Hundreds of people paid their respects on the 25th anniversary of the killing of 45 Kosovo Albanian civilians by Serbian forces in Recak/Racak—a massacre that helped spark NATO’s military action against Yugoslavia.
Recak/Racak was surrounded and attacked by Serbian security forces on the morning of January 15, 1999. The attack formed part of the Hague Tribunal prosecution’s indictment of Yugoslavia President Slobodan Milosevic. But no verdict was ever delivered because Milosevic died in 2006 while in detention.
The Recak/Racak massacre provoked a shift in Western policy toward Kosovo and became a turning point in the conflict between Milosevic’s troops and police forces and the KLA guerrillas who were fighting for independence. It became an important factor in NATO’s decision to launch air strikes on Yugoslavia two months later to force Milosevic to pull his troops out of Kosovo.
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