It was the violation of the same right when it came to Serbs that caused the conflict. Serbs didn't want to live in Croatia any more than Croatians wanted to live in Yugoslavia. By violating Serb reights to self-determination, the Serbs were forced to live in newly and arbitrarily redrawn borders, precisely based on thnicity. So, when you state that "basic human rights are not a function of race or ethnicity" I say rubbish!
You also say that basic human rights "are not bestowed and cannot be taken by any government, although sadly, many governments have prevented their exercise" -- which to me is the same as taking them away, if not de jure then certainly de facto. Cutting through the semantics of what's the diference between taking something away and preventing it from being taken away, the fact remains that governments and unelected bodies very much have a say who gets to exercise these inalienable rights and who doesn't. Our government, which does not represent Serbian people, decided that Serbs have no right to exercise self-determination, just as the world governments have decided that Kurds have no right to it either. If the government has cannot take Kurdish human rights to self-determination, then by what authority short of naked oppression are Kurdish rights being curtailed?
In the former Yugoslavia, only the "constitutive peoples" (konstitutivbi narodi), a communist-era idiot phrase intended to mean only the founding Southern Slavs (Yugoslavia = land od Southern Slavs, the people who originally constituted the country) had a right to secession, whereas the so-called "nationalities" (narodnosti), a politically correct terms for "minorities," did not have that right.
So, while Yugoslavia's highest law gave them something that was theirs by birth, the American government denied them not soemthing that was already inalienable (which is intself alienation), but also denied Serbs soemthing that was guaranteed to them by their own Constitution!
Thus, in reality, it is clear that self-determination (of peoples) has a lot to do with ethnicity, because ethnic and religious groups tend to congregate and separate as a unit, and the exercise of that right is either allowed or alienated by the governments, which technically cannot curtail them -- but do anyway, sometimes half-way across the world.
Border changes will become superfluous (nothing heckuva about that word), or unnecessary, not only when "when governments safeguard and respect the rights of all their citizens," but when governments respect the rights of foreign citizens in their respective countries, and when governments, especially those of greater nations, begin to respect internationla agreements to which they are signatories (i.e. the Helsinky Agreement of inviolability of borders, 1975).
The problem of minorities in Serbia is not lack of local government. Serbia has local governments and had them all along. The problem is that they do not feel that they are Serbian "nationals" because they were born in and are citizens of Serbia, but behave as (what I call) -- "domestic foreigners."
I was not being sarcastic when I suggested that Serbia needs to be reorganized on the basis of the US: to create suitable reservations for its minority "nations."
Thus, in the paragraph beginning "You say that basic human rights..." the sentence "Cutting through the semantics of what's the diference between taking something away and preventing it from being taken away" should read "Cutting through the semantics of what's the difference between taking something away and preventing it from being being used"
Also the word konstitutibni should be konstitutivni.