10th anniversary of Racak
Ten years after the Serb police operation in the village of Racak, which left 45 Albanians dead, controversies over the event are continuing.
(KosovoCompromise Staff) Thursday, January 15, 2009
Dubbed "massacre of innocent civilians" by one side and "operation against terrorists" by the other, the event was the object of a recent book by a key figure, Finnish forensic dentist Helena Ranta.
A few days after the event, in January1999, Ranta is called to examine and qualify the outcome of the operation.
Under the spotlight of the world's leading media and the close surveillance of the head of the OSCE Kosovo monitoring mission, senior US intelligence officer, William Walker, -- who is sitting next to her -- Ranta qualifies the events as "crime against humanity". It is enough to launch the path towards NATO bombings of Yugoslavia, which was to happen two months later.
Now, almost a decade later, Ranta admits that she was under tremendous pressure in the case. In her biography, written by Kaius Niemi, a managing editor at Helsingin Sanomat, Ranta reveals that officials of the Finnish Foreign Ministry and the current Finnish Secretary of State had tried to influence the content of her reports.
She says that following the events in Racak, William Walker broke a pencil in two and threw the pieces at her when she was not willing to use sufficiently strong language against the Serbs.
After the bombings, Walker received numerous awards from the Kosovo Albanian leadership for his contribution to their cause.
