Dictionary of Genocide - D Ank Unlimited

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Racak Massacre. On January 8, 1999, a carefully planned operation carried out by the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) ambushed and killed three Serbian policemen; another
was murdered two days later. In response, on January 15, Serb police and army detachments
attacked the village of Racak, in southwestern Kosovo. Army artillery had already
hit the town in the days leading up to the assault, and with the advance into Racak a large
number of men and boys—at least forty-five—were butchered by the Serb forces. One
was a twelve-year-old boy; two were women; one of the men was decapitated. U.S. ambassador
William Walker (b. 1935), the head of the UN Kosovo Verification Mission monitoring
Serb progress toward an easing of conditions for Kosovar Albanians, immediately
condemned the massacre as the work of Serbs and declared the victims to be innocent
civilians. Largely based on Walker’s assessment, but confirmed by other eyewitness
accounts collected by journalists who came upon the scene soon thereafter, world leaders
quickly came to the conclusion that the unstable and dangerous situation existing in
Kosovo before the Racak massacre had to be addressed and ameliorated immediately. U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (b. 1937) realized that from that point onward any
attempts at negotiation with the Serbs had to be backed by a credible threat of force and
that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) had to be the major vehicle for
enforcing it. The Racak massacre can thus be seen as either the final straw testing Western
resolve with regard to Kosovo, or the start of a new initiative that would soon lead to war
between NATO and the federal republic of Yugoslavia. In all likelihood, it was probably
both. Soon afterward, Albright managed to convince other NATO leaders to convene a
conference of Serbs, Kosovar Albanians, and NATO leaders at Rambouillet, outside of
Paris, by which a settlement could be negotiated under the threat either of NATO bombing
if the Serbs refused to sign or of an abandonment of Kosovo if the KLA refused to sign.
After lengthy negotiations, the KLA did sign; the Serbs did not. As a result, on March 24,
1999, NATO began a bombing campaign that would lead to the Serb military withdrawal
from Kosovo and end in utter defeat for Yugoslavia.
Racak had another important role to play: by being in effect the catalyst for war, its
unfortunate major ramification was an attempt at ethnic cleansing throughout the
province by Serb forces acting on the orders of Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic
(1941–2006), masked by the cover of war after March 24, 1999. During this time,
NATO forces attacked targets in Kosovo in order to stop the ethnic cleansing of the