On August 25th, this journalist documented how the 1975 Helsinki Accords transformed “human rights” into a highly destructive weapon in the West’s imperial arsenal.
At the forefront of this shift were organizations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch—the forerunner to Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organizations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilization campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. An early example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration.
In December 2017, HRW published a highly self-laudatory essay boasting of how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organization’s independent lobbying for a legal mechanism “to punish military and political leaders responsible for atrocities” committed in the conflict, contributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia’s establishment. Documents held by Columbia University “reveal the fundamental role of HRW” in the ICTY’s May 1993 founding.
These files, moreover, detail HRW’s “cooperation in various criminal investigations” against former Yugoslav officials by the ICTY, “through mutual exchange of information.” The organization is keen to promote its intimate, historic ties with the Tribunal, and how the ICTY’s work spurred the International Criminal Court’s creation. Yet, absent from these hagiographic accounts is any reference to HRW playing a significant role in manufacturing consent for Yugoslavia’s break-up, which produced the very atrocities HRW helped document and prosecute.
In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber co-authored a tendentiously titled op-ed for The New York Times entitled “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”
Inspired by a recent visit to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s on-the-ground experience in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbor “serious doubts about whether the U.S. government should continue to bolster the national unity of Yugoslavia.”
Instead, she proposed actively facilitating the country’s destruction, and laid out a precise roadmap by which Washington could achieve this goal.
The goal was to be achieved by offering financial aid exclusively to Yugoslavia’s constituent republics, “to help them in a peaceful evolution to democracy,” while sidelining “weak” federal authorities from any and all “economic support.”
Laber forcefully concluded, “there is no moral law that commits us to honor the national unity of Yugoslavia.”
Coincidentally, mere days earlier, U.S. lawmakers began voting on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which codified Laber’s prescriptions as formal government policy.
Under the legislation’s auspices, Washington would provide no “direct assistance” to Yugoslavia’s federal government whatsoever. Moreover, financial aid would be withheld from the country’s constituent republics unless they all convened independence referenda under U.S. State Department supervision within six months.
In a stroke, Belgrade’s central authority was destroyed, and the seeds of bitter, bloody wars of independence throughout the multi-ethnic, multi-faith federation were sown.
Shockingly, Human Rights Watch was well aware this was an “inevitable” consequence of its advocacy for ending Yugoslav “national unity.”
“Multinational Experiment”
In January 1991, HRW published an investigation, Human Rights in a Dissolving Yugoslavia. Laber was lead author, and its findings relied heavily on her visit to Kosovo the previous year.
The report claimed the Serbian province was home to “one of the most severe situations of human rights abuse in Europe today,” due to the Yugoslav army’s mass deployment. Kosovo resultantly teemed with soldiers and roadblocks.
Numerous local Albanians told HRW representatives lurid tales of atrocities, supposedly committed by the military and security forces against civilians.
The report briefly acknowledged Serbs and Kosovo’s other ethnic and religious minorities had previously “suffered abuse” from elements of the province’s Albanian population, and local governments “composed predominantly of ethnic Albanians.”
It also noted prior HRW missions to Kosovo concluded the Yugoslav military’s deployment was intended “to protect the Serb minority.” However, the report claimed there was “no justification” for the army’s continued presence at the time of its writing, and its true purpose was to “subjugate ethnic Albanian identity” locally on the Serbian government’s behalf.
That non-Albanians “suffered abuse” in Kosovo before the Yugoslav army’s arrival is quite an understatement. As The New York Times reported in November 1982, Albanian ultra-nationalists had in recent years embarked on a savage “war of terror” to create an ethnically pure Kosovo, “cleansed of all Slavs.”
In that year alone, 20,000 terrified Serbs fled the province. Times journalist David Binder reported that there were “almost weekly incidents of rape, arson, pillage and industrial sabotage, most seemingly designed to drive Kosovo’s remaining indigenous Slavs—Serbs and Montenegrins—out of the province.”[1]
In 1987, The New York Times reported how this barbarous crusade had intensified to such a degree that Yugoslav officials and citizens across the country feared the outbreak of civil war.
“There is no doubt Kosovo is a problem of the whole country, a powder keg on which we all sit,” Slovenian Communist chief Milan Kučan, who three years later led his republic’s secession from Yugoslavia, was quoted as saying. “Officials in Belgrade” of every ethnic and religious extraction viewed the “challenge” of Kosovo Albanian secessionists as “imperiling the foundations” of the country’s “multinational experiment.”
They cautioned of the “Lebanonizing” of their state, comparing the situation to the ‘Troubles’ in British-occupied Ireland:
“Slavic Orthodox churches have been attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.”
Earlier that year, Belgrade’s nine-strong Presidency, led by Sinan Hasani—himself a Kosovo Albanian—formally condemned the actions of ultranationalists in the province as “counter-revolutionary.”
In the parlance of socialist Yugoslavia, this was the gravest qualification that could be bestowed by the country’s leadership. Hasani remained part of the Presidency in February 1989, when its members—of which just one was Serbian—unanimously declared a state of emergency in Kosovo, leading to the military’s deployment.
