Human Rights Watch investigation finds:
YUGOSLAV FORCES GUILTY OF WAR CRIMES IN RACAK,
KOSOVO
(January 29, New York) - Human Rights Watch today
categorically rejected Yugoslav government claims that the victims of the
January 15 attack on Racak were KLA soldiers killed in combat or civilians
caught in crossfire. After a detailed investigation, the organization
ccused Serbian special police forces and the Yugoslav army of indiscriminately
attacking civilians, torturing detainees, and committing summary executions.
The evidence suggests that government forces had direct orders to kill
village inhabitants over the age of fifteen.
The
killing of forty-five ethnic Albanian civilians has provoked an apparent
shift in western policy toward Kosovo, which the Contact Group is meeting
in London today to discuss.
A
report in the Washington Post yesterday provided excerpts from telephone
conversations between Serbian Interior Ministry General Sreten Lukic and
Yugoslav Deputy Prime Minister Nikola Sainovic, who clearly ordered government
security forces to "go in heavy" in Racak. The two officials later discussed
ways that the killings might be covered up to avoid international condemnation.
Human
Rights Watch conducted separate interviews in Kosovo with fourteen witnesses
to the attack, many of whom are hiding out of fear for their lives, as
well as with foreign journalists and observers who visited Racak on January
16. Together, the testimonies suggest a well planned and executed
attack by government forces on civilians in Racak, where the KLA
had a sizable presence and had conducted some ambushes on police patrols.
As
has happened on numerous occasions in the Kosovo conflict, once the KLA
retreated government forces moved in and committed atrocities against the
residents of the village. While it is possible that some residents
may have defended their homes in the morning, most were clearly not involved
in any armed resistance. At least twenty-three people were summarily
executed by the police while offering no resistance - a clear violation
of the laws of war, and a crime punishable by the International Criminal
Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
Villagers
told consistent stories of how government forces rounded up, tortured,
and then apparently executed the twenty-three ethnic Albanians on
a hill outside of the village. Two witnesses interviewed by Human
Rights Watch saw these men being beaten by the police and then taken off
in the direction of the hill. Local villagers, foreign journalists,
and diplomatic observers who saw the bodies the next day said that the
victims had been shot from close range, most of them in the head; some
of them appeared to have been shot while running away. Four men are
known to have survived.
Eighteen
other people were killed inside Racak, including a twelve-year-old boy
and at least two female civilians, as well as nine soldiers of the KLA.
At least one civilian, Nazmi Ymeri (76), was executed in his yard.
Witnesses claim that Banush Kamberi, whose headless body was found in his
yard, was last seen alive in the custody of the police. At least
two people, Bajram Mehmeti and his daughter Hanumshahe (20), were killed
by a grenade thrown by the police as they were running through the street.
Human
Rights Watch confirmed that a group of approximately forty policeman, in
blue uniforms and without masks, shot from a distance of twenty meters
on unarmed civilians who were running through their yards. They killed
Riza Beqa (44), Zejnel Beqa (22), and Halim Beqa (12), and wounded two
women, Zyhra Beqa (42) and her daughter Fetije (18). It is believed that
local policemen from the nearby Stimlje police station participated in
this action.
The attack on
civilians in Racak is one in a long series of war crimes committed by the
Yugoslav Army and Serbian police during the Kosovo conflict. Since
February 1998, government troops have systematically destroyed civilian
property, attacked civilians, and committed summary executions, all of
which are grave breaches of the laws of war. The Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA) has also committed some serious abuses, such as the taking of
civilian hostages and summary executions (documented in the Human Rights
Watch report "Humanitarian Law Violations in Kosovo" available, along with
other Kosovo reports, on the web site www.hrw.org). The KLA in the
Shtimle and Suva Reka area was particularly known for a high number of
kidnappings of ethnic Serbs.
Human
Rights Watch called on the Yugoslav government to allow an unhindered investigation
by international forensics experts and the war crimes tribunal to determine
the precise nature of events. Government authorities, directly implicated
in the crime, cannot be trusted to conduct an impartial investigation.
The
organization also called on the international community to take resolute
action against Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and his government
for brazenly violating international humanitarian law. International inaction
in the face of past atrocities, the organization said, gave President Milosevic
the rightful impression that he could continue his abusive campaign with
impunity.
Finally,
Human Rights Watch called on the Contact Group to insist that the Chief
Prosecutor of the International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia,
Louise Arbour, be granted access to Racak and other sites of atrocities
in Kosovo.
