{"id":240894,"date":"2023-08-07T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2023-08-07T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=240894"},"modified":"2023-08-06T06:33:58","modified_gmt":"2023-08-06T05:33:58","slug":"1999-nato-cia-false-flag-operation-at-racak-set-precedent-for-similar-operations-in-syria-and-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/08\/1999-nato-cia-false-flag-operation-at-racak-set-precedent-for-similar-operations-in-syria-and-ukraine\/","title":{"rendered":"1999 NATO\/CIA False Flag Operation at Ra\u010dak Set Precedent for Similar Operations in Syria and Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”<\/em>
\n — <\/em>Mark Twain<\/cite><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Burials in Ra\u010dak after the 1999 massacre. [Source: news.bbc.co.uk]<\/p><\/div>\n

Designed to Create a Pretext for Military Intervention<\/strong><\/p>\n

Clinton administration claimed Serbian forces massacred civilians when deaths at Ra\u010dak resulted from fighting between the Serbian Army and the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which Washington supported.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

7 Jul 2023 <\/em> – We are living in terrible times. The great hegemon\u2014the United States of America\u2014and its false flags abound all around.\u00a0Where do I start?\u00a0Remember Bucha anyone?\u00a0Let me tell you about the Ra\u010dak massacre in Serbian Kosovo and Metohija in 1999, yet another brutal U.S.-NATO false flag that was used to justify military intervention and bombing.<\/p>\n

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The Serbs have been trying for more than two decades to present the truth about this 1999 false pretext for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, which at the time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro.<\/p>\n

The alleged massacre, which helped mobilize public opinion against the Serbs, occurred on the night and early morning hours of January 14 and 15, 1999,\u00a0during a period of military conflict between the Serbian security forces and members of the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).<\/p>\n

If any CovertAction Magazine<\/em> readers get the impression that the KLA resembles ISIS in some respects, your intuition is good.<\/p>\n

Forty-five members of the KLA were killed in the so-called Ra\u010dak massacre, though Serbia has been trying to defend the truth about it for more than 20 years.<\/p>\n

Namely, Serbian institutions have been trying to communicate to the broader public that the claims about a massacre in Ra\u010dak, allegedly committed upon civilians, were an outright lie and that it was, in fact, an armed conflict between Serbian security forces and KLA members.<\/p>\n

Investigative Judge Danica Marinkovi\u0107, who has been working on the case for years, now claims with utmost credibility that William Walker, a veteran U.S. diplomat and head of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) who had covered up the murder of six U.S. nuns by death squads when he was ambassador to El Salvador, told the media his own distorted version of the course of events that night without ever waiting for the competent and unbiased authorities to investigate the whole affair.<\/p>\n

\n
\"A
Judge Danica Marinkovi\u0107 [Source: telegraf.rs<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"A
William Walker [Source: wikipedia.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

She points out that, later,\u00a0the Hague Tribunal accepted the truth that there was no massacre in Ra\u010dak. Judge Marinkovi\u0107 has repeated many times that a huge amount of weapons and ammunition, such as grenade launchers and automatic guns, were found on the spot people were killed immediately after the conflict.<\/p>\n

The spot of the alleged massacre was the same location as the KLA headquarters and the people killed were found with KLA military insignia on their uniforms.<\/p>\n

Judge Marinkovi\u0107 stated that the Serbian police received the intelligence information that the region was ridden\u00a0with terrorists and some information about their actions prior to that event.<\/p>\n

Serbian police had indeed been forced to deal with KLA terrorists in the region.<\/p>\n

Judge Marinkovi\u0107 reported that a number of the deaths occurred due to wounds inflicted by firearms shot from a distance. There was no evidence suggesting that the deaths occurred because they may have been bashed by dull objects or by maltreatment or physical torture, that is, the way Walker falsely claimed.<\/p>\n

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KLA terrorists. [Source: youtube.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A reputable Finnish forensic expert, Dr.\u00a0Helena Ranta<\/a>, who worked on the case in real time, together with her team of experts, later confirmed that William Walker exerted a considerable amount of pressure on her while she was preparing her report. She also believed that he expected her to support his explanation of the events that night. With this admission from Dr. Ranta, the grim story may have been given the epilogue the Serbs were hoping for.<\/p>\n

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Dr. Helena Ranta [Source: nalstenaani.ri<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cIn a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act\u201d\u00a0\u2013 George Orwell<\/em><\/p>\n

Judge Marinkovi\u0107 has bravely repeated a number of times that William Walker\u2019s claim that an alleged massacre happened in Ra\u010dak by Serbian forces, which supposedly constituted a war crime, was a blatant and unscrupulous lie and an arbitrary misconstruction.<\/p>\n

