From mea culpa to Milosevic

I still get emails from readers asking why they no longer receive alerts to steel city scribbles. My bad. Moons ago I decided to slim down my distribution list; a good idea badly implemented. I emailed all to say I’d from that day forth send alerts only to those who replied with ‘continue’ in the subject field.

You, being smart, can see the problem. Me, being a dipstick, didn’t. Any reader who missed that sole alert (and hadn’t blocked me years ago) was left wondering why the others had stopped. So I’m temporarily reinstating Big List. Alerts will continue to all, but with this announcement:

On March 6 2026 these alerts to steel city posts will cease unless you request otherwise. To do that, reply with ‘continue‘ in the subject field.

(To stop them before  March 6, reply with ‘remove‘ in the subject field.)

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Moving on to another of my mistakes, in a recent post I wrote:

Yesterday I offered a short read on the idiots who, from diverse political worldviews – and with levels of enthusiasm ranging from bring it on gung-ho, through peg on nose ‘lesser evil-ism’, to ‘condemnations’ which give slyly de facto support – back an empire strike on Iran.

It was inaccurate, unfair and rank bad salesmanship to decry as ‘idiots’ the many who deem Iran’s theocrats the last word in evil incarnate. (Or “as bad as” a US empire which objectively and quantifiably is precisely that.) This isn’t about morality or reasoning power. Better minds and purer hearts than mine aren’t immune – how could they be? – to the most powerful, flexible and pervasive propaganda machine the world has ever known.

Again, my bad. I do apologise and in future will strive to emulate our Christian friends by hating the sin while loving the sinner.

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I speak of a long record of secret service involvement in protests sold as organic by the most powerful propaganda machine the world has known. But mention must be made of how the CIA, ever evolving in sophistication and over exposed by the bloody excesses of Operation Condor, saw plausible deniability in NGO cut-outs like National Endowment for Democracy, human rights groups which uncritically accept State Department dollars, and such private funders as Soros and the Gates Foundation. That’s before we even get to the likes of  Syria’s “White Helmets”, of which volumes have been written and which invariably vacated ISIS held areas the moment these were retaken by the Syrian Army. I sometimes wonder if the ‘conspiracy theorist’ putdown was algorithmically slipped into social media discourse precisely to deny a hearing to those who research such matters – but that’d be a conspiracy theory, right?

CIA/Mossad fingerprints are all over this! (footnote 3)

With the sack cloth and ashes behind me till the next time, let me turn to Yugoslavia. Oops. Not sure the sack cloth and ashes can be cast aside just yet. I too, in my 90s goodbye-Lenin-hello-life-stylism  phase, bought hook, line and sinker the propaganda on that Western backed butchery of a state for imperial gain. ¹

But in these most dangerous of days, you may ask, why hark back to events of thirty years ago? Well, because the butchery on Yugoslavia was precursor to a pattern since writ large. In a recent rebuff of Owen Jones, whose “simplistic morality tales” – and the untold damage they do – I can’t overlook quite as readily as I do the errors of a misguided public, I wrote of:

(a) the responsibilities attendant on his privileged platform and (b) an abundance of evidence of empire machinations in a quarter-century of ‘colour revolutions’ and coups which by divine coincidence advanced the interests of a US oligarchy masquerading as a democracy and determined at all costs, up to and including thermonuclear Armageddon, to shore up its weakening but still murderously powerful grip on the planet.

Those empire machinations (and attendant propaganda) reached a then new low in Yugoslavia. With hindsight many things can be seen in sharper focus, one being its offering an early study in the systematic, now routine weaponising of ‘human rights’.

Here to tell the tale, writing January 31, is Kit Klarenberg. But before I hand over, allow me one last observation. Empire reach and power since 1945 – hugely but briefly bolstered by that unipolar moment between the fall of the USSR, and the twin challenge of China rising while Russia once more found its soul and spine after the IMF disaster years under Yeltsin – rests on three pillars: military might … dollar hegemony … ‘soft power’ through capture of other nations’ information space as discussed from one angle in Road to WW3 part 5, from another in How fiction advances empire agendas.

