Yugoslavia: Human Rights Watch in Service to the War Party
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson and George Szamuely
Global Research, March 9, 2007
Zmag.org - 2007-02-25
A Review of “Weighing the Evidence: Lessons from the Slobodan Milosevic Trial” (Human Rights Watch, December, 2006) |
by Edward S. Herman and David Peterson and George Szamuely; February 25, 2007 |
Part 1: Introduction: The Role and Biases of Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch (HRW) came into existence in 1978 as the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee. Early documents affirmed that its purpose was to “monitor domestic and international compliance with the human rights provisions of the Helsinki Final Act.”[1] But though a private U.S.-based organization whose vice chairman once stated “You can't complain about other countries unless you put your own house in order,”[2] its main focus was on Moscow . Thus its literature also affirmed that founding the Committee “was intended as a gesture of moral support for the activities of the beleaguered Helsinki monitors in the Soviet bloc,” and its early work was well geared to advance the U.S. government's policy of weakening the Soviet Union and loosening its ties to Eastern Europe.[3] While the organization has broadened its horizons and grown enormously since its $400,000 seed money from the Ford Foundation, it has never sloughed off its close link to the Western establishment, as evidenced by its leadership’s affiliations,[4] its funding,[5] and its role over the years. Because of its institutional commitment to human rights and its broad purview, however, HRW has done a great deal of valuable work, as for example in helping to document the character and effects of the Reagan era wars across Central America, where its Americas Watch reports on the U.S. support for the Nicaragua Contras, the Salvadoran army and death squads, and Guatemalan state terror were eye-opening and led to intense hostility on the part of the Reaganites and Wall Street Journal editors.[6]
But despite these and countless other constructive efforts, the organization has at critical times and in critical theaters thrown its support behind the U.S. government’s agenda, sometimes even serving as a virtual public relations arm of the foreign policy establishment. Since the early 1990s this tendency has been especially marked in the organization’s focus on and treatment of some of the major contests in which the U.S. government itself has been engaged—perhaps none more clearly than Iraq and the Balkans. Here, its deep bias is well-illustrated in a March 2002 op-ed by HRW’s executive director, Kenneth Roth, published in the Wall Street Journal under the title “Indict Saddam.”[7] The first thing to note about this commentary is its timing. It was published at a time when the United States and Britain were clearly planning an assault on Iraq with a “shock and awe” bombing campaign and ground invasion in violation of the UN Charter. But Roth doesn’t warn against launching an unprovoked war—though wars of aggression had been judged by the Nuremberg Tribunal to be the “supreme international crime” that “contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”[8] On the contrary, Roth's focus was on Saddam’s crimes, and provided a valuable public relations gift to U.S. and British leaders, diverting attention from and putting an apologetic gloss on their prospective supreme international crime.
Three years earlier, when the NATO powers had begun the bombing of Yugoslavia on March 24, 1999, HRW said nothing critical about that action; as we shall see, it focused mainly on the crimes of the target country then under attack. In a 1998 commentary for the International Herald Tribune, Fred Abrahams, an HRW researcher whose major focus has been Kosovo, urged regime-change for Yugoslavia , either through President Slobodan Milosevic's indictment or a U.S. war to affect the same outcome. “At what point will the Clinton administration decide that they have seen enough?” Abrahams asked. “[T]he international community's failure to punish Milosevic for crimes in Croatia and Bosnia sent the message that he would be allowed to get away with such crimes again. It is now obvious that the man who started these conflicts cannot be trusted to stop them.”[9] This line also served the United States and other NATO powers well, and both cases show a clear adaptation of HRW definitions of human rights and choice of worthy victims to the needs of the Western powers and institutions that nurture the organization. (In Part 3, we deal with the mind-boggling misrepresentation of history in Abrahams' statement about Milosevic’s unwillingness to stop these wars—in fact, Milosevic signed-on to every major peace proposal 1992-1995, whereas Abrahams’ favorite state regularly sabotaged them.)
