Invisible Blood: Do Pictures Tell the Truth? Photographic evidence shows Racak massacre

Visual records, including photographs and film, have become essential tools in documenting mass violations of human rights. The footage of concentration camp survivors taken by allied troops in WWII is continually broadcast in museums worldwide, and provides powerful evidence against the claims of holocaust deniers. But photographs and film can be cut and edited, and record only what the cameras were pointed towards. In an age of digital manipulation of images, it becomes even more difficult to claim that pictures never lie. In court, moreover, oral testimony given under oath is presumed truthful, and when the spoken word is not refuted, it may prove more convincing than pictures.

The difficulties with visual records presented themselves in the Milosevic courtroom on July 5, beginning with the testimony of Sandra Mitchell, a United States lawyer who headed the human rights division of the OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission (KVM), active from October 1998 through March 1999, just before NATO bombing started. Mitchell was responsible for sending Ian Hendrie - the British detective who testified before the court on June 7 - to the village of Racak, following reports of a massacre of 45 Albanian civilians conducted by Serb forces on January 15, 1999. Hendrie was charged with photographing everything he saw at the crime site, and his images of brutally disfigured corpses in civilian clothes have been shown repeatedly in court. The Racak incident is often cited as a turning point in the international response to the actions of the Serb forces, as it presented evidence of crimes on a scale that had not been seen in Kosovo since a negotiated agreement in October 1998.

Racak has similarly become a fulcrum of debate in the trial, with Milosevic insisting that the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and Ambassador William Walker (head of the KVM) rigged the scene to spark outrage and to provide a pretext for NATO intervention. In support of his allegations, which have been vigorously denied by every Racak witness, Milosevic has focused on two of Ian Hendrie's photographs. The images are of the same body; one shows a pool of blood near the head, while no blood is visible in the other. Milosevic's claims are low-tech, and the authenticity of the photographs has not been challenged. Rather, he maintains that the images prove that bodies of KLA fighters were imported to the site, re-dressed in civilian clothes, and that blood or a blood-like liquid was splashed around them to create the impression of an execution. According to Milosevic, the fact that the two photographs made it to the courtroom in the first place reveals carelessness on the part of the prosecution and of the 'riggers,' who must have spilled blood around the body in the moments between the taking of the two photographs.

Inexplicably, even though Ian Hendrie would have had to be present during any such staging of the Racak scene, Milosevic did not challenge him directly with this version of events. The claim emerged later during the cross-examination of Ambassador Walker, one of several officials whom Milosevic holds personally responsible for the eventual NATO bombing of Serbia. The prosecution therefore called Hendrie back to court after Sandra Mitchell's testimony in order to respond to the allegations.

Hendrie testified unequivocally that no rigging occurred at the scene, and that the photographs were taken within minutes of each other, as could be seen by the nearly identical shadow patterns in the images. He explained to the court that the photographs had been taken at different angles, and pointed out clues to the difference in perspectives, including a rock that was partially concealed by the victim's head in one photo and completely revealed in the other. The prosecution also presented the film Hendrie had used, in which the order of the negatives can be seen, and which shows a third picture taken in between the two at issue. This middle picture shows Hendrie's hand moving the head of the victim and exposing a pool of blood. The visible blood in one of the photographs is attributable to the repositioning of the corpse's head and the different angles of the shot.

Milosevic persisted in his claim that identical areas are visible in both photographs, and that blood cannot be invisible. Therefore, the scene was rigged. Milosevic could always try to find an expert witness to testify that the blood would have to be visible in both photographs if it had not been spilled, but the perspectives of the pictures are clearly different even to a layman's eye. The explanations seemed to satisfy Judge May, who told Hendrie that 'the accused does not or will not understand' after repetitive questioning on the same point by Milosevic. Milosevic of course did not admit he had been wrong, although he did say that these were not the only pictures that supported his claim after he could not undermine Hendrie's explanations. Up to this point in the trial, Milosevic's response to the Racak crimes has been firmly rooted in his own perspective of the photographs, both in the technical sense of camera positioning and in the larger sense of the contrived nature of the scene. In court, he refused to be swayed from what he insisted he saw with his own eyes.

This tunnel vision is perhaps not the best defense tactic in the face of contrary physical evidence, but the most troubling aspect of Milosevic's nearly obsessive focus on the two photographs has nothing to do with cameras and sight lines. Rather, it is that he seems to have totally dismissed the testimony of four survivors of the Racak killings; Bilall Avdiu, Agron Mehmeti, Xhemajl Beqiri, and Nusret Shabani were brought to court on May 31, June 4, and June 5. These men testified to physical and verbal abuse at the hands of Serb forces, and they survived gunfire only to find the bodies of their slain family members and neighbors. Avdiu told the court how he and 28 other unarmed men were sent into a ravine by Serb forces, whereupon they encountered other Serb soldiers who opened fire with automatic weapons. Four men at the end of the line escaped into the surrounding woods, and Avdiu survived by falling to the ground and feigning death for five hours. It was this scene that Hendrie photographed upon arriving in Racak. Ignoring for a moment the physical evidence from the original negatives and the testimony of Hendrie, Walker, and other visitors to the site, any defense based on the photographs presupposes that the survivor witnesses were simply lying.

Yet Milosevic did not successfully discount the survivors' testimony despite repeated attempts to confuse and intimidate the witnesses, all of whom are farmers with limited education. Avdiu, for example, is not literate, and had repeated his oath of honesty after it was read aloud to him, rather than reading it from a card provided to witnesses. By proceeding with his allegations of a scene-staging as if these survivor accounts did not exist, Milosevic reveals his generally contemptuous posture towards Albanian survivor witnesses, usually expressed through belligerent questioning and little or no recognition of the devastating losses all such witnesses have suffered.

The court had a further glimpse of this stance when Judge May reprimanded Milosevic for attempting to put a seven-part question to Sandra Mitchell. In response, Milosevic noted that 'this witness is not someone who signs her name with a thumb; I assume she can handle it.' This belittling attitude carries the implication that the testimony of the survivor witnesses is worthless, a position wholly in tune with propaganda disseminated by Milosevic's regime in the years preceding the Kosovo conflict to the effect that people of Albanian ethnicity are generally untruthful and not to be trusted. Yet unless Milosevic can produce a witness in his defense who can prove the survivors were lying, the court will likely find the Racak crimes to have been proven. Hendrie's photographs are indeed shocking, and Milosevic must deal with them if he persists in denying that crimes occurred at Racak, but he ignores the weight of the sworn word at his own risk.