HRW REPORT: YUGOSLAV GOVERNMENT WAR CRIMES IN RACAK
Background
The
village of Racak, about half a kilometer from the town of Stimlje, had
a pre-conflict population of approximately 2,000 people. During the
large-scale government offensive in August 1998, the Serbian police shelled
Racak, and several family compounds were looted and burned. Since then,
most of the population has lived in Stimlje or nearby Urosevac. On the
day before the January 15 attack, less then four hundred people were in
the village. The KLA was also in Racak, with a base near the power
plant. A number of ethnic Serbs were kidnapped in the Stimlje region,
mostly during the summer.
The
January 15 attack might have been provoked by a well-prepared KLA ambush
near Dulje (west of Stimlje) on January 8, in which three Serbian
policeman were killed and one was wounded. On January 10, the KLA
ambushed another police patrol in Slivovo (south of Stimlje), killing one
policeman. A Yugoslav Army buildup in the area around Stimlje ensued
over the next four days, especially on the mountain road between Dulje
and Caraljevo villages.
The Police Action in Racak
Witnesses
told Human Rights Watch that they heard automatic weapons fire beginning
around 6:30 a.m. on January 15, when the police reportedly exchanged fire
with the KLA from a hill called Cesta. Half an hour later, army tanks and
armored cars came as backup and shelled the forest near the neighboring
village of Petrovo, where some KLA units were positioned. They also fired
at some family compounds in Racak. Some families managed to escape
Racak, fleeing towards Petrovo, which was also affected along with the
villages of Malopoljce and Belinca.
Around
7:00 a.m., Racak was surrounded by the Serbian police. Several witnesses
told Human Rights Watch that they saw seven blue armored vehicles on Cesta
hill, as well as three VJ tanks (type T-55). The police were shooting and
some heavy artillery was fired directly into some houses near Malopoljce
and Petrovo from a position in the nearby forest called, in Albanian, Pishat.
The
extent of the fighting in Racak that morning remains somewhat unclear.
According to one Serbian policeman, the KLA's resistance around Racak lasted
almost four hours, and when they were finally able to enter the village
the police confiscated three mounted machine guns. Villagers, however,
said that the police had entered the village by 9:00 a.m. They said
that there was shooting and some artillery until 4:00 p.m. By 4:30
p.m., the police had left the village.
Deliberate Killings of the Beqa Family Members
Ten
households of the Beqa family live in the part of Racak called Upper Mahalla
on the edge of the village. According to one member of
the family, whose son and husband were both killed, at around 7:00 a.m.
thirty members of the Beqa family tried to run toward the nearby forest
when they heard the police. She told Human Rights Watch that more
then forty policemen wearing blue uniforms and without masks began shooting
at them from a distance of twenty meters from the top of the hill.
She said:
My
son H.B. was running on my left side, maybe two meters from me. He had
his trousers in his hands, we did not have time to dress properly. He was
warning me to move aside and suddenly he fell down. The bullet hit him
in the neck. In front of me my husband fell as well. He didn't move
any more.
Another
person in the same group, aged seventy, told Human Rights Watch how he
saw his twenty-two-year-old grandson shot dead, while his eighteen-year-old
granddaughter and her mother were both wounded.
The
other members of the Beqa family ran back to a house and hid under the
steps until nightfall. Nobody dared to help the wounded, who spent
two hours crawling for shelter from the police. One young women said that
the police stayed on the hill singing songs and calling her relative by
name in the Albanian language ("Aziz, come here to see your dead relatives!"),
which suggests that local policemen from Stimlje who were familiar with
the residents of Racak may have participated in the attack.
Killed by Grenade
According
to M.B., who was hiding in his home, Bajram Mehmeti and his daughter Hanumshahe
were killed by a grenade early in the morning of January 15 as they were
running through the center of the village. He said:
My
cousins were lying twenty meters from the water well. He was hit in the
head and she was hit in the chest. One man pulled her in the house and
she died in his hands.
Searching for Weapons and the Killing of Nazmi Ymeri (76)
According
to eleven different witnesses interviewed separately, groups of about thirty
policemen each were entering Racak from different directions beginning
around 7:00 a.m. By 9:00 a.m., most of them had gathered in the village
center near the mosque. These policemen also wore blue uniforms but they
had masks on their faces with slits for their eyes and mouth, and they
wore helmets. Some of them had "rocket propelled grenades" strapped to
their backs. These police searched house by house, witnesses said, looking
for people and weapons. Most of the hidden civilians, upon seeing the police
in the village center, ran in the opposite direction towards another part
of the village.
One
witness, S.A. (46), was hiding with his wife and the five children of his
neighbor between the house and stable of Hyrzi Bilalli. From
this spot, he said he overheard a discussion held by a group of policemen.