Roth’s “Indict Saddam” st arts as follows: “The Bush administration’s frustration with a decade of porous sanctions against Iraq has led to active consideration of military action. Yet one alternative has yet to be seriously tried—indicting Saddam Hussein for his many atrocities, particularly the 1988 genocide against Iraqi Kurds.” This clearly implies that the sanctions imposed on Iraq were ineffective (“porous”) and that the administration’s alleged frustration on that account was real and well grounded, establishment claims that were false and misleading and that an unbiased analyst might have had some doubts about at the time. We may note also the lack of concern with the “active consideration of military action.”
But equally important, Roth ignores the devastating sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United States and Britain via the UN for over a decade, which prevented the repair of Iraq’s sanitation facilities, water purification and agricultural irrigation systems, all of which had been deliberately destroyed in the 1991 bombing war.[10] Through their power to magnify hardship, malnutrition, and disease, this form of economic and political warfare “may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history,” John and Karl Mueller write in their aptly titled “Sanctions of Mass Destruction.”[11] This would seem to constitute first-order war criminality, and with a million fatalities should be worth great attention from a human rights group. But as Madeleine Albright once told CBS TV's 60 Minutes, the price of half-a-million Iraqi children’s deaths was “worth it,”[12] and Roth and HRW looked the other way. HRW never produced a major report on the sanctions. It never called attention to U.S. and British responsibility for this death-dealing policy. And though HRW did point out that the deliberate starvation of civilian populations is a war crime, it never suggested that U.S. and U.K. officials were guilty of these war crimes. And of course it never called for any tribunals to try the responsible parties.[13]
Also of interest is the fact that in this same Wall Street Journal commentary, Roth describes in detail Saddam Hussein’s crimes against the Kurds, which he repeatedly calls “genocide,” whereas the number of Iraqis killed by Western sanctions were between five and ten times the number of Kurds killed by Baghdad forces, but don’t get mentioned, let alone described as victims of “genocide.”[14] Roth asserts that bringing Saddam to justice for his treatment of the Kurds ran into difficulties because France and Russia each had “extensive business interests” in Iraq , and China was worried about comparisons with their treatment of Tibetans. Nowhere does Roth mention the U.S. business dealings with Saddam, loans to his regime, supplying it with helicopters, intelligence and chemical weapons, and the Reagan administration’s protection of Saddam from Security Council actions. Instead, paralleling HRW's condemnation and delegitimization of Belgrade during 1998-1999, by this stage in early 2002, it was the condemnation and delegitimization of the Iraqi regime that had become of paramount importance to Roth. Although he noted that bringing indictments against Saddam “would not guarantee his ouster,” Roth added that they “would certainly help build consensus that he is unfit to govern, and thus that something must be done to end his rule.”
The word “genocide” has also never been applied by Roth or HRW to the enormous death toll caused by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, 2003-2007, although the numbers of civilians that have died as a consequence of that UN Charter violation now exceed the Kurd “genocide” attributed to Saddam by a multiple that may have reached six or more.[15] But HRW has shown little interest in these totals, and when the British medical journal Lancet published an estimate of some 100,000 Iraqi civilian deaths for the first 18 months following the March 2003 invasion, HRW senior military analyst (and former Pentagon intelligence analyst) Marc E. Garlasco quickly dismissed the findings as “inflated” and the methods used as “prone to inflation due to overcounting.”[16] Subsequently, Garlasco admitted to not having read the report when he offered his initial assessment about it to the press.[17] Roth and HRW have shown no qualms over using the word “genocide” frequently in reference to Serb conduct in Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in Kosovo, although there also the number of victims falls far short of the numbers in Iraq, whether from the “sanctions of mass destruction” or the invasion-occupation of 2003-2007.[18] Once again, this word usage is well geared to the support of U.S. and NATO policy.
