Massacre that started long haul to justice

THE undoing of Slobodan Milosevic came on a scrubby hillside in Kosovo on a crisp January morning more than two years ago.

In a crime reminiscent of Nazi reprisals in occupied Europe, 45 Kosovan Albanian farmers were rounded up, led up a hill and massacred. By Balkan standards the toll of the Racak massacre was meagre. At Srebrenica four years earlier Serbs had killed more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in three days.

The siege of Sarajevo in the mid-1990s killed 10,000 civilians in four years and left thousands more maimed. When the Serbs entered the Croatian town of Vukovar in 1991 they took nearly 300 wounded from the hospital and executed them. But at Racak, Milosevic made a crucial mistake. It led to his first indictment on war crimes charges - to date the only one that predates the three-month war with Nato.

In the other mass killings in the Balkans' decade of conflict, the dirty work had been done by troops that could not be directly linked to him. In the Croatian war in 1991 the Yugoslav army, a federal institution, and Croatian Serb irregulars were the culprits, at a time when Milosevic's title was President of Serbia.

In Bosnia, the Bosnian Serb army, which besieged Bosnian Muslim towns and led the ethnic cleansing of civilians, answered to Gen Ratko Mladic, a man with no official link to Belgrade. At Racak, however, the Serb special forces, the Specijalna Antiterroristicka Jedinica (SAJ), were sent in. This provided prosecutors at The Hague with a more direct link to Milosevic, who effectively commanded the unit.

Having just been warned that the West would tolerate no more massacres by Serbian forces after a string of gruesome mass killings the previous year, Milosevic appeared to be making a defiant gesture at Racak. When a Serbian police patrol was attacked south-west of the capital Pristina a team of special forces was despatched. The mission was clear: to exact a terrible revenge on Albanian villagers and show them and the world that the killing of Serbs would not be countenanced.

Surviving witnesses were able to describe the methods and demeanour of the men who organised the killing - they wore black uniforms, balaclavas and gloves and carried walkie-talkies. I spent more than a week collecting evidence on the Racak massacre from Albanian witnesses, Western monitors and diplomats and a few Serb sources who spoke privately and at some risk.

The official reaction from Belgrade was silence and lies. In some of the police stations I visited there was sullen denial. In others knowing smirks. On each occasion I was shown the door. Belgrade's version was that the dead were KLA fighters who had been dressed up in civilian clothes after they died. I knew that was a lie.

When I walked up the hill above Racak on that cold winter morning and found the bodies in a tangled heap I probed them to make sure the wounds matched the holes in the clothes. It was not the first time the Serbs had made such a claim and journalists in the Balkans had had to become amateur forensic science experts. Over the days the threads of the Racak massacre began to weave together.

One Albanian witness gave a good description of the killings. Crucially two Serbs gave important operational information about the SAJ and their even more clandestine counterpart in the intelligence services: the JSO or Jedinica za Specijalne Operacije.

On 27 Jan 1999, I wrote a story in The Telegraph detailing some of the findings. The reaction was immediate: death threats from unidentified Serbs and a phone call from investigators from the Hague War Crimes Tribunal.

A few weeks later, I faced two investigators in the secluded lobby of a hotel in Geneva. Slowly they took me through what I had seen and learnt. They wanted to hear even the smallest detail, the vaguest impression. That was when I knew that Milosevic would be indicted. In time his cunning would be outflanked by this small army of investigators digging away in the shadows.

A few months later, in May 1999, at the height of Nato's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, the Butcher of the Balkans was officially indicted by Chief Prosecutor Loiuse Arbour. From then on, the clock was ticking.