The Ra\u010dak incident has often been referred to as a \u201cmassacre\u201d of innocent civilians.<\/p>\n

However, it should be noted that it is not within the scope of the EU Forensic Team or any other person to draw any such inferences; neither is it within their competence to use the term \u201cmassacre,\u201d having participated\u00a0solely in examinations of the bodies. The arbitrary use of the term \u201cmassacre\u201d cannot be based on medico-legal\u00a0facts because it\u00a0is a description of the circumstances surrounding the deaths of persons as\u00a0determined after a thoroughly prepared analysis of all available evidence.<\/p>\n

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Family members grieve victim at Ra\u010dak. Those who were killed appear to have been mostly soldiers. [Source: washingtonpost.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Judge Marinkovi\u0107 has often emphasized that Walker did not wait for national authorities and competent independent bodies to investigate further and provide facts. Dr. Ranta, the Finnish forensic expert, being\u00a0aware of the restrictions to her mandate, later refrained from describing the incident in Ra\u010dak as a \u201cmassacre.\u201d<\/p>\n

She still stands by her statement from earlier in the investigation about the pressure Walker exerted. Another team of forensic experts, from Belarus, confirmed the same.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Ra\u010dak\"
[Source: blic.rs<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

At the professional level, the expert team experienced no problems in collaborating with Yugoslav\u00a0or Belarussian pathologists.<\/p>\n

After the autopsies were completed in January, the Serbian and\u00a0Belarussian pathologists decided to draw up common reports in order to summarize their findings. The Finnish team, however, refused to sign off for mysterious, and what appear to be political, reasons. (Finland recently set its goals to join NATO and has historically been fomenting anti-Russia, anti-Belarus sentiments\u2014Russia supported the Serbs in the war.)<\/p>\n

After a thorough investigation by the Serbian police, subsequently confirmed by Judge Marinkovi\u0107\u2019s\u00a0team, there were no children or women among the murder victims, most of the dead had several layers of clothes and military boots on, and they used guns.\u00a0A paraffin test was used for gunshot residue analysis (GSR)\u00a0by Judge Marinkovi\u0107\u2019s team but the Finnish team refused to do so.\u00a0The paraffin test was positive for 37 of the 40 persons killed.<\/p>\n

Judge Marinkovi\u0107\u00a0has stated that the deaths of all 40 people whose bodies were found\u00a0in the nearby mosque, were caused by injuries inflicted by firearms shot from a distance and from a sedentary position by a person\/people who shot at them, which is still applicable to this day, based on the evidence collected. The evidence goes to prove that there was no massacre in Ra\u010dak and the people who died were neither civilians nor were they innocent local villagers of either Serbian or Albanian population, as the Pristina officials keep claiming.<\/p>\n

Based on these blatant lies by William Walker and his OSCE team as background, this U.S.-NATO false-flag incident was used as a pretext to bomb Serbia and launch the NATO aggression on the then SRJ\u2014Judge Marinkovi\u0107 points out in the documentary\u00a0DOSIJE KOSOVO<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

An eminent French reporter with Le Figaro<\/em>,\u00a0Renaud Girard, who witnessed what was going on at the time in Ra\u010dak, and Kosovo and Metohija in general, claims that the events in Ra\u010dak were a skillful manipulation by KLA so as to provoke and set off an international military intervention against the Serbs.<\/p>\n

Regrettably, they had \u201cwholehearted\u201d support by the then-director of the OSCE mission, the unscrupulous William Walker. When a day later he arrived in the village of Ra\u010dak, he found the KLA members in military uniforms in the whole village and only the body of men lying stretched out on the ground one next to each other one by one.<\/p>\n

\"A
Renaud Girard [Source: lefigaro.fr<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps the Serbian authorities may not have abided by the rules of warfare but that was certainly not a massacre on civilians in the village of Ra\u010dak. Girard added that, in the village, one could see military trenches everywhere, and he was utterly confused at seeing them there.<\/p>\n

He told himself the world must know the truth about this: \u201cI owe the truth to the world. I wrote an article the next day based on those facts. I wrote that William Walker may have rushed only too quickly to provide his conclusions. It was the breaking news at the time.\u00a0Le Figaro<\/em><\/a>\u00a0published it the following morning and Le Monde<\/em> the following afternoon,\u201d Girard remembers.<\/p>\n

The Guardian<\/em><\/a>\u00a0also reported about\u00a0Girard\u2019s views.<\/a> That article, he pointed out, caused an outrage in the general public.<\/p>\n

Walker said that the article was horrible and that he would not allow me to interview him. An American friend told me, \u201cYou, scumbag, you killed the story.\u201d<\/p>\n