In all these cases the HRW focus has been on methods of fighting and their impact on civilians. As noted, this bypasses any possible challenge to cross-border attacks that constitute the “supreme international crime,” which HRW takes as a given (with exceptions as described below). It may be argued, however, that if a war itself is illegal, then any military or civilian killings that follow from this crime cannot be defended on grounds that they are the unavoidable consequence of war; [19] but this is not the philosophy of HRW, which ignores that basic illegality. Instead, HRW has repeatedly stated that it “does not make judgments about the decision whether to go to war—about whether a war complies with international law against aggression. We care deeply about the humanitarian consequences of war, but we avoid judgments on the legality of war itself because they tend to compromise the neutrality needed to monitor most effectively how the war is waged….”[20]
But this is a disingenuous evasion on multiple grounds. The decision to go to war is the one that assures there will be both military and civilian casualties, as was stressed by the Nuremberg Tribunal in explaining its own focus on the “supreme international crime,” and for that reason alone an unbiased human rights organization would not ignore it. Given that HRW’s own state is the one that has been carrying out serial wars in violation of the UN Charter, the exclusion of this primary cause of human rights violations in itself compromises any neutrality the organization may claim to observe.
What is more, there is evidence that HRW leaders have been pleased with these aggressions. We will show later that it urged them on in the case of the Balkans wars, and Roth’s piece “Indict Saddam” was a form of public relations support for the prospective attack on Iraq . Roth even celebrates the breakdown of international law against aggression, allegedly in the interest of “human rights.” He stated that “We will remember 1999 as the year in which sovereignty gave way in places where crimes against humanity were being committed.”[21] Of course, it is the U.S. and British leadership which determines when “crimes against humanity” are committed, but Roth has faith that these leaders are the proper deciders and that the sacrifice of a basic principle of international law is thus justified. This is an only slightly veiled defense of recent U.S. aggressions, and so the alleged refusal by HRW to make judgments about decisions to go to war is in fact a form of apologetics for aggressive war.
HRW’s professed neutrality is disingenuous for yet another reason: The organization has never applied it to the armed conflicts within the former Yugoslavia . There, HRW has treated the conflicts and their impact upon civilian populations as the direct consequences of cross-border aggression, and has held the ethnic Serb leadership in Belgrade to be uniquely responsible for them. The entire first half of HRW’s Weighing the Evidence is devoted to a summary of the Office of the Prosecutor's evidence that Belgrade provided financial, material, and personnel support to ethnic Serb combatants in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina—treating this support as clear-cut violations of the international law against aggression: “[H]ow Belgrade orchestrated the vicious wars in Bosnia, Croatia and Kosovo,” as Weighing the Evidence author Sara Darehshori put it.[22] HRW has never done the same in other theaters of armed conflict where it maintains an interest—say, documenting how Washington's financial and material support “orchestrates” Israel’s 40-year-old military occupation of the Palestinian Territories or Israel's cross-border attacks into Lebanon; and as already noted, U.S. crimes of aggression are treated with “neutrality.” But HRW-style neutrality disappears when it is dealing with U.S. targets such as Serbia, where HRW widens its human rights concerns beyond mere methods of combat to include “who started it” and the “accumulated evil of the whole.”
In a closely related double standard—and point of illogic—throughout their coverage of the Balkans conflicts, and in close accord with the position of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY or Tribunal), Roth and HRW demanded that the villains (Serbs) must be brought to justice if a true peace is to prevail.[23] This was allegedly required to help deter future villainy and because the victims need the consolation of justice. But this principle should clearly apply to villains who commit the “supreme international crime,” and it was precisely such villains who were tried at Nuremberg . Wouldn’t we want “justice” brought to aggressors to teach potential aggressors that such behavior doesn’t pay? And isn’t such justice necessary to bring peace of mind to the victims of aggression so that true peace can prevail? The point doesn’t arise for Roth and HRW, who not only are completely oblivious to this double standard, but in their Balkans efforts have worked closely with the perpetrators of the supreme crime in allegedly bringing justice to the lesser criminals. Here again it is clear that Roth and HRW are not neutral, but, having internalized the perspectives of the Western powers, they serve aggression when carried out under the right auspices.
