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By:
Isidora Stakiq
- 19 January 2021 17:35
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The anniversary of the massacre in the village of Recak in Kosovo, on January 15, 1999, has served as an occasion for 22 years to confirm the official policy of denying the crimes and strengthening the narrative of Serbia as the victim of an international conspiracy.
On 15 January 1999, at least 45 Kosovo Albanians, including a woman and a child, were killed in a joint operation by Yugoslav Army and MUP units in the village of Reçak. More than 25 bodies were found in the village, including an old man whose head was cut off, while the bodies of 20 people who were shot in the head, apparently at close range, were found in a ditch near the village. When they were killed, the victims were mostly wearing civilian clothes. This was confirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). On the other hand, although Serbia has legally pledged to cooperate with the ICTY and respect its decisions, this crime has been consistently denied for 22 years. The dominant narrative about Recak has remained untouched by regime changes in Serbia from the 1990s to the present day - the denial of this crime is the thread that binds all authorities. This account has two main features that deviate from the facts established by the court: first, it insists that Serbian forces fought members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in Recak on January 15, 1999, and that the victims were not civilians but combatants killed in combat. . Second, it is alleged that the evidence was tampered with, meaning that the Albanians, with the support of the OSCE Verification Mission, disguised the bodies of the fighters in civilian clothes and organized the crime scene by bringing the bodies of people killed elsewhere to Reçak.
Another important feature of the dominant narrative about Recak is selective memory. Any official politics of commemoration is at the same time a politics of forgetting—of certain events, but also of the facts about the events that are remembered. Thus, the official version of the events in Recak "forgets" a lot and constructs a story that may seem convincing to uninformed readers.
What is "forgotten"
For example, it is "forgotten" that the ICTY first-instance verdict against Vlastimir Gjordjevic denies allegations of heavy fighting by Serbian forces in Recak. The decision states: "Even if it is accepted that the operation in Reçak had a legitimate military or anti-terrorist purpose, given the type of weapons used by the UJ and MIA during that operation, the absence of any indication in the evidence from Reçak is open fire, the large number of Kosovo Albanian casualties, as well as the fact that VJ and MUP were virtually casualty-free, point to a brutal disproportion between the force used in Reçak and any potential military or counter-terrorist targets."
One can often hear and read in untrue media that the ICTY indirectly confirmed that there was no massacre of civilians in Reçak by removing Reçak from the indictments in Kosovo affairs (Milutinović and others, Gjorgjevic). Recak was excluded as a point of the indictment, but not because of lack of evidence, but because of the need to conduct trials more efficiently and economically, which was the practice of the Tribunal, obviously suitable for misrepresentations and fake news.
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That this is fake news can be concluded from the judgments of the first and second instance of the ICTY in the Gjordjević case. As the Appeals Chamber points out, although the events in Recak were not the basis for specific charges of murder, they remained relevant to other issues in the indictment: to establish the accused's intent (mens rea) and his participation in a joint enterprise criminal. TPNJ not only did not indirectly confirm that there was no massacre of civilians in Recak, but also explicitly confirmed that there was.
Another untruth on which the official version of events in Recak rests is that, in addition to Yugoslavia and Belarus, the Finnish team of forensic experts determined that the dead in Recak were shot from a distance, meaning that they died in battle . This has been clearly stated by pro-government media such as Večernje Novosti and Kurir, while Politika and Blic go a step further and, in addition, state that Finnish forensic experts have confirmed that gunpowder particles were found in the hands of victims. However, even in this case, the truth is different.
Pathologist Helena Ranta, who headed the Finnish forensic team, admitted that William Walker, head of the OSCE Verification Mission in Kosovo, pressured her to qualify the events in Recak. The Serbian media presents this as proof that there was no crime, ignoring Helena Ranta's other statements: her denial that those killed in Recak were changed afterwards; insisting that the victims were killed at the scene and shot at close range; noting that Serbian officials also pressured her about the content of the report. As for the gunpowder that Serbian forensics allegedly found in the hands of the victims a few days after the murder, Ranta says: "The much-talked-about gunpowder test must be done within a few hours for the results to be accurate. ". […] It is amateurish to even suggest a gunpowder test a few days after death. "
Thus, in Reçak's official account, the ICTY and the Finnish forensic team are not dismissed as corrupted by "anti-Serbism" – which is typical of nationalist discourse – but in fact invoke their authority, but with misinterpretations and silence of the relevant facts.
