Operation Horseshoe
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Operation Horseshoe was the name given by the German government to an alleged Serbian plan to expel the entire Albanian population of Kosovo. It was cited in support of NATO's bombing campaign during the Kosovo War. Although it has since been raised in trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, its veracity remains uncertain.
The alleged plan was detailed by German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in a press conference on Tuesday, 6 April 1999. He stated that the German government had unearthed operational plans agreed by Yugoslav commanders in late February 1999 to carry out a massive ethnic cleansing operation in Kosovo. According to Fischer, this had been put into effect as early as March 1999 – a month before the start of NATO operations – when Yugoslav President Slobodan Milošević had told him that "he would be finished with the ethnic Albanian separatists within a week". Fischer accused Milošević of engaging in "ethnic warfare" directed against his own people, in which a whole ethnic group had become the "victim of systematic expulsion" to "reorientate the political geography" of Kosovo.
Further details were provided on 9 April by Rudolf Scharping, the German Defence Minister, at a press conference held in Bonn. He presented maps containing the names of towns and villages which showed arrows representing Serbian army and police militia units progressively encircling Kosovo in a horseshoe-shaped pincer movement. He was quoted as saying that: "Operation Horseshoe provided clear evidence that President Milosevic had long been preparing the expulsions from Kosovo and that he had simply used the time gained by the Rambouillet peace talks to organise army and police units for the campaign."
Unnamed sources from other countries supported Fischer's allegations; The Times of London reported on 8 April that
- The CIA was aware as early as last autumn of a plan, codenamed Operation Horseshoe, to kill or drive them out over several months. A village a day was the rate that Mr Milošević calculated the West would wring its hands over without acting. In Pristina, public records have been combed to identify precisely which homes, shops and businesses were Albanian-owned; Serb police and paramilitaries have emptied towns and villages neighbourhood by neighbourhood in a pattern that has has been as unvaried as it has been ruthless.
- The packed trains, the snipers picking off those who strayed out of line on the forced marches to the borders: every detail points to the existence of a detailed blueprint, without which so many could not have been murdered or driven into exile within a fortnight. In this context, yesterday's reported sealing of the frontiers by Serb forces is a sinister development; there is no such thing as safety in Kosovo for a people marked for destruction solely because of their racial identity.
The Baltimore Sun suggested on 11 April that NATO had known about the "Horseshoe" plan for some time, but had underestimated its severity.
The existence of the plan was immediately denied by the Yugoslav and Serbian governments, and remains controversial to this day. It was denied by Milošević as a "fabrication of the German Defence Ministry" [1] (http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/020214IT.htm) while Ratomir Tanic, a witness at Milošević's subsequent war crimes trial, said of it:
- [Horseshoe] was a colloquial nickname for a completely different plan ... when the term was used first, I really can't say, especially as it was the colloquial term applied and not an official one.
- It was an exercise plan of the Yugoslav army while it was the JNA, the Yugoslav People's Army, and the plan provided for training and exercise in case of an aggression on Yugoslavia from south-east Europe, and if the Albanian population should take the side of the foreign aggressor, then it would come into force. The army of Yugoslavia would come into force if these two conditions were met. They would take seven defensive positions and they would be geared towards neutralising the Albanian strongholds, and this exercise – this plan was actually stored in an archive and then it was reactivated and would be reactivated with all the rest for taking action in Kosovo.
- [The army leadership] didn't want to use the plan at all [during the Kosovo War], because there was no external aggression or Albanian rebellion, or rather, that they should take the part and go to the side of the foreign aggressor, because it didn't exist. [2] (http://www.un.org/icty/transe54/020515ED.htm)
In April 2000, Heinz Loquai, a retired German brigadier general, published a book on the war that claimed that the plan was fabricated from Bulgarian intelligence reports. The German news weekly Die Woche reported that the German government's account had been based on a general analysis by a Bulgarian intelligence agency of Serbian behaviour in the war, which was turned into a specific "plan" by the German Defence Ministry, which had itself coined the name Horseshoe. According to Loquai, the Bulgarian analysis concluded that the goal of the Serbian military was to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army, and not to expel the entire Albanian population. He also pointed to a factual flaw in the German government's presentation – it had named the plan "Potkova", which is the Croatian word for horseshoe, whereas the Serbian for horseshoe is potkovica.
Although the ICTY prosecutors have so far apparently not proved the existence or implementation of a plan of ethnic cleansing by the name of "Horseshoe", the United Nations and international human rights organisations were at the time nonetheless convinced that the refugee crisis in Kosovo was the result of a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing. The accounts of the refugees, collected by the OSCE and other organisations during and after the war, indicated a widespread and consistent pattern of events. A postwar statistical analysis of the patterns of displacement, conducted by Patrick Ball of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, [3] (http://shr.aaas.org/kosovo/pk/toc.html) found that there was a direct correlation between Serbian security force operations and refugee outflows, with NATO operations having very little effect on the displacements.