In 1999, before Ambassador William Walker exposed the atrocities occurring in Kosovo, Anita Crossfield was a young mother who ran for her life with her child in her arms at night. She would go to churches, other towns and high into the mountains to avoid Serbian forces that came to murder Albanians.
“We were cold, starving, terrified, trying to stay ahead of the violence that was sweeping into our homes and our towns,” said Crossfield, now a Fredericksburg business owner. “One of the only sources of information we had was the Voice of America. The radio was our lifeline. Until the battery died, we were completely cut off, but the horror was all around us… and there was the silence that followed. It could have been us.”
One man, Walker, had the courage to speak out about what happened. And Crossfield had tears in her eyes as she introduced him to a crowd of roughly 75 people at the Fredericksburg Visitor Center on Saturday afternoon, an assemblage that included several Albanian refugees who say they owe their lives to his actions.
“It is my deepest honor to welcome the man whose voice carried across oceans and borders to a mother hiding in the mountains with a dying radio,” she said.
Walker, a longtime ambassador and OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) chief, who led the Kosovo Verification Mission that documented the atrocities taking place in 1999, was in town on his ongoing book tour for his recently published “Racak: A Story of a War Crime.”
William Walker signs copies of his book: ‘Racak: A War Crime’ which offers his account of the massacre took place in 1999 in Kosovo. (Photo by Ted Schubel/B 101.5)
While the book hinges on Walker’s experience uncovering a massacre that captured the world’s attention and influenced NATO’s intervention in Kosovo, it also shares his background and experiences in Latin America that led him to that post and unpacks his decision to quickly spread the truth and stick to his convictions during the Kosovo War.
In April, Crossfield was contacted about holding a book signing for Walker at her business, Anita’s Café & Dessert Bar in downtown Fredericksburg.
But, she said: “I realized it needed to be more than just a small cafe gathering. I had to be it had to be something for the whole Fredericksburg community.
“You see, it was deeply important to me to share this moment with the city of Fredericksburg, the city I love, the city that has embraced me…This community has been my foundation, and I wanted to include everyone in this historical moment.”
Walker’s career and the massacre at Racak
Walker described how his career led to the massacre at Racak. He spent the first 35 years of his diplomatic service in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Honduras and El Salvador.
“And in all of those places,” he said. “I don’t know if it was coincidence or what, but they were run by military governments, oppressive governments, non-democratic governments. So I went to El Salvador, and I spent four years there, and I witnessed a lot of horrible things, but there was something that was very similar to the Racak.”
Walker had never been to Balkans, but Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sent him there because he was familiar with violence. He amassed a team of “verifiers,” who lived with families throughout the region to document what was going on.
“It was very clear, very quickly, that there was something wrong in this community of 95 percent Albanians who were denied all the benefits of citizenship in Serbia, and the five percent who were sort of the masters of the scene,” he said. “Villages being burned to the ground, and as Anita said, abuse of all sorts taking place from the Serbian military and police.”
He said what happened at Racak was “not the first, nor was it the last. There were massacres before, much bigger. There were massacres after. There was incredible oppression. Why did this event capture the world’s attention?”
Walker learned something had happened in Racak the night of Jan. 14, 1999. The Serbian government called it a battle “between the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army) and the army and the police, in which all the victims, all those who had died, were on the KLA side, and there had been no casualties on the side of the government that, in itself, was a little fishy.”
He went out with his team early in the morning of Jan. 15, 10 hours later and realized there was no battle.
“It was a very bitter Balkan winter, the ground out in the countryside is rocky and dirty and full of debris, and we had to go up a hill outside of the village,” he recalled. “The Earth was full of ice and snow, and I could barely keep my balance as we walked up this ravine.”
Below, he saw 45 bodies, all in “peasant clothing” — not uniforms of the KLA (an Albanian separatist militia) — with “bullet holes in their bodies, in their clothes, all very consistent with them being shot there. It was obvious that they had died where we found them. It was obvious they had been killed from gunshots coming down from above.”