Leaders of denial
On January 15, many Serbian media, as well as representatives of the Serbian government, promoted the former investigative judge from Pristina, Danica Marinkovic, who conducted an investigation in Recak on January 18, 1999 and who later testified as a defense witness in the case against Slobodan Milosevic, and with her testimony, she confirmed Milosevic's claim that the crime in Reçak was fabricated by William Walker.
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During the proceedings before the ICTY, Judge Marinković argued the opposite of most international observers: that the victims were wearing uniforms, had no gunshot wounds to the head, that she had not seen the body of the child... ICTY considered that the international observers provided more reliable evidence ( including videos); rejecting Judge Marinkovic's accusations, and concluding that on January 18 she was shown a "staged scene by the police" - which speaks of the involvement of state authorities in the concealment of crimes. However, the narrative about Recak that was created by the Milosevic regime, including Judge Marinkovic as an important bearer of the narrative, became an official position that was taken by subsequent authorities in Serbia.
A few days ago, the director of the Office for Kosovo and Metohija, Petar Petkovic, thanked Danica Marinkovic as "the most meritorious for uncovering the truth about the Reçak case". While the authorities consider her responsible for uncovering the truth, many others consider Judge Marinković responsible for covering up crimes against Kosovo Albanians, including torture of prisoners. Lawyer Nekibe Kelmendi called Judge Marinkovic "Belgrade's ambassador for rigged trials in Kosovo," and Marinkovic himself took pride in the draconian prison sentences of Albanian dissidents, including Albin Kurti. In an interview last year, she said that "they" - and it can be inferred from the context that she was talking about Kosovo Albanians - have always been "prone to fraud, fiction, staging".
Judge Marinković's biography and views on Albanians do not prevent the representatives of the Serbian regime from declaring her a true heroine and reproducing her story about Reçak. The crime against civilians in Recak is also denied by President Vučić himself, who stated: "I repeat now that it was a fabricated crime, where everything was falsified by that hochstapler, liar and deceiver of the world Walker." Vučić made this statement a little over a year ago, on the occasion of the decision of the court in Pristina, which sentenced Ivan Todosijević, a former minister in the government of Kosovo and a member of the Serbian List, to two years in prison for the claim that the crime in Reçak was invented by "Siptar terrorists".
Among the prominent deniers of the crime is the commander of the Reçak operation, former police general Goran Radosavlević Guri, who is a member of the Main Board of the SNS - despite evidence of his involvement in other murders and hiding the bodies of Albanians killed in Kosovo in the mass graves in Serbia. It should not be forgotten that Radosavljevic held high police positions during the last regime and that no proceedings were ever initiated against him.
Denial of crimes
The war in Kosovo, as well as NATO's bombing of the RF of Yugoslavia, were established as key points of the official commemoration policy in which Serbia is sometimes the hero, sometimes the victim, and never responsible for the crimes. Huge efforts and resources are being invested in linking the memory of the last war with the myth of Kosovo, that is, the idea that Kosovo is a Serbian holy place - because when something is declared holy, everything becomes permissible. Claims that the crime in Reçak was fabricated to find a reason for NATO intervention not only denies the killings in the village of Reçak, but implicitly denies all previous crimes against Albanians since the beginning of the armed conflict in Kosovo in February 1998.
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In addition to making justice for the victims impossible, the denial of responsibility for war crimes also affects the present and future of the region because it defines the relationship between the states that emerged from the breakup of Yugoslavia and their peoples. In this case, the denial of the crimes of the Serbian forces in Kosovo supports the policy of "not giving up" on Kosovo, whose hostages we have been for two decades. Although declaratively committed to dialogue and the "normalization" of relations, the current government - as shown in this text - openly denies the crimes committed by Serbian forces in Kosovo. This is not only the policy of the current regime, but also of the previous ones, from the 1990s until today. And without acknowledging the war crimes and ensuring justice for the victims, the normalization of relations remains a simple phrase.
The author is the coordinator of activities in the memory program at the Fund for Humanitarian Law
