History

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.