The Aftermath of the Publication of the

German Government Documents

Translated and prepared by Eric Canepa

After IALANA (International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms) released documents from the German Foreign Ministry and High Administrative Courts--available on ZNET as "German Government Documents"--the Foreign Ministry responded. What follows is my translation of IALANA’s response and commentary. Included are important observations on the status of ‘Operation Horseshoe,’ a Yugoslav plan for ethnic cleansing of Kosovo-Albanians pre-dating the NATO bombing whose existence is alleged by the German Ministry of Defense.*  I hasten to point out that in publishing this material my motivation is not to exonerate Slobodan Milosevic; my aim, rather, is to suggest how skeptically we ought to view evidence offered by the NATO countries, and their media, regarding ethnic cleansing, especially in the period before the NATO air attacks.   My own position on the crimes Milosevic has committed against Kosovo-Albanians reflects that of Gregor Gysi in his letter to Milosevic, which can also be found on ZNET’s internet site.

*The closest thing so far to a primary source for Operation Horseshoe seems to be the material given (without date) in the Bundeswehr’s own internet site:

www.bundeswehr.de/kosovo/hufeisen.html

In Der Spiegel 15/1999 (April 10) Operation Horseshoe is introduced by Claus Christian Malzahn as follows:

As regards the actual condition of people in Kosovo, however, the Federal Administration [in Bonn] knows little.  Since journalists and aid organizations had to leave the area where expulsions were taking place, the NATO countries are dependent on reports from refugees. 

"If three people independently recount the same thing, then we consider their story to be plausible," is how Achim Schmillen, chief-of-staff of Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, described his criterion for the credibility of witnesses.  Using this criterion then, the allies reconstructed, using the name ‘Operation Horseshoe,’ the expulsion tactics, among other things, of the Serb army.

The Germans have had bad experience with wild, unverifiable reports.  Since the first week of the war there was a rumor that Kosovo-Albanian politicians and intellectuals had been shot.  Some of those pronounced dead, like the journalist Baton Haxhiu, subsequently turned up in Macedonia.

The Drones, the Bundeswehr’s unmanned intelligence air fleet, only take snapshots.   Thus Scharping’s assertion that the Serbs had established concentration camps in Kosovo is still not substantiated.  Meanwhile the German Defense Minister is complaining about the restrictive information policy of the NATO-Military in Brussels.   That they would hold back any gruesome pictures of the humanitarian catastrophe is, however, quite improbable.

The article goes on to report Scharping’s complaint that the Americans will not share their intelligence.  Independent sources are stilled due mostly to the destruction of the telephone net.  The KLA has a couple of satellite phones, and agents of the underground army call the Foreign Ministry several times a week and recount their version of the events.

In Der Spiegel 16/1999 (April 19), the straightforward description of Operation Horseshoe by Rainer Pörtner and Alexander Szandar more or less directly reproduces Scharping’s report of it, but the article is sprinkled with cautious phrases like: "the administration says it is convinced that ...," "This is said to be proven by trustworthy information that is in the possession of Defense Minister Scharping," "allegedly," etc.

Craig R. Whitney, in the New York Times of April 11, reports, with no trace of the skepticism shown by Der Spiegel:

Mr. Milosevic’s plan to redraw the ethnic map of the province by driving out most of the people of Albanian ancestry who lived there was put in place in October, according to German Defense Ministry officials.

 The operation--code-named "horseshoe," or "potkova" in the Serbian language--was being planned even as Mr. Milosevic was promising to withdraw the police and military forces that had already begun driving Albanians out of their homes, the German Defense Minister, Rudolf Scharping, said in Bonn this week.

"Our analysis of ‘Operation Horseshoe’ sadly confirms what we had inferred during the negotiations, which is that Milosevic wanted to win time to prepare a systematic deportation," Mr. Scharping said.

[...]

 "The operation began in November of 1998 in Kosovo," Mr. Scharping said. "It shows that, in a certain part of Kosovo, the Yugoslav Army and police planned and then began, between November of 1998 and the beginning of the negotiations in Rambouillet, to expel people."