I say that what they love doing is the\u00a0\u201cHollywoodization\u201d\u00a0of the media in which you show the bad guys killing the good guys and the West looking at all that whilst doing nothing. Captain Scott was there in Ra\u010dak when that article was published. Giraud said of him:<\/p>\n

\u2018His name was Scott. We had dinner together. We asked what happened? Why didn\u2019t you tell [New York Times<\/em> journalist Nicholas] Kristoff what happened. Why were you waiting for Saturday for OVK [KLA] to arrive and tell the world that there had been a massacre? What happened?\u201d<\/p>\n

Scott allegedly replied: \u201cThat is rather difficult. We do know that there was nobody by that gully on Friday. [A KLA soldier] told us that he was passing through the villages on Saturday, Sunday and Monday and that the guys told him that sometimes somebody has to be sacrificed. \u2018If you have to fight for a higher goal, you have to sacrifice something.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The dead bodies were moved elsewhere, uniforms were taken off and persistent lies were spread by the world media.<\/p>\n

The international committee headed by William Walker made sure that the world found out a different interpretation of what truly happened.<\/p>\n

By moving around the dead bodies of Albanian Shqiptari (paramilitary) fighters, by taking off their uniforms and by persistently telling blatant lies to the world media, they have managed to make a police action against the terrorists look and sound like a massacre of innocent civilians. And that is the way history will remember it if Western sources are to be believed.<\/p>\n

Allegedly, the Shqiptari are funding a book by Walker with 70,000 euros for him to falsify history.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, Walker got himself a monument in Pri\u0161tina in the pseudo state of Kosovo in 2017.<\/p>\n

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[Source: balkaninsight.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For what it is worth, \u00a0Tony Blair, with a proven record of war crimes, was honored in the same way. For the record, Walker\u2019s actions on that night and the day after back in 1999\u00a0prompted a strong reaction from Yugoslav authorities, which declared Walker \u201cpersona non grata\u201d and asked him to leave the country immediately.<\/p>\n

All\u00a0hell broke loose on Kosovo and Metohija when the OSCE mission arrived there headed by William Walker.<\/p>\n

General Vladimir Lazarevi\u0107\u00a0said in an interview for\u00a0Politika<\/em><\/a>\u00a0that the\u00a0Kosovo Verification Mission\u00a0<\/em>(KVK)\u00a0was a huge international deception on a massive scale.<\/p>\n

\"A
William Walker, left, head of the Kosovo Verification Mission, visits the OSCE office in Malisevo and inspects a firearms sign in January 1999. [Source: osce.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Neither Walker nor the \u201cverifiers\u201d (the officials who were working for the Verification Mission) even tried to hide their ill intent, which was to cause a conflict with the Serbian security forces in Kosovo at any cost, and then to expel the Serbs from Kosovo and Metohija, says General Lazarevi\u0107, Commander of the Pri\u0161tina Corps of the Serbian Army and later of the Third (Ni\u0161ka) Corps of the Yugoslav Army.<\/p>\n

\"A
General Vladimir Lazarevi\u0107 [Source: wikipedia.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

General Lazarevi\u0107 added that OSCE had a goal to consolidate, re-orgranize\u00a0and transform and then arm the terrorist KLA, completely demolished after the failed preparations and their efforts to start an uprising in October 1998. General Lazarevi\u0107 said that there were constant\u00a0rumors that the KLA, aided by the U.S., were being prepared for the\u00a0warring Kosovo Spring (the equivalent to the\u00a0Arab Spring)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In the period before January 1999 there were a high number of provocations by the Shqiptari terrorists and brutal attacks on the Serbian civilians in Kosovo. In the region of Nerodimlja in that period, there was the so-called 161st KLA brigade with its headquarters in Ra\u010dak, led by notorious terrorist\u00a0Shukri Buja<\/a>. This paramilitary formation was notoriously in charge of liquidations, kidnapping and other monstrous crimes on the local Serbian population.<\/p>\n

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Shukri Buja [Source: korasev.info<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There were even efforts to repeat the monstrosities from Markale in 1994 in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the way that they planted explosives in Podujevo, Pri\u0161tina and Mitrovica. Many civilians died due to that but the international community did not react in any way whatsoever.<\/p>\n

Walker did not just sit doing nothing<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Although none of these things had been successful prior to Ra\u010dak, nobody in OSCE and KVK just sat doing nothing. Quite the opposite. They were concocting\u00a0perfidious atrocities and then they cooked up a plan to orchestrate Ra\u010dak, a false-flag operation with such an easily recognizable CIA signature behind it. The Ra\u010dak incident was used as a pretext to launch a NATO attack and a brutal aggression on SR Yugoslavia which was all assisted by the CIA and the Pentagon.<\/em><\/p>\n

