BRUSSELS, March 24. /TASS/. NATO started its war in Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999 without the UN Security Council’s backing under pretext of a staged incident in the Racak village, which was described by international media as the mass killing of Albanians by the Serbian military, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the European Union Vladimir Chizhov told TASS.
"This was a pure provocation, which was just used as a pretext to start the bombings," said Chizhov, who took part in Russia’s diplomatic efforts to settle the crisis. According to him, the bodies of the Kosovo Liberation Army’s fighters, who had died earlier, were disguised as those of civilians, while the results of international forensic tests were hidden from the broad public.
"A trigger of the West’s military intervention in Yugoslavia [and now they have stopped speaking about it] was an incident in Racak, where even not a burial site but just a pile of unburied corpses was found. This was allegedly a scene of mass killings of Albanian civilians," Chizhov said.
The head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Kosovo mission, a US national, rushed to report about this on TV and "the ball started rolling." However, a group of Finnish forensic experts carried out an independent autopsy at the request of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). It showed that the bodies had the signs of regular use of firearms. "There were traces of rifles on the shoulders, clear traces of gunpowder on the fingers, and moreover bullet holes were found on the bodies, but not the civilian clothes on them."
"A clear conclusion followed that these are not civilians. These were fighters of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, combatants, who were dressed up after their death. Their commanders, by the way, today hold government positions in the self-proclaimed Kosovo Republic," the diplomat said.
The most interesting part of the story was the fate of the Finnish experts’ report, Chizhov said. "A brief version of this report was sent to the International Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia to Special Persecutor Carla Del Ponte, who later made it public in the UN. But this was only a descriptive part, and no one has ever seen the full document with all this evidence. It was compiled, but was not published, it just disappeared and was lost," he stated.
March 24, 2019 marks 20 years since NATO started its military operation against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The bombings started without the permission of the UN Security Council. Top NATO officials said the primary cause of Operation Allied Force was to prevent the alleged genocide of the Albanian population in Kosovo. According to the NATO website, during the operation, which lasted 78 days, the alliance’s warplanes made 38,000 sorties, more than 10,000 of them for conducting bombing raids.
According to Western data published by Human Rights Watch, the bombings killed nearly 500 civilians and some 1,000 military. Serbian data said some 2,000 civilians died in the bombings and several hundred people went missing, while the death toll among the military is estimated at 1,000. Serbia’s military and industrial infrastructure was almost fully destroyed, and more than 1,500 settlements, 60 bridges, 30% schools and 100 monuments were ruined. Material damage amounted to between $30bln and $100bln, and some facilities have not been reconstructed by now.