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Operation Horseshoe was a military plan designed and run under the auspices of Belgrade's general staff--as if the Joint Chiefs of Staff had planned and executed an operation to cleanse some ethnic population out of Texas. The job of actually bending the horseshoe fell to a special coordinating team that drew on both the MUP special police and Serbian paramilitaries. Many of these killers were visible in parts of Kosovo last week--sometimes stripped to the waist, heads shaved, making threatening gestures to anyone who challenged them.
The man charged with implementing these ideas in Kosovo was General Sreten Lukic, a high-ranking member of the state-security apparat and a personal friend of Milosevic's. Lukic boldly described Horseshoe last fall to Western diplomats as a massive clockwise sweep that would finally crush the K.L.A. Lukic told his visitors he hoped to finish the mission by mid-October. But that plan collapsed when it became apparent that the K.L.A., which had become expert at hiding and fighting in Kosovo's rough hills, wasn't going to cave in easily.
So Belgrade's military chiefs went back to the planning board. Instead of the massive "sweep" of the original attack, they developed a wickedly clever alternative: a series of smaller sweeps against the K.L.A. that would be combined with a wholesale assault on the civilian population. This two-punch would have the double purpose of depriving the K.L.A. of ground support and permanently altering Kosovo's demographics. Cities and towns would be emptied to depopulate the province. The VJ would shell villages so the police and paramilitaries could move in to put the population to flight, torch their houses and kill any residents who refused to go. While the West was trying to negotiate a diplomatic settlement at Rambouillet, Milosevic was positioning his forces. By the time NATO started bombing in late March, the VJ, police and paramilitaries were operating in concert across Kosovo--in Pec, Pristina, Podujevo. The tactics were always the same, and slaughtering civilians was the essential prod to the exodus.
It worked. After the first offensive in late March, Serbian forces rarely needed more than a corpse or two to force people from their homes. Idriz Xhemojli was one of the villagers from Ljesane, a few miles east of Pec, who ran to the hills two months ago when Serbian forces stormed in and gave residents an hour to leave. "The whole village went," he said, and they watched from the shelter of a hilly wood as the Serbs torched their houses. Two people who refused to turn over cash were shot; two others taken away. The rest, some 300 men, women and children, roamed the woods for two months.
Only Haxhi Kadria, 80, and his wife Rukije managed to stay behind. They survived a second attack on April 27, when every Albanian house was burned. But the Serbs came a third time, just two weeks ago, in a focused fury to obliterate the whole of Ljesane. In the yard of their shattered house last week lay Rukije's body; her skull was crushed, and maggots had made swift work of her body, leaving only bones, rags and hair. The brown, rotting corpse of Haxhi lay nearby in the garden.