I appreciate these sort of statements are important for a postmortem about the war.
Unfortunately, although I can understand the main features of the Berliner Zeitung article, the linguistic register of the Frankfurter Allgemeine article is too subtle.
The only related English article I could find on the FAZ site was a commentary on "The Curse of the Good Deed".
It contained the following
>As the business world knows no objectively
>correct price, just the day-to-day market value, is there no
>hard truth concerning the events at Racak and the Serb
>"genocide"?
A strangely marxist comparison between knowledge and the economic base, but perhaps just cyncal.
I would appreciate a summary of the main findings of these German articles, which do not appear to have been echoed in for example a paper like the Guardian, presumably because the pre-leak of the report was to a German source.
I understand the main findings to be that initial statements about Racak were played up by NATO sources, and subsequent more doubtful views of the Finnish group were not publicised. There are also a lot of technical details about a serious post mortem including doubts about why the original number of 15 dead became 40 etc. The first examinations were done by Serbian and Byelorussian pathologists.
I spent a significant amount of time checking the web on this in the last two days. Others may know these sources from the time.
French 20 Jan 1999
http://www.zoran.net/afp/text/background/fabrication_of_racak_massacre.htm
Canadian from a website last updated 20 Nov 2000
http://cbc.ca/news/indepth/racak/
The picture from these is that the deaths in Racak were in the context that, as the French report says,
"Virtually all the inhabitants had fled Racak during the frightful Serb offensive of the summer of 1998."
My understanding is that the war against the KLA in 1998 produced up to a 1/4 million refugees.
The Serbian authorities were open that they were conducting a vigorous campaign against the KLA, and had reported hostilities to the observers.
According to these two critical reports the events at Racak were deaths but not mainly of civilians.They are consistent with a view that the KLA was fighting with no realistic military objective but to draw NATO into the war, by provoking the Serb authorities. The articles also emphasise William Walker's history of working in Latin America, including probably with contras.
The deaths in Kosovo turned out to be very much less than in Bosnia, by even a factor of 100. Nevertheless it is clear that the Serbian federal authorities were prepared to allow, if not to promote, mass migration in order to prevent the majority population of Kosovo from seceding.
We are unlikely to agree about the main principles to determine what should have been done by progressive people, in Kosovo, in Serbia, and in the West. But it may be possible to reach some agreement about the politics of the war that actually took place.
I hope Hinrich or Johannes are able to come back with any additional important feature in the German articles.
Chris Burford
London