Yet, pursuant to an unprecedented resolution by The Hague Tribunal prosecution this incident was used as the first point in the indictment in the legal proceedings against the President of Serbia Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107, and then later against other Serbian politicians and military commanders, which also featured in the indictment for the alleged massacre in Ra\u010dak.<\/p>\n

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Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 [Source: icty.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

General Lazarevi\u0107 goes on to say that one of The Hague investigators,\u00a0William Kelly<\/a>,\u00a0concluded by using NATO satellite images showing that there were seven murdered KLA terrorists in two locations and, upon the order of William Walker, about 40 murdered KLA terrorists were moved, dragged or possibly transported to\u00a0the gully\u00a0<\/em>nearby that afternoon, whose clothes were then changed into the clothes of civilians.<\/p>\n

It was William Walker who declared it a massacre on civilians by the Serbian police and the Serbian Army, but that grand deception was immediately seen through, above all by Judge Marinkovi\u0107 and the Serbian investigative team in Pri\u0161tina, which was the first one to arrive in Ra\u010dak.<\/p>\n

She later presented her evidence to The Hague Tribunal that no civilian was murdered on that occasion. When General Lazarevi\u0107 heard of Walker\u2019s plans to have his book on Ra\u010dak published, he stated that it would be more honest if Walker admitted he deceived the\u00a0whole international community, even though he still feels no remorse for all the evil he has committed.<\/p>\n

Sadly, the alleged Ra\u010dak massacre false flag\u2014U.S.-NATO style\u2014stuck the final nail in the coffin of Serbia at the time, before the NATO bombing unleashed two months afterwards.<\/p>\n

Yet, thanks to indefatigable investigation and research and the testimonies of Judge Marinkovi\u0107 and the Finnish forensic expert and her team, no Serbian individual was charged with a crime in The Hague on account of Ra\u010dak, though the consequences of the NATO bombing has left an indelible mark of atrocities on Serbia and her nation for decades to come.<\/p>\n

Fast forward to 2023, the Public Prosecution in Pri\u0161tina has recently issued an arrest warrant for 18 Serbs who are allegedly guilty for what happened in Ra\u010dak 1999. Albin Kurti, the pseudo PM of the pseudo, illegal state of Kosovo stated, in the temporary Pri\u0161tina institutions at the commemorative meeting on the anniversary of that event, his baseless claims about Serbia: that those who deny genocide wish to repeat it. The world now is aware this was neither a massacre nor a genocide, and was not done against civilians.<\/p>\n

But as much as they are trying to use and abuse the orchestrated indictments, and as much as they keep attacking the Serbs to desperately try to whitewash and arbitrarily revise the true nature of Serbian anti-terrorist military action in Ra\u010dak 24 years ago, Serbia will not allow them to do any such thing, responded Serbian Minister Nikola Selakovi\u0107.<\/p>\n

Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister, recently compared\u00a0Bucha and Ra\u010dak<\/a>. He added that, due to the American colonial mentality, they like to think that they can do anything. He recalled the bombing of Yugoslavia and added that Bucha, a U.S. false-flag operation in Ukraine 2022, was almost identical to that of Ra\u010dak in 1999.<\/p>\n

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Nikola Selakovi\u0107 [Source: wikipedia.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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Sergey Lavrov [Source: wikipedia.org<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n

The \u00a0world has slowly come to realize that the whole false-flag case was fabricated by the United States and its extended hands of OSCE and NATO. It was used to get the then hesitant governments of the collective West to agree to the start of the NATO bombing. At that point the negotiations in\u00a0Rambouillet\u00a0came to a political halt at a critical moment because the Serbian government did not agree to the establishment of a military alliance protectorate over the whole country.<\/p>\n

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1999 Rambouillet conference. [Source: dw.com<\/a>]<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The hidden agenda behind the Ra\u010dak massacre was to pressure other NATO countries into an illegal aggression against SR Yugoslavia, commenced without the approval of the UN Security Council. The whole scenario was pre-planned much earlier and the U.S. and NATO were just waiting for the right moment to unleash hell in their grand\u00a0Drang nach Osten<\/em>\u00a0plan masterminded as far back as 1945 immediately after the end of World War II.<\/p>\n

______________________________________________<\/p>\n

Olga Peterson is a writer and translator living in Serbia.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – covertactionmagazine.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Designed to Create a Pretext for Military Intervention<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":56341,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3102],"tags":[417,133,1284,1126,1050,767,780,91,2571,112,413,961,70],"class_list":["post-240894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-nato","tag-bullying","tag-cia","tag-false-flag","tag-hegemony","tag-imperialism","tag-middle-east","tag-military-intervention","tag-nato","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-pentagon","tag-syria","tag-ukraine","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":240899,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240894\/revisions\/240899"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/56341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}