“OPERATION HORSESHOE”: KOSOVO FORGERY REVEALED
5th April 2000
The eminent German daily Frankfurter Rundschau reported a fortnight ago that Bulgarian and German secret services had forged a “secret Serb plan” that was used as justification for NATO air strikes on Yugoslavia last year (“General bezweifelt Existenz des serbischen Kriegskonzepts,” March 21).
The plan, code-named “Horseshoe,” purported to prove that the Serbs had planned ethnic cleansing of Kosovo Albanians well before the NATO bombing campaign. The German paper quoted Heinz Loquai, a retired Bundeswehr brigadier general, who says that the “plan” was no more than an intelligence assessment written in Sofia and subsequently embellished in Bonn.
But during the NATO war “Horseshoe” was given top billing. It was first revealed by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, on April 6 last year, almost two weeks after bombing had started. Two days later, on April 8, 1999 it was mentioned again at a press conference by the Bundeswehr Inspector- General Hans-Peter von Kierbach. The general claimed that this document provided evidence that Belgrade wanted to liquidate the KLA “even if that would mean extermination of the Albanians in Kosovo.”
Then “Horseshoe” crossed the Atlantic. On April 15 it was invoked by William Pfaff in the International Herald Tribune in support of his claim that it would be “immoral” to stop the bombing. Pfaff treated “Horseshoe” as a given fact: Mr. Milosevic and his government are attempting to solve their Kosovo problem by producing a basic demographic change in the province through deporting its Albanian population, the overwhelming majority. According to German government sources, this program for purging Kosovo of its Albanian population was prepared at the end of last year under the code name “Horseshoe.” … Horseshoe was designed to produce a permanent solution, and was launched even before the Rambouillet discussions in February, which the Serbian leadership did not take seriously.
On April 24, 1999, Bulgarian Prime Minister Kostov also quoted the “Horseshoe” to justify the pending Bulgarian collaboration with NATO: “Operation ‘Horseshoe’ began on February 26 and aimed at two things: to exterminate the KLA and to turn Kosovo into a desert.” It was subsequently used by a whole host of NATO apologists, and most recently by State Department’s James Rubin only two weeks ago. But in Europe it is now common knowledge that Operation Horseshoe was yet another Kosovo Lie. On April 2 The Sunday Times of London followed the Rundschau story up with a comprehensive and conclusive report (“Serbian ethnic cleansing scare was a fake, says general,” by John Goetz in Berlin and Tom Walker): Horseshoe – or “Potkova”, as the Germans said it was known in Belgrade – became a staple of Nato briefings. It was presented as proof that President Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia had long planned the expulsion of Albanians.
James Rubin, the American state department spokesman, cited it only last week to justify Nato’s bombardment. However, Heinz Loquai, a retired brigadier general, has claimed in a new book on the war that the plan was fabricated from run-of-the-mill Bulgarian intelligence reports. Loquai, who now works for the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), has accused Rudolf Scharping, the German defence minister, of obscuring the origins of Operation Horseshoe. “The facts to support its existence are at best terribly meagre,” he told The Sunday Times. “I have come to the conclusion that no such operation ever existed. The criticism of the war, which had grown into a fire that was almost out of control, was completely extinguished by Operation Horseshoe.”
Loquai claims that the German defense ministry turned a vague report from Sofia into a “plan”, and even coined the name Horseshoe. But this eagerness to embellish it in order to produce a convincing forgery resulted in the fundamental flaw: the Germans named the operation “Potkova,” which is the CROATIAN word for horseshoe. The Serbian for horseshoe is Potkovica. It is a bit like claiming that a secret IRA document was called “Operation Londonderry” – impossible by definition. “A state prosecutor would never think of going to trial with the amount of evidence available to the German defense ministry,” said General Loquai.
But how about Carla del Ponte? “Horseshoe” is now proven to be a lie, but it may yet be used to indict a few more Serbs by the “tribunal” at The Hague.
