[Yugoslavia Memory of a disaster] 1999. Pressure on the forensic doctor of the Racak massacre in Kosovo?

(BRUSSELS2) In her biography, which has just been published in Helsinki, the specialist in dental forensic medicine, Helena Ranta, says officials from the Finnish Foreign Ministry tried to influence the content of his report on the Racak massacre in Kosovo.

On January 15, 1999, about forty Albanians were killed there in Racak in Kosovo. This massacre, in particular, helped convince NATO to launch bombardments of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. Helena Ranta had been commissioned by the European Union to investigate and write a report. The report was submitted - in the summer of 2000 - to the Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague and a summary returned to the EU Member States. But it did not seem to sufficiently highlight the notion of crimes against humanity.

The head of the political directorate of the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the time Pertti Torstila (now Secretary of State) allegedly asked him to withdraw from his report certain comments which were too moderate on the allegations of crimes against the humanity, according to the daily Helsingin Sanomat. "I have the emails of three Ministry officials who tried to make me 'deepen' the conclusions," she explains, to say that there had indeed been an execution, and that certain shots were "shots of grace". The expert preferred to stick to the conclusions of forensic medicine and not to enter into considerations which seemed to her "political and legal". (Torstila denied in an email sent to our Finnish colleagues and speaks of a dialogue with the expert "to seek the truth").

Ranta also recounts that William Walker, the head of the OSCE monitoring mission in Kosovo, was particularly furious with the findings of her report "to the point of breaking her pen" because she did not use harsh enough words about the Serbs. .

To read a comment on the summary of Racak's report

(NGV)

(This book was written by Kaius Niemi, an editor of the newspaper, also known for his reporting in Iraq).