Controversy
Noam Chomsky stated that "The United Nations Commissioner for Refugees registered the first refugees outside Kosovo on 27 March ..., three days after the bombings began". His opinion, however, is refuted by UNHCR's own sources which registered 200,000 refugees from Kosovo by 24 March 1999, before the NATO intervention - out of that number, 100,000 fled to European countries, 25,000 to Montenegro, 30,000 moved to other parts of Serbia, 18,000 left for Albania and 10,000 went to Bosnia. An additional 260,000 people were internally displaced inside Kosovo.
The existence of the Horseshoe plan was immediately denied by the Yugoslav officials. Slobodan Milošević labeled it as a "fabrication of the German Defence Ministry". Milosevic denied a policy of ethnic cleansing during the NATO bombing in Kosovo, stated that "when aggression stops, when bombing stops, then it will be very easy to continue (the) political process".
Ratomir Tanić, a witness at Milošević's subsequent war crimes trial, said that Horseshoe was a colloquial nickname for a "completely different" Yugoslav army plan, that should come into effect only if the ethnic Albanian population take the side of the foreign aggressor in case of aggression on Yugoslavia. Then the Army would "neutralising the Albanian strongholds". Tanić stated that the army leadership didn't use this plan during the Kosovo War, "because there was no external aggression or Albanian rebellion".
In April 2000, Heinz Loquai, a retired German brigadier general, published a book on the war that claimed that the German government's account had been based on a general analysis by a Bulgarian intelligence agency of Yugoslav behaviour in the war, which was turned into a specific "plan" by the German Defence Ministry. 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 and Bulgarian word for horseshoe, whereas the Serbian word is potkovica.
Read more about this topic: Operation Horseshoe
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