In November 1990, HRW founding member Jeri Laber authored a tendentiously-titled op-ed for The New York Times, “Why Keep Yugoslavia One Country?”. Inspired by a recent trip to Kosovo, Laber described how her team’s experience on-the-ground in the Serbian province had led HRW to harbour “serious doubts about whether the US 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. Namely, 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”. She forcefully concluded, “there is no moral law that commits us to honor the national unity of Yugoslavia.” Coincidentally, mere days earlier, US lawmakers began voting on the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which codified Laber’s prescriptions as formal government policy.
The missing piece here is that Yugoslavia was a massive human rights abuser, and HRW brought attention to that fact.
The goal was not to destroy Yugoslavia, but to remove human rights abusers from positions of power.
This of course was leveraged by other human rights abusers, resulting in the breakup of the country. It did, however, eventually result in the cessation of widespread abuse of the people, but not until after significant escalation.
The CIA wrote a document in 1990 “Yugoslavia transformed”. It briefly discusses increasing repression of Albanian Kosovars advocating autonomy, and sporadic ethnic conflict, but at that point it even considered military force involvement in secession attempts unlikely. If there were a massive human rights abuse situation at the time of Laber’s article, also 1990, how did the CIA miss that?
So you didn’t read the article.
The article was very much focused on how HRW was a tool of the west to destroy Yugoslavia.
My point was that what HRW did was legitimate, totally outside of how the west abused its results; Yugoslavia was already in trouble from their government and faction leaders doing the things the West failed to stop.
It’s overall a good write up. I think for me there’s are some pieces missing though, which I would love to see further explored, although it is not possible yet to fully do so. For example:
- Why are Jeri Laber’s files on Yugoslavia between 1980-1984 restricted until 2060?
- Why is her correspondence with the dept of state between 84 and 87 restricted until 2060?
- Why are there almost no files listed at all from HRW between 1984 and 1990 for Yugoslavia?
- Why did she go there in 1988?
- Why are Ivana Nizich’s 1991 files on Yugoslavia and the World Bank/IMF information restricted until 2067?
- Why are Amnesty International docs by HRW also restricted?
If it weren’t for the now releases CIA files from the 80s and 90s, you’d think the area had simply disappeared entirely.
