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How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia [Kit Klarenberg]
(open.substack.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2026
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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.