HRW singularly failed to probe this complex, crucial background in its report. There was also no recognition whatsoever that the situation on the ground in Kosovo for non-Albanians remained fraught at this time, to the extent Serbs fleeing brewing ethnic conflicts elsewhere in Yugoslavia were explicitly warned not to seek refuge in the province by authorities.
These omissions were all the more dangerous given HRW’s distorted view of events in Kosovo was central to the report’s conclusion—the U.S. should sanction the Yugoslav federal government for rights abuses.
This finding was reached despite the report’s introduction stating plainly, HRW “takes no position on whether Yugoslavia should or should not stay together as a country,” and the organization conceding it was widely believed such punitive actions against Belgrade would “inevitably” lead to the federation’s disintegration, with “human rights virtually guaranteed to suffer” as a result.
HRW avowedly did “not endorse this position,” believing it of far greater importance that Washington “express its disapproval” over purported abuses in Kosovo via sanctions.
“Communal Violence”
Fast forward to December 2002, and Jeri Laber testified as an “expert witness” during Slobodan Milosevic’s ICTY prosecution. Under cross-examination by the indicted former Serbian and Yugoslav president, she exhibited a staggering ignorance of socialist Yugoslavia’s culture, history, legal and political systems, and much more.
For example, Laber was unaware that Tito, the federation’s creator and long-time leader, was a Croat. Her pronounced lack of local knowledge proved especially problematic when Milosevic dissected an August 1991 HRW report on the Croatian civil war.
The probe made a number of bold claims regarding the conflict, describing “the resurrection of Croatian nationalism” that produced the deadly standoff “as a reaction to 45 years of Communist repression and Serbian hegemony.”
Western sponsorship of Nazi-venerating Croat leaders, who openly advocated for genocide of the republic’s Serb population was unmentioned. Croat citizens were also said to be “bitter” over how Zagreb was, in Yugoslavia, “a vassal of Belgrade”—and thus Serbia by extension.
Milosevic asked Laber how HRW could have concluded Croatia’s membership of socialist Yugoslavia amounted to almost half a century of “Serbian hegemony,” given that, throughout the federation’s history, only a single Serb occupied the position of prime minister for a four-year-long period.
He further inquired whether she knew that Belgrade’s three federal premiers between 1982 and 1992 were all Croats, or that Croats led and dominated Yugoslavia’s defense apparatus during the Croatian conflict itself, or that, by law, “all ethnicities were represented proportionally” in the country’s military.
Laber confessed to not knowing a single one of these inconvenient truths, which gravely undermined the claims of numerous HRW reports on the assorted inter-ethnic wars that erupted in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.
Flailing on the witness stand, she resorted to arguing the countless flagrantly bogus assertions in HRW’s investigations were not intended to be taken as the organization’s own findings, or in any way actually rooted in reality, but merely reflective of what some people locally had voiced to HRW researchers:
“We were not saying that was factually the case, we were trying to explain the attitudes we heard, what people told us when we were there…There was no intent or implication…this is what we thought. We were just saying Croats talked about many years of Serb hegemony. That was the way they seemed to see it, not the way we were saying it was, in fact…We were trying…to explain a very complicated situation to people who were not living in [Yugoslavia]…in our own simplest way.”
Such crucial, self-nullifying caveats were, of course, not included in any of HRW’s reports on Yugoslavia’s collapse and the numerous internecine conflicts that resulted, which the organization actively worked to facilitate.
That Laber’s pronouncements informed and justified U.S. policy, despite her ignorance of the most basic facts about Yugoslavia, is a disquieting testament to the quality of “expertise” routinely exploited to pursue Washington’s imperial goals.
What advocacy for Yugoslavia’s break-up would produce was entirely predictable, and indeed contemporaneously predicted by scholar Robert Hayden.
In a December 1990 New York Times op-ed, Hayden—an actual expert on Yugoslavia—harshly condemned Laber’s strident call for the U.S. to shatter the federation in the newspaper the previous month as “remarkable for its lack of comprehension” of the country.
He rightly warned, “those who would break up the country are strong nationalists, not likely to treat minorities within their own borders well,” while recording how the federal military’s interventions helped “forestall armed conflict” in Croatia that August.
Comparing Belgrade’s present situation to the lead-up to the U.S. civil war, Hayden charged it was “truly bizarre…‘human rights’ activists so cavalierly advocate policies that are likely to turn Yugoslavia into the Lebanon of Europe.”
With eerily precise foresight, he warned that, should the federal state collapse, “the republics are almost certain to fight one another because of the large minority populations that are scattered through the country.” His words today reverberate as a prophet’s curse come true:
“At best, we could expect strict repression, perhaps massive expulsions, the sundering of mixed towns and families, followed by permanent hostility and…communal violence as to make present human rights abuses in Kosovo seem absolutely civilized…The nations of Yugoslavia, despite their hostilities, are tightly bound to one another. These bonds cannot be broken, at least not without atrocities. ‘Human rights’ advocates should thus consider policies that will lead these nations to put down their arms, rather than policies that will induce fratricide.”
The underground leader of a Marxist-Leninist party was, meanwhile, given a 15-year prison sentence. ↑
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About the Author
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions.
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