US military might remains formidable, not least through 800 bases encircling the planet, but is increasingly constrained by a Russia and China which can’t be directly bullied. For its part the supremacy of the greenback grows more precarious by the day; a textbook case of how, in Greek tragedian fashion, efforts to stop the rot serve only to advance it. Much of the recklessness shown now over Iran, once we look beyond psychological fixations on Trump’s erratic persona, reflects the panic of an oligarchy addicted – see More on the empire’s zugzwang – to dollar supremacy and the exorbitant privilege it confers.

On the third pillar, however, control of the narrative – “getting into the head” of target nations to such a degree they act against their own interests – America continues to reign supreme.

he crimes of the USA have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but few have talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 2005

Bear this in mind as you read Kit’s piece on the dismemberment of Yugoslavia. Btw, courtroom drama buffs will enjoy his account of how Milosevic, defending himself at the Hague – where two senior judges opined later that, had he not been Epsteined, he would have been acquitted – skewered in cross examination the witless but poisonous garbage put out by a “flailing” Human Rights Watch executive.

How Human Rights Watch Shattered Yugoslavia

On August 25th 2025, 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 organisations such as Amnesty International, and Helsinki Watch – the forerunner of Human Rights Watch. Supposedly independent reports published by these organisations became devastatingly effective tools for justifying sanctions, destabilisation campaigns, coups, and outright military intervention against purported overseas “rights” abusers. A palpable example of HRW’s utility in this regard is provided by Yugoslavia’s disintegration. ²

In December 2017, HRW published a self-laudatory essay boasting how its publication of “real-time field reporting of war crimes” during the Bosnian civil war’s early stages in 1992, and the organisation’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 organisation 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’s pivotal contribution to manufacturing public and political consent for Yugoslavia’s breakup, which produced the very atrocities the organisation helped document and prosecute.

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.

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 elections under US State Department supervision within six months. In a stroke, Belgrade’s central authority was neutralised, and the seeds of bitter, bloody wars of independence throughout the multiethnic, multifaith federation were sown. Shockingly, Human Rights Watch was well-aware this was an “inevitable” consequence of terminating 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 anonymous local Albanians told HRW 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 mission was “to protect the Serb minority.” However, the report asserted there was now “no justification” for the army’s presence, 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 ultranationalists had in recent years embarked on a savage “war of terror” to create a Kosovo “cleansed of all Slavs.” That year alone, 20,000 terrified Serbs fled the province. In 1987, the outlet recorded how this barbarous crusade had intensified to such a degree, Yugoslav officials and citizens across the federation 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 Kucan, who three years later led his republic’s independence 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:

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 unanimously declared a state of emergency in Kosovo, leading to the military’s deployment.

HRW singularly failed to probe this complex, essential context in its report. There was also no recognition whatsoever the situation in Kosovo for non-Albanians remained fraught at this time, to the extent Serbs escaping brewing ethnic tensions elsewhere in Yugoslavia were explicitly warned not to seek refuge in the province by authorities. These omissions are all the more unpardonable given HRW’s distorted view of events in Kosovo was central to the report’s conclusion – the US should sanction the Yugoslav federal government for human rights violations.

This finding was reached despite HRW conceding it was widely believed punitive action against Belgrade would “inevitably” lead to the federation’s disintegration, with “human rights virtually guaranteed to suffer” as a result. The organisation however did “not endorse this position”, believing it of far greater urgency Washington “express its disapproval” over purported abuses in Kosovo via destructive sanctions. Meanwhile, HRW unbelievably stressed it took “no position on whether Yugoslavia should or should not stay together as a country.”

‘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 an absolutely staggering ignorance of socialist Yugoslavia’s culture, history, legal and political systems, and much more besides. For example, Laber was unaware Tito, the federation’s founder and longtime leader, was – famously – a Croat. Her pronounced lack of local comprehension proved particularly problematic when Milosevic dissected an August 1991 HRW report, on the Croatian civil war.