He got the word out immediately that this was a massacre, that those bodies belonged civilians rounded up and marched to their death in an effort to ethnically cleanse the area of Albanians.
“Our getting there within just a matter of hours, they had no time to do anything to change the crime scene,” he said. “So they kept having to come up with ridiculous stories explaining what had really happened, and that Walker was a liar. The more the stories got wild…the more ridiculous it became, and the more journalists came from around the world.
“The other massacres earlier, sure, a couple of journalists would come up, they’d send the story back to their home, and would come out two days later, it would be old news. The story of Racak was on the front pages of Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, the big story the big newspapers around the world for weeks.”
A far-reaching legacy
Also speaking at the event was Fisnik Hasani, who said he was 15 then and lived 10 miles from the massacre.
“Albanians had no basic rights,” said Hasani, who has lived in Virginia since 1999. “We lived under constant threat with the fear of any moment of being detained, abused or killed by the Serbian forces the opposition.
“The oppression and violence that had gone in Kosovo for years, had largely gone unnoticed for the rest of the world, but that changed when the news of Racak massacre broke, it was Ambassador Walker who had the courage to speak the truth and call it what it was, a massacre, and in doing so, he told the world to pay attention.”
Hasani added that many families in Kosovo honor Ambassador Walker by naming their children after him.
“That’s how deep our gratitude runs,” Hasani said. “His bravery and moral clarity in 1999 continue to impact generations. Ambassador Walker didn’t just report what he saw. He stood up for us when a few others would.”
His admiration was echoed by Sarah Roeske, who teaches IB 20th-century world history at Mountain View High School in Stafford County. Roeske told the crowd that Walker is the focus of her lessons on Kosovo and Racak and that the ambassador is one of her “personal heroes.”
Roeske invites Crossfield to lecture in her classroom every year during that lesson and said her story “leaves an extraordinary lasting impression upon the students,” who go on to “visit her cafe to see her pictures of Kosovo and to let her personally know just how much her story has meant to them.”
A group of her students, who attended to meet the figure they’d learned about in the school, listened to the hour-long presentation and stayed for the signing right before their prom that evening.
Most of the attendees stayed to have their books signed by Walker and to share their personal stories of Kosovo and admiration for his efforts.
Walker is still involved and goes back annually for Kosovo’s Independence Day.
“I’m even prouder every time I go back now, because, in my opinion, this small country in the heart of the Balkans — one of the most conflicted areas in the world for the last thousands of years — is today a gem,” he said. “It is a jewel. I am extremely proud of Kosova today. In my opinion, Kosova is the most democratic country in the Europe, if not in the world.”
It shows, “what can be done by a people if given the chance to show their best.”
For Crossfield, her best is “paying it forward” here in Fredericksburg, as her small business. “It is my obligation. It is how to honor those who didn’t survive. It is how I say thank you for the freedom, the safety, not going to bed hungry, and the second chance I was given.”
Crossfield saw her generation die, she said. And she recounted the massacres she was aware of while in Kosovo.
When 370 people, mostly men and boys, were separated from their families and executed.
When 243 other civilians were murdered, some of them burned alive.
When 147 men were rounded up in a field to be executed. And, in the town she called home, when 1000 civilians were murdered.
She described how she later returned “on the back of a tractor trailer passing by melted destroyed homes and burned bodies, still unaware of the full horror [of] what had taken place just steps from where I had once lived.”
“All this just because we were Albanian ethnicity,” she said. “These numbers are not just statistics. They are the lives of mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, my relatives, my classmates and my family members taken without mercy just because we are Albanian.”
She said that those encountering Walker’s words and work should realize that, “It only takes one person to spark change in a community, in a country or even across the world. Our differences do not distance us. They connect us through the power each of us, the power each of us wants to influence, uplift and inspire.”
