( Not to be forgotten)
20 years ago, to the hour, I have just come back to the base, and despite already having about a year of experience in reporting from the war, I was still trying to calm down and stop the shaking hours after leaving the village….
During the night between the 14th and the 15th of January 1999, Serbian forces first surrounded and then went into a village called Raçak, at the time almost completely unknown even in Kosovo- Hours after they left- the footage of the bodies of executed civilians piled up in a ditch was being transmitted on every major news-channel of the world and the name “Raçak” became a synonym for what was happening here.
I did not really know how ugly it was when we started off… sometime about 10 am, the crew I was working with called me to say that they heard that the Serbian forces surrounded a village and that there seem to be some dead civilians, KVM ( OSCE-s kosovo verification Mission) was either there or on the way, as well as other media crews- so, we were going there too… it took us a bit to get everything ready , figure out which routes are safe to use that day, and gather as much info as we could before leaving…
By the time the clock in our vehicle told us it was noon, we were getting closer, moving through secondary roads , since all the main ones were closed , while, on occasion running into one of the dozens of other media, or monitoring teams trying to get there — someone , on the radio, told us that BBC managed to get in and that Rowland will be calling in live in just a few minutes- so we caught their signal and listened….
I can still hear the shaking in the voice of Jackie Rowland — the first reporter to get into Raçak ,(who will later testify about what she saw during the Milosevic trial in the HAgue-kicking off a debate about the neutrality of the media in war-zones — but that is a story on its own) as she described the scenes.
I met Jackie a couple of times before that and I knew that she was not someone that is easily excited or shocked- and the tremors, the ones that made her voice sound as if she was fighting tears as she spoke, made me realize that we are about to go into something really, really nasty… even within the standards of Balkan wars of the 90-s…
After another hour or so, we approached the village, we could see crowds of people gathered around , what will later turn out to be a ditch full of bodies, and a bunch of bright-orange Toyotas used by the KVM as well as a few other vehicles belonging to the crews that managed to get there before we did. The one thing missing was any sign of the Serbian forces who seem to have left the area…. ( as it turned out later, they left in a hurry, which is why the bodies in Raçak did not end up being thrown in the lakes or buried in mass graves in the military bases in Serbia) .
Then there was silence…
I got out of the car and into the freezing cold. Despite the large number of people present, no one seemed to be speaking. Even the birds in surrounding woods were quiet… The only thing that broke that silence were occasional sounds of crying, or weeping, coming from the villagers who managed to escape and who were coming back to find their loved ones thrown in that ditch, or still left in the streets and the yards of the houses riddled with bullet holes.
I am not going to spend time describing in detail everything what we saw once we got to the ditch in front of the village entrance…or among the houses … or the decapitated head of the 40+ man lying on the ground next to a bloodied stump and an axe usually used to chop wood… the 14 year old torn to pieces by large caliber machine gun shot from a point blank range, the woman who just stood there looking at the bodies of her executed children…. Describing every ugly detail would serve no purpose now and If anyone wants to, the reports, the footage and the descriptions can be found quite easily.. just type in your search…. all I can say is that it was enough to get the stomachs of seasoned international war-reporters turning, and shock even the likes of American generals who have seem all sorts of ugly during their time in Latin America… And I was a 21 year old local the bodies of whose people were spread around Raçak simply because they belonged to the “wrong” nation…
Yet 2 decades later, things have started being forgotten.. and It would be OK,- I sometimes wish I can forget… But there are those who are now saying “It never happened” …. “It is NATO/Muslim propaganda aimed at discrediting the christian Serbs” … “Yes there were some dead, but there were only a few and all of them were UÇK ( KLA) fighters who were killed in the fighting and who were dressed up in civilian clothing afterwards”…
Well, IT DID HAPPEN, dozens of civilians were executed, quite a few of them tortured before being killed, the bodies had clear signs — in what was a punitive operation organized by the Serbian forces after their patrol got attacked by a UÇK unit somewhere in the vicinity of the village . Just as they did in Croatia and later Bosnia… the Serbs did not bother going after the fighters, the ones who could fight back, their way of reacting to an attack was to kill a bunch of civilians as retaliation- in hope that such acts will deter further attacks…
The results of that policy are known…
And 20, 30…100 years later, we, the ones who saw it will not forget