-----Original Message----- From: Ian Williams <uswarreport at igc.org> To: asdnet at igc.topica.com <asdnet at igc.topica.com> Date: Sunday, January 21, 2001 8:03 PM Subject: Re: [ASDnet] The alleged "Racak Massacre"
>Andras Riedlmayer of the Justwatch list put it another way below..
>
>It looks very much like the PDS,BZ- which of course failed to find fault
>with Slobbo at any point of the war, puts its own spin which is then put
>into even more eccentric detail by Tanjug. it seems on a par with the 2,000
>bodies discovered after one year that "proved " that no one died in Kosovo,
>d espite all the other evidence. I have yet to see those who carolled the
>"Only 2,000 dead" story come back with revised stories mentioned the same
>again found the following year! The Finns said things like "inconclusive."
>And not at "close range". Great! They were gunned down at some distance,
>which must have been considerable comfort for the deceased!
>
>Ian Williams
>
>
>
>
>course, is Tanjug's way
>of putting it. A team of Finnish forensic experts, along with a team
>from fraternal Belarus, were invited by the Yugoslav authorities to assist
>in the autopsies of the bodies of 40 of the victims from Racak (reports
>from the time claim there were 45 victims). The Finns had no access to the
>crime scene and did not interview witnesses. Three members of the Finnish
>team, Juha Rainio, Kaisa Lalu and Antti Penttila have written an article
>about their autopsy findings, for publication in the professional journal
>Forensic Science International.
>
>The leader of the the Finnish team, Helena Ranta, has reportedly submitted
>her own report to the ICTY and is not among the authors of the article.
>
>The full text of Rainio, Lalu and Penttila's article is not available yet,
>but leaked excerpts appeared last week in the German tabloid Berliner
>Zeitung, which has had a long-running campaign to discredit the Racak
>massacre. You can see some examples of Berliner Zeitung's reporting
>on Racak over the past two years in Engl. translation on the websites of
>the Serbian Ministry of Information and the Serbian Unity Congress (SUC),
>e.g.
>http://www.serbia-info.com/news/1999-03/17/9795.html
>http://www.serbia-info.com/news/2000-04/05/18281.html
>
>Berliner Zeitung's 17 Jan. 2001 'exclusive' on the Finnish experts
>forthcoming technical article can be found at
>http://www.BerlinOnline.de/suche/.bin/mark.cgi/aktuelles/berliner_zeitung/
>politik/.html/1510.html?keywords=racak
>
>The excerpts quoted by BZ from the technical article do not support
>Tanjug's conclusion that "the famous 'massacre' in Racak ... never
>took place."
>
>The Finns state that they examined 40 sets of remains from Racak and found
>they all had gunshot wounds, with between one and 20 gunshot wounds in
>each body. They further state that in only one case did they find traces
>of gunpowder indicating an execution-style shooting at very close range.
>They say they did not find any evidence that the bodies they examined had
>been mutilated after death. The article states that the team "could not
>confirm that the victims came from Racak" and was not in a position to
>establish the events that led up to the autopsy, not even "the positions
>of the victims' remains at the site of the incident." None of which is
>very surprising, given the limitations under which they were working.
>
>The Yugoslav authorities and their supporters abroad have seized upon the
>Berliner Zeitung report as a vindication of their long-standing claim
>that there was no massacre at Racak. Until the Finns' technical article
>appears it's hard to be sure, but on the basis of what's quoted from it
>in Berliner Zeitung one might better characterize the Finnish experts'
>findings as inconclusive.
>
>Andras Riedlmayer
>
>The preceding is a personal opinion. Try not to post more than daily.
>
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