Billionaire-backed Human Rights Watch lobbies for lethal US sanctions on leftist governments as COVID-19 crisis rages
Regime change-hungry HRW is proudly taking credit for crushing new US sanctions on Nicaragua while pushing to escalate Washington’s economic war on Venezuela. The Grayzone presents a deep dive into the “human rights” arm of US empire.
by Ben Norton
Part 2 - HRW, a coup-supporting ‘human rights’ group funded by a billionaire cold warrior
Since its founding days, Human Rights Watch has functioned as a revolving door between the NGO sector and the US government. It has repeatedly refused to oppose American wars and military interventions, and displayed clear double standards toward Washington’s allies, while fixating obsessively on the supposed misdeeds of independent nations targeted by the US for regime change.
HRW was founded during the height of the Cold War as Helsinki Watch, an anti-Soviet lobby group closely linked to the US government and funded by the Ford Foundation, which served as a CIA passthrough.
Ken Roth has directed HRW for 27 years – far longer than most leaders he derides as dictators. Having begun his career as a federal prosecutor in the US Attorney Southern District of New York Office, Roth has never deviated much from Washington’s foreign-policy agenda.
Roth supported the far-right military coup in Bolivia in November 2019, and subsequently downplayed the junta’s massacre of indigenous protesters. Back in 2011, the HRW director wrote an op-ed glorifying the “responsibility to protect” doctrine, which holds that the US and its allies must dispatch their military to destroy governments that supposedly threaten civilian populations. He deployed the thin cover for imperial conquest to justify the NATO military intervention in Libya, which transformed the previously prosperous country into a failed state that was home to open-air slave markets.
This January, Roth helped justify the Trump administration’s extrajudicial execution of top Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, a brazen act of war that nearly plunged the region into a catastrophic conflict. In recent months, he has taken his longstanding resentment of China’s government to unhinged levels, likening Beijing to Nazi Germany and spreading a fake video of a special effects training which he implied depicted Chinese “killer robots.”
All the while, Roth’s organization has marketed itself as a noble and absolutely impartial defender of human rights. Its disingenuous global branding campaign has been possible thanks to a $100 million grant from anti-communist billionaire George Soros. Soros is a key financier of the regime-change industry and a zealous cold warrior who worked closely with the United States and Western Europe to help overthrow socialist-oriented governments in Eastern Europe through a series of “color revolutions,” privatize their economies, and integrate the newly capitalist states into the European Union and NATO.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius named Soros in 1991 as a key figure among a coterie of “overt operatives” who “have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private – providing money and moral support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist rule.”
While Soros has become something of a bogeyman for the right-wing, targeted with inane conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic vitriol, the oligarch has been granted broad cover from center-left forces across the West to finance pro-neoliberal regime change operations.
One of the two co-founders of HRW, Aryeh Neier, went on to become the president of Soros’ Open Society Foundations. The other co-founder, Robert L. Bernstein, gave Neier most of the credit for the organization’s genesis, writing in his memoir, “It would be hard to overstate the role that Aryeh Neier had in the development of HRW.”
Like Roth, HRW’s billionaire sponsor has taken a hardline position against China, calling it a “mortal danger” to neoliberal capitalist democracies, pouring money into groups to try to weaken and destabilize Beijing and remove the Communist Party from power.
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