The Deutsche Sektion der International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (Peter Becker, Chair) can be contacted at:

Gisonenweg 9
D-35037 Marburg
Germany
tel: 49-6421-2 30 27
fax: 49-6421-1 58 28

Editorial additions are distinguished by square brackets.

Eric Canepa

 

 

IALANA Press Information, April 29, 1999

 

On the Position Taken on April 23 by the Foreign Ministry in Response to IALANA’s press release of April 22 (See "German Government Documents" in ZNET)

I.

The German Section of the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA) has characterized the April 23 reaction of the Foreign Ministry to IALANA’s April 22, 1999 press communiqué* as a smoke screen and an unserious attempt to conceal the Foreign Ministry’s hypocritical public declarations on the status of persecutions in Kosovo.

*Numerous German dailies have reported it (see, for example, Frankfurter Rundschau, April 23, 1999; junge welt, April 24, 1999; Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 24, 1999).

Through detailed excerpts from hitherto unpublished Foreign Ministry documents and from numerous German regional high-administrative-court decisions in refugee cases, IALANA had pointed to obvious and serious contradictions.  Until mid-March 1999, just a few days before the start of NATO’s air attacks against Yugoslavia,  Joschka Fischer’s Foreign Ministry constantly stated in its status reports and official intelligence information produced for asylum hearings: "Even in Kosovo an explicit political persecution linked to Albanian ethnicity is not verifiable."  Trusting the veracity of this official intelligence the German asylum judges found that the Milosevic regime had no state program of persecution of Kosovo-Albanians, and that the latter were not otherwise threatened in Kosovo by the Serb-dominated state on account of their ethnicity.  However, since the NATO countries’ air war, begun on March 24, 1999, had to be justified before German public opinion and the Bundestag, the Foreign Ministry spoke of "genocide," "deportations" and "ethnic cleansing," practiced by the Milosevic regime against Kosovo-Albanians not just since the war’s beginning, but as having preceded the NATO attack for a considerable time.

 

II.

The Foreign Ministry claims in its press statement of April 23, 1999 that no more Kosovo-Albanians have recently [i.e. in the recent period before the start of NATO air attacks*] been repatriated.  Despite what the Foreign Ministry wishes to insinuate, however, this fact cannot be due to the "status reports" it presented to the asylum courts nor to its "official information reports" [which the Ministry now alleges would have indicated the existence of ethnic cleansing, thereby deterring repatriation].  The present lack of returnees to Kosovo is rather exclusively a product of the absence of available airlines resulting from the prohibition against flights proclaimed by the European Union on September 7, 1998.

[*clarification from Peter Becker]

 

III.

The Foreign Ministry passes over in silence the fact that the "Federal Bureau for the Recognition of Foreign Refugees" in Zirndorf (which is under the Ministry of the Interior) had, on March 17, 1999-- that is, a few days before the start of NATO’s air attacks which were undertaken, according to Chancellor Schröder’s executive declaration, "to prevent further and systematic violations of human rights and a humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo,"--issued a directive (AZ 2433787 - 138 of March 17, 1999) expressly based on the binding jurisdiction of the Bavarian High Administrative Court, of the Administrative Court of Baden-Württemberg and of the High Administrative Court of the Saar District, which themselves had invoked the status reports and official intelligence of the Foreign Ministry, in which the following was stated:

When returning to their homeland, Kosovo-Albanians still are not subjected to group persecution ... The situation in Kosovo has fundamentally changed due to the agreement on the pacification of the region worked out between the OSCE, under the leadership of American Special Envoy Holbrooke, and the Yugoslav state leadership ...  The ca. 50,000 refugees, who had temporarily holed up in the mountains and forests (mostly in the immediate vicinity of their villages), have almost all found stable lodgings since the partial withdrawal of the Security Forces.  ... However, there are occasional armed incidents.  These overwhelmingly consist of raids by the KLA and its supporters, using terrorist means, to which the Yugoslav state reacts within its area of operations in a targeted manner.

