Now's your chance to shine, Kate: Provide link for verification.
The one million refugees are from Bosnia and Croatia as well as Kosovo, and during the heydey of Serb Nationalism were sadly outnumbered by their Croat, Bosnian, and Kosovar Albanian counterparts. Hopefully they too will see their homes again.
What was achieved? 800,000 Kosovar Albanians returning home from refugee camps in Macedonia and Albania, along with more hundreds of thousands of internally displaced allowed to return home.
HRW based it's numbers on the White Book, so again, please provide your UN source, and try to figure out why Belgrade's public prosecutor used HRW's numbers in his indictment of NATO leaders.
Kate, I hold no personal animosity towards anybody in the region unless they've committed crimes personally - but if I have to see 1 man killed to stop another from killing hundreds, or watch as an airliner full of nuns and orphans is shot down to prevent it from being crashed into a skyscraper - so be it. Milosevic was warned that we would bomb him and his country if he didn't act like a decent human being for once, and he thought he could tough it out.
His mistake, Serbia's loss.
The vast majority were in their homes before NATO attacked, and here's more on what caused the refugee crisis prior to NATO's intervention. The refugee counts were matched, and the IDP count exceeded in Macedonia (when you take population and length of fighting into account), and seems to be a side-effect of every campaign waged by the KLA/NLA.
If links were luminous I have enough totted up to light California. You on the other hand, are in the dark in every way (including your inference that everyone against what Nato did to Yugoslavia is a Serb 'agitprop' or nationalist!?!). The only link that I have ever seen you provide was to the Nato website.
The figure of 1,500 came from a BBC documentary quoting the UN (which they would) around about the time that a secondary exit route was needed through Serbia for Nato troops (fairly recently). If you don't believe me, then you'll just have to wait until it all comes out at international level within the year.
HRW is just an extension of the State Dept - everyone knows that.
As for your assertion about saving hundreds of thousands - from what?? There was no mass movement of people from that region until after the bombing started, as Veronin has pointed out, and even when the trail of refugees started they were not summarily shot or murdered but just driven out of the country.
I am not supporting this, but just as Nato threatened Milosevic (earlier described by the US as a 'man we can do business with'); Milosevic retaliated with the threat of a mass movement of people which would cause Nato and the UN immense problems. These people were not going to death camps, but just being dumped out of the country. For such a cold-headed military person, I would have thought that you would accept this playing chess with people. That's exactly what you do.