HRW not only overlooks the rule of law as regards aggression, it has never addressed the massive abuses of the judicial process in the politicized work of the ICTY,[24] apparently because it is serving the same cause as HRW. In another illustration of its cavalier attitude toward legality, HRW boasts that it “helped pressure the Yugoslav government to turn Milosevic and his cohorts over to the tribunal,” in complete disregard of the fact that this was done by a kidnapping and in straightforward violation of the Yugoslav constitution and rulings of Yugoslav courts.[25]
Among other forms of bias, HRW accepts the NATO-friendly view that civilian deaths from high-tech warfare such as in aerial bombings and missile strikes are not prima facie “deliberate” as are face-to-face and low-tech killings of civilians. HRW holds that while the former may involve war crimes if not carried out carefully, the latter are war crimes per se. But this distinction is invalid, as bombs dropped from on high on or near civilian facilities are extremely likely to kill and injure civilians, even if the individuals killed were not specifically targeted; and this known high probability makes those killings deliberate for all intents and purposes.[26] Suicide bombers also sometimes target military personnel and do not always just attack civilians. Given that the actual civilian casualty totals of hi-tech bombings and other weaponry are usually far greater than those of suicide bombers and other face-to-face killings,[27] this HRW bias places the protection of U.S. and NATO methods of warfare ahead of human rights.
Another form of bias is the HRW tendency to offer low counts of U.S. and NATO victims, and high counts for victims of U.S. and NATO targets. A study by Marc Herold reveals a pattern in which HRW “reports figures which are about one-third those of other reputable sources.” Herold points out that in the case of the NATO attack on Yugoslavia, HRW estimated 500 civilian deaths in Serbia, whereas other credible sources ran to 1,200-1,500 (and the Serbian official estimate was 1,800); and for Afghanistan, HRW estimated that at least 1,000 civilians were killed whereas Herold’s own studies yielded a total between 3,000-4,000. Herold also shows that in the specific case of a U.S. massacre at Chowkar-Karez in Afghanistan, HRW’s thinly based estimate of 25-35 dead was markedly below the figure of 90 reported in the media of Britain, India, Qatar and Egypt.[28]
On the other side of the ledger, Richard Dicker, the director of HRW's International Justice Program (IJP) and a consultant on Weighing the Evidence, asserted that “hundreds of thousands killed and millions [were] forced from their homes in the four wars [Milosevic] lost while asserting Serbian nationalism.”[29] Dicker's inflated rhetoric was not meant to be exact; nor did it need to be, and his “hundreds of thousands” killed has been drastically deflated by establishment sources, but without explicit acknowledgement by Dicker or HRW. In dealing with Serbia's exquisitely demonized “strongman,” this human rights lawyer knew that just about any charge could be made to stick, whether at the ICTY or before the court of public opinion. In a more subtle display of numbers-bias, HRW's World Report 2007 says that in February 2006, staff at the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center (RDC) “were threatened through an anonymous phone call and warned to stop their analysis on war-related deaths.” The motive was the “center’s downward revision of the number of wartime casualties,” which HRW stresses “has drawn criticism from Bosnian Muslims, the war's principal victims.”[30] In fact, the RDC has found documentable totals of war-related deaths on all sides to be in the area of 100,000.[31] Thus HRW's use of the phrase “downward revision” mischaracterizes the RDC's work, as it understates the dramatic reduction by one-half to two-thirds of the much higher estimates of 200,000 to 300,000 that have been in circulation since late 1992, while HRW never once gives the specific number in the revised estimate that shows Dicker to have been guilty of inflation (and raises questions about HRW’s massive attention to an alleged “genocide” in Bosnia).
Another revealing form of bias has been HRW's regular denial that the United States commits war crimes. Writing in late 2002, Kenneth Roth stated that “In recent wars, U.S. forces have made mistakes and even violated humanitarian law but have not committed war crimes.”[32] He admitted that the use of cluster bombs where substantial civilian casualties are “foreseeable” might be deemed by some court to be a war crime, but he himself declared that none were committed—a remarkable claim given that Roth and HRW have hardly examined all uses of cluster bombs and determined that in each of those cases civilian deaths were not “foreseeable.” This is the language of crude apologetics. Furthermore, there is the matter of the use of depleted uranium, a civilian-deadly weapon regularly employed by his country, which Roth ignores.
