[Marxism] Racak?

[Michael Karadjis]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: marxism-bounces+mkaradjis=theplanet.net.au at lists.econ.utah.edu
> [mailto:marxism-
> bounces+mkaradjis=theplanet.net.au at lists.econ.utah.edu] On Behalf Of
> Louis Proyect
> 
> Btw, Karadjis said this last month:
> 
> "Yes, that is correct, and what the moderator tried to say about Racak
> is outdated, as I'll show in another post."
> 
> This was a reference to my belief that the "civilian massacre" in
> Racak
> had the same relation to Yugoslavia that WMD's had to Iraq. 
> 
> I doubt that Karadjis will ever favor us with that post clearing up
> Racak

Yawn. Yeh, I really want to discuss ... Racak. But anyway, the moderator
is right that I did say I would do something but forgot about it, among
more important things than discussing some particular incident on one
day a decade ago about which there is no real discussion, except among a
few embittered left apologists, mainly in cyberspace. So I'll get onto
it.

The point is not how significant Racak was. It was a ghastly massacre,
yet people might argue that the massacre of 45 people was not as grand
as many other massacres in the world, yet NATO had a reason to focus on
that one at that time. That might be a useful argument to explain that
NATO's motives were not humanitarian etc. Even within the Kosova
conflict, it was only one small event where 2000 people had been killed
in the year up till then. It is certainly small compared to the
genocidal actions of Serbian nationalists in Bosnia.

Yet this is not the argument being used. The whitewash being pushed is
that no massacre occurred.

The post the moderator had sent was that hackneyed old article by FAIR:
http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak.html

which alleged the Finnish pathologists investigating the Racak massacre
were unsure if there had been a massacre, were unsure if they were
civilians, and that their report was classified.

This baloney was answered way back in the article 'Dubious Sources: How
Project Censored Joined The Whitewash of Serb Atrocities' by David Walls
at http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue33/walls33.htm#n4 . You will see
that the report was declassified and the Finnish pathologists said the
opposite of what the apologists all want her to have said and
continually disingenuously claim that she said. Here is an excerpt:


"As a European Union Forensic Expert Team was already conducting
investigations in Kosovo, its Finnish Director, Dr. Helena Ranta, was
asked by the OSCE to help perform autopsies on 40 of the victims who had
been moved to Pristina. Her initial report on the autopsies by the team
was completed on March 17, 1999 and noted that there was "no indication
of the people being other than unarmed civilians." 


"Dr. Ranta's EU Forensic Expert Team returned to Racak in November 1999
and March 2000 to recover additional evidence at the gully where the 23
bodies were found. Newsweek broke a story in its April 24, 2000 issue
that the team had discovered bullets in the gully, confirming that the
killing was indeed a massacre as earlier reported. Dr. Ranta presented
the final report of the team to the EU's Western Balkans Working Group
in Brussels on June 21, 2000. The report was sealed and delivered to the
ICTY in the Hague, where it became part of the evidence leading to an
indictment of Milosevic. As three colleagues of Dr. Ranta's in Helsinki
prepared to publish an article in the journal Forensic Science
International on the Racak victim autopsies, the Berliner Zeitung
repeated the claim that the autopsies showed no evidence of a massacre
and that this was the final report on the matter. In fact, the FSI
article, based only on the early 1999 autopsies, made no judgment about
whether a massacre had occurred or not. This story was then repeated in
the U.S. by the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting 
(FAIR), by Martin Lee in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and others.
Under pressure in Europe to counter these interpretations, the Council
of the EU declassified the Executive Summary of the final report of the
EU Forensic Expert Team in Kosovo in February 2001. The summary notes
that bullets and bullet fragments had been found in the gully where
photographs taken at the time showed the bodies to be positioned, and
that DNA evidence on the bullets connected them to the bodies autopsied.
In a separate interview, Dr. Ranta estimated the bodies had been shot
from a distance of a couple of meters. The evidence confirmed that an
atrocity had been committed."


Another useful article is 'FAIR Misrepresents the Racak Massacre', by
Roger Lippman http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/fair.htm 

One of the striking things about all this is the oddball claim that
Racak was like the Gulf of Tonkin. What a stretch. I'm just wondering
what would have been wrong with what the Vietnamese were alleged to have
done in 1964 even if it were true, let alone how that would change our
attitude to a decade long US genocidal war with that excuse. In other
words, what is the point of years of misrepresenting just one brutal
massacre of civilians by the Serbian armed forces, as it there were not
hundreds of others? It was not necessary to "stage" a massacre, why not
just choose another real one? In any case, there were two Rambouillet
conferences in between Racak and the launching of NATO's aggression.
What difference would it make to us if the Racak massacre did in fact
occur, just like so many others occurred and have been documented in
great detail? Would that make NATO's terror bombing, leading to dozens
more massacres both by and/or under NATO bombs, OK? Obviously not. 

What was the 'Tonkin Gulf' of Gulf War I? Was it Hussein's invasion of
Kuwait? From memory, yes. So therefore, we should either:

(a) deny the invasion of Kuwait took place and spend the next 20 years
trying to "prove" it in a loony bin, or
(b) support the US genocidal attack on Iraq in 1991, if we cannot prove
this 'Tonkin Gulf' did not take place, or 
(c) admit it took place and explain why no matter what Hussein does,
including far grater crimes than merely occupying some feudal sheikdom,
cut out of Iraqi sand by UK imperialism, we still oppose imperialist war
and slaughter.

I prefer option (c) myself.