The probe made a number of bold claims regarding that conflict, describing “the resurrection of Croatian nationalism” producing the deadly standoff “as a reaction to 45 years of Communist repression and Serbian hegemony,” leaving Croats “bitter” over how Zagreb was, in Yugoslavia, “a vassal” of Belgrade. HRW strongly suggested – without evidence – Milosevic was personally responsible for fomenting local tensions and violence. Western sponsorship of Nazi-venerating Croat leaders, who openly advocated total erasure of their republic’s Serb population, was unmentioned.

Milosevic asked Laber how HRW could’ve possibly concluded Croatia’s membership of socialist Yugoslavia amounted to almost half a century of “Serbian hegemony”, given a Serb occupied the office of Prime Minister just once throughout the federation’s history, for a four-year-long period. He further questioned her cognisance of Belgrade’s three federal premiers 1982 – 1992 all being Croats, that Croats led and dominated Yugoslavia’s defence apparatus during the Croatian conflict itself, and how “all ethnicities were represented proportionally” in the country’s government and military by law.

Laber confessed to not knowing a single one of these inconvenient truths, fatally undermining the claims of every HRW report published on Yugoslavia under her watch – which inspired the ICTY’s formation, and prosecutions. Flailing on the witness stand, she resorted to arguing the countless flagrantly bogus assertions in HRW’s assorted Yugoslav investigations weren’t intended to be taken as her organisation’s own independent findings, or in any way rooted in reality, but merely reflected what some people locally had voiced to HRW researchers:

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 organisation actively encouraged and facilitated. That Laber’s witless pronouncements informed and justified US policy, despite her ignorance of the most basic facts about Yugoslavia, is a disquieting testament to the woeful quality of ‘expertise’ routinely exploited in pursuit of Washington’s imperial goals. ³ What the federation’s breakup 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 US to shatter the federation in the newspaper the previous month as “remarkable for its lack of comprehension.” 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, which could’ve easily spread across the country.

Comparing Belgrade’s present situation to the US civil war’s leadup, 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 if Belgrade’s federal authority collapsed, “the republics are almost certain to fight one another because of the large minority populations that are scattered through the country.” His dire premonitions today reverberate as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

1. Besides weaponising ‘human rights’, the assault on Yugoslavia illustrates the truth that industrial scale mendacity is easier if the situation is or can be packaged as fiendishly complex. (That’s why Big Tobacco, knowing it couldn’t get away with flat out denial of an ocean of evidence on the lethal toxicity of its product, hired maverick experts, outliers to an overwhelming consensus, to muddy the waters. It was a gaslighting strategy, since emulated by Big Fossil Fuel, to assure us that things were less clear cut than met the eye.) Most folk found it hard enough to follow the Good and Evil plot in Rwanda, with only two parties (three if we include “moderate Hutus”) in the frame. Fat chance of keeping a clear and critical gaze on Western leveraged divisions in the multi-ethnic state Tito had held together. In such a situation it was child’s play, given our hard-wired and species wide love of stories with clearly defined Good Guys and Bad, for empire’s spinmeisters to generously do the thinking for us.
2. Under the directorship of Ken Roth, Human Rights Watch did invaluable work for empire in its dirty war on Syria; the weaponising of ‘human rights’, and its sale to a credulous public, now perfected. Of course, that was in those halcyon days before hypocrisy itself was abandoned in favour of “we’re strong, you’re weak; suck it up!”
3. “Laber’s witless pronouncements”, showcasing “the woeful quality of ‘expertise’ routinely exploited in pursuit of Washington’s imperial goals”,  would be replicated in the Xinjiang brouhaha. Prior to elements in State Department and CIA protesting its unsustainability, Washington made the claim – trumpeted by Mike (“we lied, we cheated, we stole”) Pompeo and dutifully relayed by Western media from WashPo to Guardian, NYT to BBC – of a Uighur genocide. Its basis? The childishly flawed methodology of Adrian Zenz: a Christian zealot tasked by God with the destruction of communism …