Michael Mandel has pointed out that during the war against Yugoslavia, “NATO convicted itself out of its own mouth,” its leaders repeatedly acknowledging the goal of breaking civilian morale, and targeting bridges, schools, factories, livestock, crops, power grids, media centers, religious buildings, including early Christian and medieval churches, chemical plants, and fertilizer factories.[33] Only a U.S.-war apologist could claim that this objective and these targets did not point to intentionality as well as reveal war crimes. Amnesty International had no trouble finding and naming plenty of war crimes.[34]
There are other forms of bias in HRW’s work, such as an underplaying of really major crimes and a false even-handedness in cases where the preferred side does vastly more deadly and destructive things, as in case of Israel in Lebanon and Gaza, or the United States in Iraq, with the massive use of cluster bombs, the almost complete destruction of sizable cities like Fallujah, hospital bombings, and the use of phosphorus bombs as well as depleted uranium. Roth did castigate the Israelis for their July 30 airstrikes on the Lebanese village of Qana, saying and writing that the “IDF effectively turned southern Lebanon into a free-fire zone,” and for its use of cluster bombs.[35] But HRW’s treatment of Israel or the United States in Iraq has never come near the passionate intensity shown by their on-the-ground investigations and search for witnesses, their acceptance of contestable evidence, and their furious condemnations of Serb behavior in Bosnia and Kosovo and calls for punishment.
And in contrast with their treatment of the Serbs, when dealing with Israel and the United States , HRW has gone to great pains to provide “balance” in even-handedly condemning Hezbollah, the Gaza Palestinians and Hamas, and the Iraqi resistance. In the case of Hezbollah and Israel , HRW even compared their missile attacks in terms that were unfavorable to Hezbollah, whose missiles HRW alleges deliberately targeted civilians, whereas Israel simply was not careful enough. HRW ignored the fact of a major “supreme international crime,” the volume of bombings and ordnance deployed, and the number of casualties, and it imputed an intent to Hezbollah fighters for which HRW had no supportive evidence.[36] This parallels the apologetics in the HRW contrast between unintended civilian casualties from high level bombing versus the “deliberate” killing of civilians in close-quarters combat.
In sum, HRW has done a great deal of valuable work on human rights, enough to frequently arouse the ire of U.S. and U.S. client state officials and their intellectual and media supporters. But like the Christian missionaries of earlier empires, HRW has also performed yeoman service in the advancement of U.S. foreign policy. Hans Köchler says that “Human rights have become an instrument of power politics in an environment in which no checks and balances exist to restrain the arbitrary use of power.” And in his view, “In the war against Yugoslavia in 1999, NATO acted as the ‘Holy Alliance’ of our times, trying to justify with moral principles a campaign of war that was in complete contradiction to the UN Charter and to international law in general.”[37] HRW has been a servant of this new Holy Alliance.
In the beginning, as the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, it did this by helping to publicize Soviet wrongdoing in Western capitals. Later, and during the current and the last decade in particular, it has made three principal contributions to U.S. policy interests. First and most notably, HRW has refused to challenge U.S. wars and interventions as such, taking them as givens and dealing only with second-order human rights phenomena within the theaters under attack. This refusal dates back to the Golden Age of the 1980s, when under challenge over their handling of the Contra war against Nicaragua and the Sandinista government's response to it, the group's leaders avowed that “Americas Watch takes no position on the military conflict as such,” emphasizing that “we condemn the human rights violations committed by the insurgents as we condemn those committed by the government.”[38] Second, HRW has tended to underplay and undercount U.S. and “allied” human rights violations. At worst, it has found U.S. warmakers responsible for very narrow mistakes and oversights, for taking insufficient precautions in their methods of violence, for using proscribed munitions, and for causing “needless deaths.”[39] Third, and the most important from the standpoint of how atrocities are recorded and publicized, HRW has placed the targets of U.S. wars under the most demanding of human rights microscopes, invariably finding their political leadership guilty of serious crimes and calling for their removal and/or punishment.[40]
Even when HRW applies its microscope to U.S. conduct, as in the related cases of the prisoner of war camp at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and “rendition” to foreign states,[41] it never calls for the prosecution of the political leadership responsible for these practices, much less treat this conduct as something more grave than bad publicity, tarnishing America's image abroad. Thus HRW began 2007 with a PR campaign calling for Guantanamo 's closure. But although HRW labeled Guantanamo a “shameful blight on US respect for human rights,”[42] and Kenneth Roth called it “utterly counterproductive,” a “symbol of the Bush Administration's lawlessness when it comes to fighting terrorism,” a “tool for terrorist recruiters,” and a “disaster for America's standing in the world and a disaster for the effectiveness of the fight against terrorism,”[43] no mention was made of the direct chain-of-command that runs from the White House to Guantanamo. Nor of the fact that Guantanamo is but one node in a network of similar U.S. practices that circle the globe—the reality of which is a U.S. Gulag.[44] Instead, early 2007 found HRW adopting the posture that Guantanamo is yet another “mistake,” and chiding Washington on grounds that its larger objectives in the so-called “war on terror” would be better served were it to shut the camp down.
