Re: L-I: MORE ON WILLIAM WALKER

[Borba100@aol.com]

In a message dated 03/20/2000 10:10:43 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
comvoice@FLASH.NET writes:

<< 
      Jared Israel (Borba100) denies the Racak massacre, citing that 
 Mr. William Walker is an imperialist.  >>

1) NOT an imperialist.  A death squad liason expert.  Important difference: a 
speicalist in setting up leadership ties with contra type groups.  Hence his 
work with the KLA.  NO other credentials for work in Kosovo. NONE.  No 
knowledge of the area - nothing.  Just his work in Honduras (vs. Sandanistas 
- IRan Contra) El Salvador, liason with death squads, PR work for them, Peru, 
vs. revolutioonaries there, setting up US cover companies to fly government 
support missions, etc.  

2) Here is Diana Johnstone's article published one or two days after the 
phony massacre.  The description of events makes the idea that a massacre 
took place utterly ludicrous.  After Mr. Green succeeds in "proviong" Racak 
was real, he can do likewise with the Sudaten Germans.
- Jared Israel

Here's Johnstone:

Racak - the impossible massacre by Diana Johnstone Paris, 20 January 1999

[Note from emperors-clothes.com: When Diana Johnstone wrote the following 
analysis demolishing the U.S. government's claims that Serbian government 
forces massacred civilians in the town of Racak in January, 1999, she had no 
crystal ball. She could not know Racak would be used to justify the 
Rambouillet "negotiations" - forced on the Serbs with the threat of bombing. 
But she did point out the general function of fabricated atrocities in the 
New World Order: they are used to mobilize public opinion to support bombing 
the 'guilty party'. Please feel free to copy and distribute this article in 
full including this note.]

French newspaper and television reports today feature evidence 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. The 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 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, and is currently working on a book 
on the former Yugoslavia.)

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