WEEKLY SELECTION/Kosovo Massacre Resembles 1995 Attack in Sarajevo

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric-Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Jan 23 1999 (IPS) - The massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo is similar to an incident in Sarajevo that ignited a decisive Western air attack in 1995.

“Developments around Racak (the village where the massacre took place) bear a certain resemblance to Markale,” a Belgrade analyst who requested anonymity told IPS.

Markale is a market in Sarajevo where more than 60 people were killed in 1995 by shells allegedly from the Bosnian Serb side, although a UN investigation never proved any responsibility.

At least one report from a U.S. State Department official suggested then that the mortar attack could not come from any other place but a Muslim Bosnian position nearby, but the report was kept restricted.

The 1995 massacre in Sarajevo caused prompt Western reaction and a NATO bombing of Serbs in Bosnia that changed the course of the war in favour of Croatian forces.

A call for Western military intervention in Kosovo, launched this weekend by ethnic Albanian separatists, only confirmed to most Serbs that the Kosovo Liberation Army’s (KLA) strategy is to solve its military problems through foreign troops.

But analysts agree that the situation in Kosovo is not comparable to Bosnia’s and that bombing threats exert little influence over Belgrade, whose main aim is to convince Serbs that it will not give up Kosovo.

The Yugoslav government knows that Western countries are unwilling to send ground troops to fight a deadly war, as proved by the mild measures adopted by an emergency meeting held by NATO in Belgium on Sunday, two days after the Racak massacre.

“The abductions and killings of Serbs as well as ethnic Albanians in Kosovo by the KLA during the months of cease-fire almost brought the KLA to being labeled a terrorist organisation by the West,” the analyst said. “The KLA is desperate in trying to bring NATO upon the Serbs, thinking it would help it in its aims.”

“But they are wrong, and this may be a catastrophic miscalculation,” he added. “Kosovo is not Bosnia. If NATO bombs Belgrade or army positions, the only answer of security forces and the Yugoslav army in Kosovo will be to level ethnic Albanian villages to the ground.”

So far, the only undisputed fact regarding the battered village of Racak, some 30 km south of the Kosovo capital of Pristina, is that 45 ethnic Albanians are dead, some of them elders, women and children.

It was still unclear why the Serbian authorities decided to carry out such a brutal act, knowing that it would provoke angry reactions from Western countries and new threats of military action.

The Yugoslav police launched an offensive Monday against Racak and nearby villages, described as KLA’s strongholds.

A Serbian investigator judge went into the area Monday afternoon to inspect the bodies, but Belgrade denied entry to a UN prosecutor, rejecting the jurisdiction of the UN war crimes tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, based in The Hague.

A statment said that Racak was attacked Friday because it hosted “a base of armed terrorists, who ambushed and killed Serb policeman Svetozar Przic last week”.

The ethnic Albanian victims were all described as “armed and uniformed men” who had opened fire on Serbian police, but according to all accounts from the scene of the bloodbath, the number of men found with weapons did not match the ferocity of the police action.

William Walker, a U.S. national and chief of the Kosovo Verification Mission sent by the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), told journalists that some of the people were “massacred”, maimed and shot to death at point blank range.

But the Serbian Interior Ministry replied that “only the Albanian terrorists were killed” and that Walker – who has since been given 48 hours by the Serb authorities to leave the area – had “turned terrorists into civilians”.

Serbian president Milan Milutinovic, an ally of federal president Slobodan Milosevic, sharply attacked Walker, saying that the OSCE mission chief “deliberately lied” and “protected the terrorists”.

Vojislav Sesel, the Serbian vice-prime minister and an ultranationalist accused Walker and the United States of training and arming the KLA. “OSCE verificators help the terrorists with logistics,” Seselj told journalists in the town of Prizren.

To most analysts, the action looks like another attempt by Serbian and Yugoslav authorities to rally the nation around a cause with patriotic overtones. “This time it’s the last cause Milosevic has up his sleeve – Kosovo,” says Radosa Milutinovic, an independent journalist in Belgrade.

“Saturated with never-ending crisis, disappointed with wars that Serbs lost in Croatia and Bosnia, people are also disappointed with the man that once was their idol,” he says.

“Now they see that he is about to lose Kosovo, too, and wonder what price they have to pay. The government wants, in vain, to prove the contrary, trying to act as if it does control the situation on the ground,” he adds.

Considered a cradle of the Serb state in medieval times, Kosovo has almost mythological dimensions in the minds and hearts of ordinary Serbs. However, due to historical developments, it has some 2,000,000 ethnic Albanians and just about 180.000 Serbs.