Throughout HRW's work runs the presumption that the United States is the global lawgiver, with special rights that call for special treatment, including in particular the non-reciprocal right to interfere in the sovereign affairs of other states and peoples, militarily if its leadership so decides. And this remains equally true whether HRW is documenting Washington's “mistakes” across various theaters of war or, as we show below, HRW is decrying what it called Slobodan Milosevic's “coordinated and systematic” campaigns to terrorize, kill, and expel ethnic non-Serbs from the territories he sought to dominate.[45] Can one imagine HRW referring to George Bush’s “coordinated and systematic” campaign to organize a global torture gulag? Or calling a Serb, an Iraqi, or a Sudanese action “unproductive” and a “tool for recruiters against U.S. imperialism”?
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Endnotes to Part 1
1. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee: The First Fifteen Months (U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee, 1980), pp. 3. "[H]uman rights provisions" referred to Article VII of the Declaration on Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States (a.k.a. the Helsinki Final Act), adopted at the First Summit of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in Helsinki on August 1, 1975. Article VII affirmed among other things that "participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms," and "act in conformity with the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [and] the International Covenants on Human Rights, by which they may be bound." The other nine articles largely reaffirmed the principles set out in the UN Charter (e.g., the sovereign equality among States (I), refraining from the threat or use of force in international affairs (II), the peaceful settlement of disputes (V), the non-intervention in the internal affairs of other States (VI), and so on (pp. 3-8)). (Also see note 47, below.)
2. Orville Shell, quoted in Dusko Doder, "Helsinki Watch Unit Set Up To Monitor U.S. on Rights," Washington Post, March 18, 1979.
3. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee: The First Fifteen Months, p. 4. Among the activities highlighted by this document (pp. 9-19), fundraisers, lobbying, and publishing efforts on behalf of Soviet bloc dissidents featured the most prominently, and a mark of distinction attached to expressions of solidarity with figures running afoul of Soviet, Czech, and Polish authorities. One Helsinki Watch op-ed that appeared in the June 16, 1979 New York Times was quoted: "Soviet leaders should be told in Vienna that until the legitimate rights of the Helsinki monitors are restored, the fulfillment of another goal of the Helsinki Accords—the granting of most-favored-nation-status—is out of the question" (p. 12). Notwithstanding its pledge to monitor "domestic compliance" to Article VII standards, the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee was organized around monitoring the Soviet bloc above all.
2. Orville Shell, quoted in Dusko Doder, "Helsinki Watch Unit Set Up To Monitor U.S. on Rights," Washington Post, March 18, 1979.
3. U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee: The First Fifteen Months, p. 4. Among the activities highlighted by this document (pp. 9-19), fundraisers, lobbying, and publishing efforts on behalf of Soviet bloc dissidents featured the most prominently, and a mark of distinction attached to expressions of solidarity with figures running afoul of Soviet, Czech, and Polish authorities. One Helsinki Watch op-ed that appeared in the June 16, 1979 New York Times was quoted: "Soviet leaders should be told in Vienna that until the legitimate rights of the Helsinki monitors are restored, the fulfillment of another goal of the Helsinki Accords—the granting of most-favored-nation-status—is out of the question" (p. 12). Notwithstanding its pledge to monitor "domestic compliance" to Article VII standards, the U.S. Helsinki Watch Committee was organized around monitoring the Soviet bloc above all.