He told Human Rights Watch:
I
heard clearly when one said, "Release everybody under the age of fifteen.
You know what to do with the others." I heard when another one gave
the order to pick up the bodies from the yards in plastic bags and put
them in the cars. They took away the body of Ahmet's wife who was shot
on the street while she was trying to run from one house to another. I
later saw the place where her body was. It was just a pool of blood.
The
same witness said that the same group of policeman went into the next door
house of the elderly Nazmi Imeri, who lived alone, and was later found
dead. He said:
I
heard shooting and a scream. In the evening I went in his [Imeri's] yard
and took his body to our yard. The top of the head was blown off.
Torture in the Yard of Sadik Osmani
As
the police were in the Racak, many villager made their way, running and
hiding, to the large house of Sadik Osmani near the place called, in Albanian,
Kodra e Bebushit. One boy who was present, aged twelve, told Human Rights
Watch that approximately thirty men and four boys, himself included, decided
to hide in Osmani's stable. A group of approximately twenty women
and children hid in the cellar of Osmani's three-storey house. The
police later detained, beat, and executed the men in the stable (see below),
but the women and children in the cellar were left unharmed.
According
to the boy, the police entered Osmani's yard sometime before noon.
One tall policeman wearing a black mask and a helmet with a blue police
uniform kicked in the door and immediately began to shoot over the heads
of the thirty men lying on the ground, who were screaming "Don't shoot!
We are civilians!"
All
of the men were taken outside into the yard, where they were forced to
lie on the ground and searched for weapons. The four boys were taken out
of this group, including the twelve-year-old who spoke with Human Rights
Watch, and were locked up together with the women and other children in
Osmani's cellar. The police also took four men from the cellar -
Sadik Osmani, Burim Osmani, Rama Shabani, and Mufail Hajrizi - and put
them with the other men in the yard. Burim Osmani, who is a teenager around
fifteen years old, was later put back into the cellar, apparently because
he was too young. The conscious decision to return him, while later
executing the others, suggests that the police had a clear order to kill
the adult males of the village.
Before
the twelve-year-old boy was sent to the cellar, however, he saw how the
police beat the men in the yard, including his father and some other relatives.
The boy told Human Rights Watch:
Two
or three policeman beat them with wooden sticks. One was kicking
them in the face with his boots. The others were just watching. It was
terrible. The men were screaming, and their heads were covered with
blood. A policeman locked me in the cellar with the women, but I
could hear screaming for the next half an hour.
This
version of events was corroborated by three other women locked in the cellar
who spoke with Human Rights Watch in two separate interviews, although
they could not see the men in the yard. All of them believed that
the police had only arrested their male relatives and taken them away to
the police station in Stimlje. It was only the next day when they realized
that the twenty-three men had been killed.
Extrajudicial Executions
Some
time around 1:00 p.m. the police led the twenty-three men out of Osmani's
yard. One witness, S. A., was hidden at that time behind a compound
wall fifty meters from the Osmani house. He told Human Rights Watch
that he heard the police leading the detained men through the Racak streets.
He said:
I
heard the police ask them [the men] where is the headquarters of our army
[the KLA], and they answered where it was. Then they went together toward
the power station in the direction of our army. I think it was maybe 3:00
p.m. when I heard shooting, but I did not know that they were killed.
Members
of the OSCE's Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM) entered Racak late in the
afternoon of January 15, after having been prevented from entering the
area during the day by VJ and police forces. The KVM took five wounded
persons, including a woman and a boy suffering from gunshot wounds, and
left. During the night, the remaining men of the village searched for the
wounded, still thinking that the twenty-three men were in the Stimlje police
station. One person who participated in the search told Human Rights
Watch that they found the bodies on the hill called Kodri e Bebushit, in
Albanian, around 4:00 a.m.. He said:
I
saw Mufail Hajrizi. He was slashed on the chest. Then we found
Haqif, the guest from Petrovo. His body was lying on his side with
the hands as if he wanted to defend himself. His throat and half
his face had been cut by a knife. On the top of his head was a wooden stick
with some paper. Something was written on that paper but I can't
remember what it was. There were more than twenty bodies, almost
all of them were my relatives. We wanted to cover the bodies with blankets,
or something else, but one man said not to touch anything before KVM comes
tomorrow.
One
woman, L.S., told Human Rights Watch that her son and husband had survived
the execution. She told Human Rights Watch:
In
the morning I got information that the men from the stable were found dead.
But soon I saw my husband and son coming toward me - like they were standing
up from the grave. My son told me that the group of policeman had
pushed them with their hands behind their heads to go towards the hill.
