Dacic: Abuse of Racak incident continues

BELGRADE - Serbian FM Ivica Dacic said on Monday he had no additional information on arrest warrants issued for 18 Serbs by the so-called Kosovo's prosecution office because relations with Pristina were not a part of foreign affairs.

Speaking to reporters, Dacic noted that, since the very beginning, the 1999 Racak incident had been abused as an alibi and a pretext for attacking the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and that the abuse only continued in the present times.

He noted that William Walker, the head of an OSCE verification mission at the time, had declared the incident a massacre and that US officials had immediately said women and children had been murdered even though those killed had been armed ethnic Albanian fighters.

"There has been a lot of talk about that in the past. The incident was used to bomb Yugoslavia without an adequate UN decision," Dacic recalled.

It is sufficient to say the Hague war crimes tribunal dropped the Racak charges in the Slobodan Milosevic case due to a lack of evidence, he said.

Our forensic examinations that were subsequently ignored showed that those killed had gunpowder residues on them and had taken part in gunfights, Dacic said.

It was a conflict between terrorist groups and our police, he added.

There was only one woman among those killed - the daughter of a local ethnic Albanian commander, Dacic said, adding that the abuse of the incident so many years on was another attempt to justify separatism in Kosovo-Metohija.