. was engaged in a war against the Vietnamese people.
Yet time moves on, and now there are "leftists" who apparently
believe rationales similar to those used by the American military.
Isn't the justification in the Le Monde article for the Racak
operation the same as the justification for American tactics in
Vietnam? And doesn't Greg Butterfield think that Racak wasn't a
massacre if it occurred the way the Le Monde story indicates?
To kill villagers trapped after they flee the armed invasion of
their village, that's OK. That's supposedly legitimate punishment of
"terrorists". To shell a small village, that's supposedly an ordinary
part of a legitimate police raid to enforce the criminal law. If
previous Serbian operations forced most of the inhabitants to flee,
that's not a sign that the Serbian armed forces are fighting the local
population. Oh no, it's just supposed to make further attacks on Racak
even more legitimate. What else can "terrorists" expect to see in the
villages they come from?
The account by the Serb police of what happened at Racak is really
cynical and frightening. If the Serbian police think that their
account justifies what they did at Racak, it means that they are
willing to perform this operation on one Albanian village after
another: shell it, enter it in force, attack the people who have fled,
and boast about the body count of "terrorists". ....
>From Communist Voice vol. 5, #2, August 15, 1999 (issue #21)
For the entire article, see
http://www.flash.net/~comvoice/21cKosovoRacak.html
For Communist Voice in general:
http://www. flash. net/~comvoice
e-mail: comvoice@flash. net