Racak[?] is a small ethnic Abanian village in Kosovo that by 1998 had become a local center for KLA activity. On January 15, 1999 a joint force of Yugoslav Police and Yugoslav Military entered the town, a mopping up operation near the end of the KLA insurrection.
The operation was preceded in December 1998 by shelling of the town by Yugoslav forces, and all law-abiding citizens had been ordered to evacuate: at the time of the joint operation the population consisted of KLA members, supporters, and family; and of those too stubborn to quit their homes.
With the insurrection defeated and their forces repressed, the KLA was reduced to night-time sorties to plant car-bombs and ambush the unwary. Their targets were a combination of local Police and Albanians who were not sympathetic to their methods.
Their are four depictions of the event of January 15 which must be contrasted:
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.”
Also: “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.”
Given the various political pressures to deceive in different ways about the sequence of events, we may never know exactly what happened in Racak[?], however it is likely that the narrative put together from the reports of Journalists on the scene and the initial Human Rights Watch interviews give the most accurate picture:
The Yugoslav joint force entered a mostly abandoned Racak[?] shortly after dawn, and came under fire from heavy machine gun emplacements and mortars. During the fighting an entire family attempting to flee accidentally charged an Army unit and were killed.
If the above capsule narrative were accurate, this would call into question the objectivity of the OSCE report of the event. A possible explanation for this is found in the following two observations:
Foreign media articles on the event itself and the related forensic reports:
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