Another useful article on Racak is this piece by Jim Green from
Communist Voice, where he argues with some Marcyite, and demonstrates
the similarity between the "left" apologetics for the Serbian army's
brutal counterinsurgency operations in Kosova, including at Racak, all
the shameful discourse about having to do that to fight "terrorists",
and the similar excuses used by US and US-backed counterinsurgencies:

The Racak controversy
by Joseph Green
(from Communist Voice #21, August 15, 1999)
http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/21cKosovoRacak.html
. 
. To this day, the Milosevic government denies its atrocities in Kosovo.
Its defenders deny every massacre that has occurred, or explain them
away as justified because the Serbian forces were only killing
"terrorists" or separatist sympathizers. An important example is the
Racak massacre of January this year. Here the Serbian military forces
surrounded a village and slaughtered several dozen inhabitants. It was a
signal that the expected spring offensive of the Serbian military had
come early; after Racak there was an increasing tempo of attacks on
Albanian villages and even town. 

. Below is an excerpt from an exchange about Racak that occurred on a
left Internet mailing list in January this year. Since then, the
international (Finnish) team of forensic experts led by Dr. Helen Ranta
issued its report, condemning what happened at Racak as a "crime against
humanity". It showed that, as far as could be determined by medical
evidence, the Albanian story was correct. In his article in the
Spring-Summer 1999 issue of Covert Action Quarterly Gregory Elich claims
that "forensic tests" show that the victims had been engaged in combat.
This is a lie. If you check his references, it turns out that he either
refers to newspaper stories that appeared before the medical findings,
or to the fabricated reports produced to please Milosevic and company. 

. But the discussion below indicates that, even if one accepts the
Serbian account, what took place at Racak was a cold-blooded massacre,
just like those in a typical imperialist counter-insurgency war. When
Covert Action Quarterly, WWP, and other sources defend such actions, it
shows that their only objection to imperialist atrocities is which
imperialist commits them. 

. (The exchange below between myself and WWP's Greg Butterfield is
reprinted using a similar form to how it appeared on the mailing list,
in which it is customary to reproduce in one's reply the statement one
is answering, with ">'s" in the margin to indicate that the statement is
being quoted.) 

From: "Joseph Green" <comvoice at flash.net>
Date sent: Mon, 25 Jan 1999 01:10:26 +0000
Subject: Re: L-I: Kosovo: Le Monde casts doubt on Walker's story 
. Greg Butterfield doubts there was a massacre at Racak and cites a
story in the French newspaper Le Monde. This story tries to pick at
contradictions in the story of the Racak massacre. This story, however,
has its own contradictions. It ends with the puzzle of why the Serbian
authorities fear an investigation: if the Serbian government's account
is really true and verified by TV film, what did they have to fear? 

. There are other contradictions in Le Monde's account. For example, on
one hand, the Serbian police claim they were just looking to arrest a
single "murderer". On the other hand, they had planned out an entire
military operation against a village and proudly claimed to have killed
"dozens" of "KLA terrorists". 

. But let's look it at from another angle. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that the Le Monde story is basically true. What it says is
that the Serbian police and armed forces believed that Racak was a KLA
village, where everyone left in the village was KLA. Therefore, in a
carefully planned attack, they surrounded the village, shelled it at
dawn, forced most of the people to flee into the woods, and then mowed
the people down in a crossfire. This is supposed to be justified because
the villagers shot back. And there seems to be a note of pride in an
operation well-done. That's the official story from the Serbian police,
which is the basis for the Le Monde account. It puts the best possible
light on the Serbian operation, which more likely was an outright
massacre of civilians, particularly as most of the victims were shot at
short range in the head and sometimes from the back. But taking the
Serbian police story at face value, how does it differ from what the
American imperialist troops did in Vietnam's famous "Iron Triangle"? 

. The American aggressors claimed that the villages in the "Iron
Triangle" were "Vietcong" strongholds, which they were. (The American
press always talked of "Vietcong", as the Serbian government always
talks of Albanian "terrorists".) 

. The Americans claimed that they came under fire when their troops
sought to enter villages in the Iron Triangle, which was also true. 

. Therefore, the American imperialists claimed they were justified in
destroying villages, in shooting down whoever moved, etc. One famous
statement, concerning a town whose name I have unfortunately forgotten,
was that "we had to destroy the (village) in order to save it". At the
time, I and other anti- war protesters thought that these operations in
the "Iron Triangle" were fascistic, blood-thirsty, and genocidal. We
also believed that if the American troops were meeting this sort of
opposition in the villages, this verified our view that the U.S. should
get out of Vietnam. If the people opposed the U.S. presence, this didn't
justify slaughtering them, but meant that the U.S. was engaged in a war
against the Vietnamese people.. 

. Yet time moves on, and now there are "leftists" who apparently believe
rationales similar to those used by the American military. Isn't the
justification in the Le Monde article for the Racak operation the same
as the justification for American tactics in Vietnam? And doesn't Greg
Butterfield think that Racak wasn't a massacre if it occurred the way
the Le Monde story indicates? 

. To kill villagers trapped after they flee the armed invasion of their
village, that's OK. That's supposedly legitimate punishment of
"terrorists". To shell a small village, that's supposedly an ordinary
part of a legitimate police raid to enforce the criminal law. If
previous Serbian operations forced most of the inhabitants to flee,
that's not a sign that the Serbian armed forces are fighting the local
population. Oh no, it's just supposed to make further attacks on Racak
even more legitimate. What else can "terrorists" expect to see in the
villages they come from? 

. The account by the Serb police of what happened at Racak is really
cynical and frightening. If the Serbian police think that their account
justifies what they did at Racak, it means that they are willing to
perform this operation on one Albanian village after another: shell it,
enter it in force, attack the people who have fled, and boast about the
body count of "terrorists".


MK:
If anyone really feels the need to read the chaff from the Marcyite he
is arguing with, open the link.