SANCTIONS: DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS
UN sanctions have had successes, but studies show most sanctions regimes fail to achieve goal of getting states to change policies
THE United Nations is a marvel. Successor to the ill-fated League of Nations, its pioneers managed to bring together all the nations of the world in a single global enterprise. None is more worthy of gratitude for this feat than the United States of America. Its vision, weight and leadership made it happen.
The lofty principles that underpin the UN Charter continue to inspire laudable instruments of global governance. The International Court of Justice, the UN Development Programme and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are among them.
But the UN has also been a severe disappointment in several areas. It is then criticised and even condemned. The brunt is unfairly borne by the secretarygeneral and his international colleagues. Rather than the organisation, it is the member states that are culpable.
Especially the Security Council (SC) and its permanent members. It is they who presided over the drafting of the UN Charter and the design of the organisation. It is they who choose to empower or thwart it. And it is their national and geopolitical interests that can lead to abuses and excesses.
A case in point is the sanctions that are applied on states and other entities. Article 41 of the UN Charter empowers the SC to apply political and economic sanctions short of war to constrain rogue states from breaking international law and using force to threaten the security of other states.
This is to be done after the alleged “threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression” is fully discussed under Article 39. This is hardly done. Decisions are often political in nature, based on vague and inconsistent criteria that suit the agenda of some permanent members of the SC.
One of the consequences is that a state like Israel is never sanctioned though it is a prime candidate. It has forcefully occupied foreign territory illegally for more than half a century, and it openly declares it intends to annex more. Sanctions also cannot be applied by the UN on any veto-wielding member of the SC. Even when it fabricates “evidence”, invades another country with allies in tow, and commits war crimes on a colossal scale with impunity.
Whatever their defects and shortcomings though, sanctions applied by the UN through the SC have the legitimacy accorded by the Charter and international law.
Not so the sanctions imposed unilaterally by powerful states without UN approval. Or the socalled “secondary sanctions” imposed by the United States on third countries that do business with countries it has sanctioned unilaterally. These are illegal, extra-territorial acts committed by the US in pursuit of its own political and strategic ends. The US is able to exert such power because of its control over the international financial system and the fact that the dollar is the main currency for international trade.
The US is the country most addicted to sanctions. It is the most enthusiastic advocate in the SC, the most prone to imposing its own unilateral sanctions, and the only country that resorts to secondary sanctions. Kathy Gilsinan cites no less than 7,967 sanctions on states, corporations and individuals being enforced by the US at the time of her writing (The
Atlantic, “A Boom Time for U.S. Sanctions”, May 3, 2019). The number continues to grow.
UN sanctions have had some notable successes, especially when backed by powerful international sentiment. South Africa gave up apartheid. Black rule was restored in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Iraq withdrew from Kuwait. But as various studies, such as Robert Pape’s have shown, most sanctions regimes have failed to achieve their objective: to prevail upon states to change policies that allegedly threaten international security.
When targeted states resist pressures to surrender what they regard as their vital security interests, the noose is tightened further. Sanctions become less mindful of the basic needs of the population. Critical exports and imports such as oil are embargoed. Financial transactions are blocked. Third countries, banks and businesses are threatened with sanctions if they deal with the targeted states.
No formal restrictions are imposed on the health and medical sector to comply with humanitarian requirements, but sanctions on the financial sector make payment for import of critical medical supplies difficult. Sanctions become a weapon of death. Countries like Iran and Venezuela are subject to a deliberate sanctions policy to cause hardship to the population to foment opposition and resistance against the government.
Human Rights Watch, in its report “Maximum Pressure: US Economic Sanctions Harm Iranians’ Right to Health”, quotes US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo as telling CBS News on Feb 14, 2019: “Things are much worse for the Iranian people [with the US sanctions], and we are convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behaviour of the regime.”
Prolonged sanctions suspend development. Infrastructures decay. Food supplies become scarce. Combined with sustained economic mismanagement by some target governments and factors, such as natural disasters, crop failure and famine, as in North Korea, there is extended economic and humanitarian crisis.
Decades of incessant politically-driven demonisation of target governments and biased analysis and reporting make it difficult for the international community to empathise.
North Korea has been subjected to multiple layers of crippling sanctions for almost three-quarters of a century, since 1950. The Cuban population has borne the burden of sanctions for more than six decades, since 1958. The Iranian people, for just over forty years, since 1979. Syria began to be sanctioned in 1986, over three decades ago.
Generations in these countries and other places like the Palestinian Territories have grown up knowing nothing but sanctioned existence.
Part two of this article will be published tomorrow
The writer is former chairman and chief executive of the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) Malaysia