thumb|Damaged Albanian settlements in Kosovo 1998-1999.
Operation Horseshoe was a 1999 alleged plan to ethnically cleanse Kosovo Albanians and to destroy the Kosovo Liberation Army. The plan was to be carried out by Serbian police and the Yugoslav army.
In 2011, former Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nadezhda Neynsky revealed in a TV documentary that the Bulgarian government in 1999 had turned over to Germany an unverified report compiled by its military agency which "made clear" the existence of the plan, even though the military intelligence had warned that the information could not be verified.
Serbian forces did expel 848,000–863,000 Kosovo Albanians and caused the displacement of up to 590,000 within Kosovo during the Kosovo War.
History
In a press conference on 6 April 1999, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer stated that the German government had information that the Yugoslav government had been planning a massive ethnic cleansing operation in Kosovo codenamed "Horseshoe" since 26 February 1999 and had started to implement the operation in March 1999 before the peace talks in France had concluded. 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 "reorient the political geography" of Kosovo.
thumb|Kosovar refugees in [[Republic of Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro (April 1999).]]
In a press conference on 9 April 1999, German Defense Minister Rudolf Scharping provided further details. He presented maps containing the names of towns and villages that showed arrows representing Yugoslav army and police militia units progressively encircling Kosovo in a horseshoe-shaped pincer movement. Scharping stated, "Operation Horseshoe provided clear evidence that President Milosevic (sic) 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".
Contemporaneous reports from other countries supported Fischer's allegations. The Times of London reported on 8 April 1999 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 Milosevic (sic) calculated the West would wring its hands over without acting." The British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told a UK parliamentary committee "that there was a plan developed in Belgrade known as Operation Horseshoe which was for the cleansing of Kosovo of its Kosovo population. That plan has been around for some time".
In 2012 former Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nadezhda Neynsky said that the Bulgarian government had delivered information to Germany and NATO in 1999 about Milošević's alleged plan for the ethnic cleaning of Kosovo. However, this was in contrast to a statement made in March 2000 by a spokesman for the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, which denied that Neynsky (then Mihaylova) had handed over information to the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer. In 2012 Neynsky stressed that Fischer took the report of the Bulgarian military intelligence very seriously, although Bulgarian military intelligence had warned that the information could not be verified.
Yugoslav Army military operations
Operations before NATO intervention
thumb|Ruins near [[Morinë in the White Drin valley, at the border between Albania and Kosovo. Morina was attacked on 23/24 May 1998 by the Yugoslav Army.]]
Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack date Operation Horseshoe's effective beginning to the summer of 1998, when hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians were driven from their homes. Hanspeter Neuhold stated that KLA attacks after the Holbrooke-Milošević Agreement of October 1998 resulted in new Serb offensives which culminated in Operation Horseshoe directed not only against KLA fighters but also including systematic expulsions of Kosovar civilians. Michael J. Dziedzic stated that the Serbian offensive, known as Operation Horseshoe, was already in motion on 20 March 1999.
The UK Parliament Select Committee on Foreign Affairs cited an Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe report concluding that before the start of the NATO bombing, the Serbian military campaign did not appear to be oriented towards cantonization (i.e. "aiming to bring together localities according to their ethnic composition") but rather consisted of
- "activity wherever there was KLA activity, and wherever it was suspected there were KLA sympathisers;
- efforts to control the main communication routes;
- with the approach of the bombing, securing Kosovo's borders."
Operations after NATO intervention
Jeremy Black and John Norris both state that after the beginning of NATO bombing of Yugoslavia on 24 March 1999, Serbian forces accelerated Operation Horseshoe. Peter Beaumont and Patrick Wintour of The Guardian described it as Milosevic's "final solution to the Kosovo problem".
The UK Parliament Select Committee on Foreign Affairs stated that "regardless of whether Operation Horseshoe really existed," after the bombing began, "expulsions took place in practically every municipality."
According to the verdict of the ICTY, while there is no mention of Operation Horseshoe per se,