4. One of the major players within the network of Western-based non-governmental organizations, HRW has strong linkages with both the U.S. foreign policy establishment and George Soros' operations. Within the past six years, HRW's Europe and Central Asia Advisory Board has included U.S. State Department veteran Morton Abramowitz, the former Voice of America/Radio Liberty head Paul Goble, former Republican congressman Bill Green, and former U.S ambassadors Warren Zimmerman (Yugoslavia), Jack Matlock (Soviet Union), and Herbert Okun (United Nations). By 2005, Okun alone was left from that group. As of 2006, HRW's 33 member Board of Directors included Lloyd Axworthy, a former Foreign Minister of Canada; Richard Goldstone, a former South African judge and chief prosecutor at the ICTY; Vartan Gregorian, the Carnegie Corporation's President; James Hoge, editor of Foreign Affairs; Kati Marton, the wife of Richard Holbrook; and a number of business executives, lawyers, academics, and rights activists. George Soros has served on the HRW advisory boards for both the Americas and Europe-Central Asia for many years; and several of his associates do likewise, such as Gara LaMarche (U.S.) and Peter Osnos ( Europe-Central Asia —Osnos is also a HRW Board of Directors emeritus). An Open Society Institute annual report speaks of its “partnership” with HRW, which is “of enormous importance to the Soros foundations: the relationships with grantees that have developed into alliances in pursuing crucial parts of the open society agenda.” (See Building Open Societies: Soros Foundation Network 2005 Annual Report, pp. 175-176.) Although we can only touch on this topic here, the overlap between a whole network of like-minded political, media, and human rights organizations throughout the Balkans and Eastern Europe , and Soros- and OSI-funded groups such as HRW and the International Crisis Group, is substantial. For a glimpse at some of them, see Gilles d’Aymery, “The Circle of Deception: Mapping the Human Rights Crowd in the Balkans,” Swans, July 23, 2001; Andrew Bolt, "Justice for Sale ," Herald Sun (Melbourne), June 20, 2002; Paul Treanor, “Who is behind Human Rights Watch?” 2004; and Neil Clark, “NS Profile-George Soros,” New Statesman, June 2, 2003.
5. Whatever its origins, HRW has turned itself into a very profitable nonprofit enterprise. According to HRW's Annual Report 2006 (the most current at this time), for the fiscal year ended June 30, 2006, HRW reported revenue of $39.8 million, of which $31.5 million derived from donations ("public support"). With expenses reported at $30.2 million (including programs, salaries, and supporting services), HRW thus earned some $9.6 million during the period in question. (See "Financial Information," pp. 52-56.) Turning to HRW's financial supporters, we read that for the 12 month period through March 2006, HRW had 57 donors of $100,000 or more; these included a wide array of wealthy individuals and business people (9 of whom remained anonymous), and many foundations (Annenberg, Ford, Hewlett, McArthur, Merck, Mott, the Open Society Institute, and the Sandler Family). Another 102 donors gave between $25,000 and $99,999; and scores of others gave between $5,000 and $24,999. (See pp. 62-65.) The exact amounts given in each case are not reported. But it is of interest that Soros' Open Society Institute gave HRW $1 million (as reported in its own annual report: see Building Open Societies: Soros Foundation Network 2005 Annual Report, where HRW is described as a "longtime" OSI grantee (p. 172)). George Soros' name is listed separately as another HRW contributor of over $100,000. Indeed, each of the last five Annual Reports archived by the HRW website in electronic form ranks both Soros and the OSI among the "$100,000 or more" donors. (See 2001, p. 38; 2002, p. 50; 2003, p. 40; 2005, p. 63; and 2006, p. 62.) Although HRW's funding is broadly based, there is a top-heavy concentration among the very wealthy, corporate, and establishment foundations, and Gorge Soros and the OSI figure prominently.
6. In one notorious editorial about its "unsettled business with Americas Watch," the Wall Street Journal echoed Reaganite rhetoric and accused the organization of siding with Cuba an
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