Petronijevic: New Racak investigation driven solely by political motives, a “cover” for Kurti’s failures

Lawyer Goran Petronijevic assessed that the investigation and the announced indictment by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office regarding the Racak case are driven solely by political motives, serving as a kind of cover for a major internal political crisis and growing dissatisfaction with Albin Kurti's regime.

“This comes as a kind of 'cover', a mask. It would have been normal, if there had been any suspicion or serious evidence, to do this 20 or 15 years ago. But to bring it up after 26 years clearly shows that there are solely and exclusively political reasons,” Petronijevic said.

He claims that the Racak case is part of a broader picture in which legal proceedings are used for internal political purposes.

“The fabrication of these legal proceedings is gradual. When one ends, another begins. Now, a new process is needed to cover multiple issues. First, the major internal political crisis, dissatisfaction with Kurti’s regime, the issue of the persecution of Serbs, and the problem arising from the fact that in The Hague, before the Special Department for War Crimes, high-ranking KLA officials are being charged with crimes, against Albanians, and to a lesser extent, against Serbs,” Petronijevic said.

He emphasized that the Hague prosecution had excluded many events that were once attributed to Slobodan Milosevic and a group of high-ranking Serbian political, police, and military officials.

“Racak wasn’t in the focus of interest because The Hague determined it was a staged situation. More precisely, they received reliable information from the American intelligence service, with whom they had a very close relationship, that Racak was a staged incident, or a classic 'false flag.' In other words, a setup aimed at framing the Serbian side at that time, to accuse them and use that as a pretext for the bombing that had already been planned. There is no more doubt about this. Racak was entirely fabricated for that purpose,” Petronijevic stated.

When asked why a new investigation and an indictment are now being initiated in Pristina, the lawyer sees the reason as purely political.

“After everything that happened, it is now obvious that Pristina lacks political motives for the actions of Kurti’s regime. So, they are grasping at straws. After 26 years, they are pulling out events from mothballs that were already examined by our courts, the court in The Hague, and their own courts down there, and no one has ever characterized those events as actions that could be considered war crimes committed by the Serbian police or military,” Petronijevic concluded.