Global Policy Forum

By Holger Jensen

The UN Security Council has formed a working group to make sanctions "smarter" by targeting tyrants or offending governments rather than entire populations.

However, its recommendations will only be presented in six months, by which time another 30,000 Iraqi children may have died for the sins of Saddam Hussein.

Denis Halliday, a former assistant secretary general to the United Nations and head of the U.N. oil-for-food program before he resigned in 1998, says the 10-year-old embargo on Iraq is killing about 5,000 children a month while strengthening Saddam.

Sanctions, he said, are "destroying an entire society. The theory was that sanctions diminish the leadership and sustain the people. In fact it's the reverse."

"Iraq's leadership has been strengthened by economic sanctions and the middle-class, the professional classes, the very people who might change governance in Iraq, have been wiped out. Those who remain are struggling to stay alive and keep their families alive."

Halliday and his successor, Hans von Sponeck, both resigned to protest U.S. curbs on the oil-for-food program that was supposed to ease the suffering of the Iraqi people by allowing Baghdad to sell limited quantities of oil for the purchase of humanitarian supplies. Jutta Burghardt of the World Food Program also quit in February to protest the impact of sanctions.

Supporters of sanctions say they are the only way to influence rogue nations short of military intervention. But opponents say they rarely affect dictators or abusive governments while hurting the innocent.

The latter view is upheld in separate studies by the Canadian and British parliaments, by human rights groups in Germany and Switzerland, and by a book "The Sanctions Decade: Assessing U.N. Strategies in the 1990s," recently published by the International Peace Academy.

The book's authors, David Cortight of the Fourth Freedom Forum and George Lopez of Notre Dame University, did a case-by-case study of sanctions imposed on a dozen countries (Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yugoslavia, Liberia, Libya, Haiti, Somalia, Angola, Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Rwanda) and came to the conclusion that only a third of them were even partially successful.

A ban on Angolan rebels' diamond exports was an effective way to stop them financing their guerrilla war, but it was only imposed after they earned $4 billion from gem sales and never enforced after that. An arms embargo on Rwanda was equally ineffective because it was imposed too late to stop the 1994 genocide and resoundingly ignored.

Overall, the book faults the United Nations for relying on the good will of member states to enforce sanctions. "Getting sanctions right has often been a less compelling goal than getting sanctions adopted," said Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy in a forward to the book.

Sanctions have not dislodged Iraq's Saddam, Cuba's Fidel Castro, Libya's Moammar Gadhafi, Afghanistan's Taliban or Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. And U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted earlier this month that the public is growing increasingly skeptical of such embargoes.

"There appears to be growing distrust of this instrument and its ability to bring about change at a fair cost," he said. U.S. Ambassador James Cunningham counters that "complete elimination of the unintended impact is an impossible goal and hence not an aspiration that can be met."

The burden of proof to get sanctions lifted, he said, should be "where it properly belongs, on the demonstrated behavior of the sanctioned entity."

That means if Saddam wants to improve the lot of his people, he should give up his weapons of mass destruction.

But the first American lawmaker to assess the impact of sanctions on Iraq sees it differently. Rep. Tony Hall, D-Ohio, says disarmament should be separated from humanitarian concerns because sanctions "hurt people, especially children" without necessarily forcing their leaders to change their ways.

Iraq claims 1.2 million people, three-quarters of them children, have died as a result of the embargo. Hall, who will report his findings to Congress soon, says malnutrition is widespread and few Iraqis have access to clean water.

It may be Saddam's fault for failing to comply with U.N. weapons inspections. But more than one U.N. ambassador has noted the irony of a policy meant to disarm Iraq becoming a weapon of mass destruction.

Holger Jensen is international editor of the Denver Rocky Mountain News.