My son was in front with Sadik, and the others were behind. When he came
to the top of the hill, he saw another group of policeman waiting for them
with rifles. He turned his head and shouted to the others to run away.
He ran toward the village of Rance, and didn't turn his head. One bullet
crossed through his pocket, and another one is still in his belt.
Precisely
how the twenty-three men were killed by the police on the hill outside
of Racak remains somewhat unclear. But witness testimony, as provided
here, and the physical evidence found at the site by journalists and KVM
monitors, makes it clear that most of these men were fired upon from close
range as they offered no resistance. Some of them were apparently
shot while trying to run away.
Journalists
at the scene early on January 16 told Human Rights Watch that many of these
twenty-three men also had signs of torture, such as missing finger nails.
Their clothes were bloody, with slashes and holes at the same spots as
their bullet entry and exits wounds, which argues against government claims
that the victims were KLA soldiers who were dressed in civilian clothes
after they had been killed. All of them were wearing rubber boots
typical of Kosovo farmers rather than military footwear.
It
is possible that some of these men were defending their village in the
morning and then went to the Osmani house once they saw the police entering
the village. However, they clearly did not resist the police at the
time of their capture or execution. They were tortured and arbitrarily
killed - crimes that can never be justified in times of war or peace.
The Forensic Investigation
After
a thorough inspection of the bodies by KVM, villagers collected the bodies
and transported them to the Racak mosque. Two days later, however,
under heavy arm, the police entered the village and took the corpses to
the morgue in Prishtina.
On
January 25, head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Prishtina, Slavisa
Dobricanin, announced that autopsies had been conducted on twenty-one bodies,
some of them conducted in the presence of OSCE personnel. None of
the bodies bore the signs of a massacre, he said. The OSCE did not
comment on its impressions of the procedures or the announced results.
A
Finnish pathology team subsequently took over for the OSCE, and began to
participate in the autopsy procedures together with the government authorities.
The team distanced itself from Dobricanin's statements and, on January
26, expressed concern that there had been a tampering with the evidence,
although they did not clarify by whom or when. The results of the
Finns' investigations should be made public in early February.
The International War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY)
Human
rights organizations can document the abuses taking place in Kosovo, and
the international community can take steps to bring these abuses to an
end. But only one institution has been entrusted by the international
community to prosecute the persons responsible for violations of humanitarian
law: the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).
The role of the ICTY is of crucial importance, as the prosecution of those
who commit atrocities is likely to have a significant deterrence effect
in addition to upholding the principles of international justice.
ICTY's
jurisdiction over war crimes committed in Kosovo is indisputable under
the mandate established by U.N. Security Council resolution 827, and has
been repeatedly reaffirmed by the U.N. Security Council in its resolutions
on Kosovo, as well as by the tribunal itself. In the absence of any
efforts on the part of Yugoslav authorities to bring the perpetrators of
humanitarian law violations to justice, the ICTY represents the only avenue
to prosecute abusers.
The
Yugoslav authorities have consistently refused to accept the jurisdiction
of the ICTY, and have frustrated the work of ICTY investigators in Kosovo
by denying them visas and barring them from carrying out investigations.
Only a few ICTY investigators have been able to gain access to Kosovo,
and even they have been officially prohibited by the Yugoslav authorities
from interviewing persons or gathering evidence. The Yugoslav authorities
base their refusal to cooperate with the ICTY on their view that the conflict
in Kosovo is an internal dispute with "terrorists," a view repeatedly rejected
by the ICTY, the U.N. Security Council, and other international actors,
including Human Rights Watch.
On
January 18, Chief Prosecutor of the ICTY, Louise Arbour, attempted to enter
Kosovo through Macedonia in order to "investigate the reported atrocities
in Racak." She did not have a Yugoslav visa, having been denied one
by the authorities, and was refused entry into the country. Back
in The Hague, Arbour stated unequivocally that she will be investigating
the massacre in Racak "with or without access to the territory."
Regarding the fears of evidence tampering, she said:
Evidence
of tampering - should such evidence become available, is, in fact, excellent
circumstantial evidence of guilt. If one can trace where the order
to tamper came from, it permits a pretty strong inference that it was done
for the purpose of hiding the truth, which demonstrates consciences of
guilt.
Western
governments and the Contact Group, including Russia, have called on President
Milosevic to cooperate with the ICTY. More than just a visa for Arbour,
this should mean unrestricted access for ICTY's investigators to Racak
and the sites of other humanitarian law violations in Kosovo committed
by both the KLA and the government.