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Milosevic and Operation Horseshoe

This article is more than 24 years old

If the planes had been flying lower - as they did later in the war - they would have seen close-up the unfolding of the most appalling humanitarian disaster in Europe in half a century. Down on the ground Operation Horseshoe, Milosevic's final solution to the Kosovo problem, was under way.

The operation's title was strictly descriptive. The Serb military and police would squeeze the KLA and civilians in an attack launched from three sides, destroying the KLA's bases and fighters and driving out the population as refugees fled through the open southwestern end of the horseshoe into Macedonia and Albania.

The game had been given away to Western intelligence in a number of statements that should have been impossible to ignore. Most chillingly its purpose had been described to western diplomats last September by General Sreten Lukic, the same man who commanded the Racak operation and also - as intelligence intercepts would latter make clear - its cover-up.

Lukic had described it as a massive 'clockwise' sweep across the country that would finally destroy the KLA. He had said he hoped to complete the KLA's annihilation by October.

Despite the ceasefire, Operation Horseshoe - as was clear to all of those on the ground - was never far from the minds of the Serb leadership. Even as the Rambouillet talks went on it had been reactivated. Serb forces were building up in Kosovo. Columns of armour were scouring the countryside, training aggressively for all to see.

At times they did more than train. As the first round of peace talks ran down, Serbs forces launched a series of actions, described to OSCE monitors as 'winter live fire exercises', beginning with a large scale attack on KLA positions above the town of Vucitrn, reducing whole villages with tank, artillery and rocket fire.

But it was Vojislav Seselj, the rabidly nationalist Serb Deputy Prime Minister, who was clearest about what was in Serb minds in the event of a less than whole-hearted attack by Nato forces. Speaking at a rally he had warned that any bombs would be met by a Serb attack on Kosovo, and that 'not a single Albanian would remain if Nato bombed'.

Four days before the Nato raids the Yugoslav military reiterated its warning. On March 20, Lt Gen Nebojsa Pavkovic, commander of the Yugoslav Third Army in Kosovo, warned that if attacked: 'Yugoslavia will deal with the remaining terrorists in Kosovo.'

The message had not gone unnoticed by the CIA and the European intelligence agencies. But in Washington the CIA had chosen to produce two contradictory assessments of the risk of Milosevic turning on the Kosovan civilians. And once again the US crossed its fingers and counted on the most optimistic gloss.

As Nato's raids began, Milosevic's forces moved into position. As darkness fell in the largely ethnic Albanian town of Djakovica on the night of 24 March, black balaclava'ed paramilitaries were scouring the old town, firing at random and attacking selected houses that had been associated with the work of the OSCE monitors who had left in a five-mile convoy a few days prior to the start of the campaign.

In Pec, 22 miles north-west, and Prizren, 15 miles south-east, Serbian forces began firing wildly and burning Albanian-owned shops. In the capital Pristina, Serbs set fire to Albanian-owned property.

It was the beginning of an operation - meticulously planned - that within weeks would drive over one million people from their homes and out of the country, amid appalling massacres and the deliberate destruction of Albanian property.

The purpose of the Nato military action, as laid out in the capitals of the participating nations, had opened a new chapter in international law. It was - as Defence Secretary George Robertson made clear in the first few hours of the war 'a humanitarian intervention' against a 'genocidal' power.

And as Operation Horseshoe cranked up on the ground in Kosovo, sending vast columns of weary, dehydrated and beaten civilans across international borders, even many of those who had questioned the legality of a Nato operation, conducted without the mandate of a UN resolution, were shocked by the ferocity of Milosevic's campaign.

But even as the world's first 'anti-genocidal' war was launched, the military judgements over the 'demonstrative' opening to Nato's campaign, and Milosevic's intentions on the ground, were crystalising into one of the most disturbing episodes of the war. As hundreds of thousands of desperate ethnic Albanians poured out of Kosovo, stripped of their money, homes, identity cards and even car licence plates, the forces of 'humanitarian intervention' were not ready for them.

And as the people came they brought with them details of what was happening inside Kosovo. For the first time the world heard of villages like Velika Krushe, the mine works at Trepca, the streets of Djakovica - places to which the war crimes investigators would rush following the eventual entry of Nato troops.

In London, the ferocity of Operation Horseshoe was not anticipated. 'The speed with which he unleashed the ethnic cleansing took us all by surprise,' says Tebbitt. 'We did not foresee he would move so thoroughly and so fast. I have asked myself since whether we should have predicted more precisely.'

Neither had Hubert Vedrine's government anticipated the scale of crisis. 'We knew about the massacres, of course,' he told the Observer. 'Massacres by Serbs, terrorism by KLA. Everyone knew they would continue. But one had to act, in spite of that. But the mass expulsions had not been foreseen by anyone - KLA, Rugova, Macedonians, Albanians, no one foresaw it.

What we had expected was the Serb army to attack all KLA positions, and for the KLA to launch a guerrilla war. That's what we thought. And most experts thought the KLA would have held out for longer. What most experts underestimated was that the collective memory of massacres in the Balkans was such as to unleash mass migrations.'

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