 

IV.   Operation Horseshoe

In order to justify NATO’s air attacks, the Foreign Ministry claims that "‘Operation Horseshoe’ provides for a systematic expulsion of the Kosovo-Albanian population aiming at violent, demographic changes in Kosovo."   In doing so, it relies on documentation and positions taken by Minister Scharping’s Ministry of Defense.

To begin with, ‘Operation Horseshoe’ will not do as a justification for NATO air attacks, if for no other reason than the fact that it first became known to the Ministry of Defense only after March 24, 1999.  In its press statement, even the Foreign Ministry admits that it had become aware of the existence of such a plan only on April 1, 1999.

What is more, one should realize that the documentation on ‘Operation Horseshoe’ has not yet been presented to the public for critical scrutiny; it is merely claimed to exist.  It is still impossible to know whether it can adequately prove that already before the NATO air attacks the Yugoslav state and its organs had introduced measures for ‘ethnic cleansing’ of Kosovo, on the basis of a state program of persecution and carried out systematic violations of the human rights of Kosovo’s population linked to Albanian ethnicity. [See Jan Øberg in the Transnational Foundation for Peace and Future Research’s PressInfo 64 (April 25, 1999) at www.transnational.org/pressinf/pf64.html.]

And finally, in answer to the question whether the documents on ‘Operation Horseshoe’ given her by Minister Scharping were useful,  the Chief Prosecutor of the UN Criminal Court for Yugoslavian Affairs in the Hague, Louise Arbour, stated:

"As to Operation Horseshoe, I have my doubts as to its capacity to prove anything.   If it were a document with cover, date and signature, it would be fantastic.   But mostly such things [referring to documents given her by various NATO countries] look more like verbal descriptions and conclusions." (See Der Spiegel, No. 17/1999 [April 27], p. 152)

 

V.

The Foreign Ministry’s claim that IALANA’s excerpts from the Foreign Ministry’s official positions are "citations that are selective and isolated from their context and do not correspond to the predominant tenor of the status reports," is false.

This can be seen in the simple fact that in asylum proceedings the German High Administrative Courts understood the "status reports" and "official intelligence" on the Kosovo situation in precisely the sense that the Foreign Ministry wishes now to deny.   If the Foreign Ministry--as it now claims--had in fact indicated "since May 1998 in its status reports" that an "ethnic-expulsion policy on the part of Milosevic’s regime against Kosovo-Albanians" was verifiable, and that in fact--as the asylum seekers constantly proposed--there is a state program of persecution linked to ethnicity, then the asylum courts would properly have been forced to recognize the asylum-seeking Kosovo-Albanians.

However, until the most recent period, it was expressly on the basis of the Foreign Ministry’s "status reports" and "official intelligence" that the High Courts cited by IALANA did not reach such a conclusion.  Since the Foreign Ministry is still trying to deny the facts, IALANA, as proof of these facts, points once again to the following up-to-date compilation from the latest court decisions.*

*[The compilation, appended to this Press Information, consists of items IV, V, VI and VII (with some additions to the latter only repeating points made in the other cited court decisions) from the IALANA material already available on ZNET but adds the decision of the Seventh Senate of the Hessian Administrative Court, February 5, 1999 (Az.: 7 UK 537/98.A), cited according to the court’s press statement of February 5, 1999, up to now the only form in which it has been available.  Its tenor is identical to all the other excerpts published by IALANA.   I have therefore omitted the whole appendix.--E.C.]

 

VI.   IALANA asks the Foreign Ministry:

[The following clarifications were given by Peter Becker:

*in order to prevent deportations, i.e. in contradicting a judgment of the courts or the Federal Bureau for the Recognition of Asylum-Seeking Kosovo-Albanians

**which, as the Foreign Ministry now alleges, did not indicate an  absence of ethnic cleansing, but confirmed it and which would thus have been useful to the Federal Commissioner in his hypothetical defense of an asylum request

***i.e. he pled against asylum for Kosovo-Albanian refugees

†which, in the first step of the process, before the courts are involved, can, for example, rule in favor of  granting asylum

††since these in reality only pointed to the non-existence of ethnic persecution]

 

  

The Board of the German Section of IALANA

Marburg, April 29, 1999