Sanctions may be an easy option
but they do not affect the leaders they aim to weaken.
By Richard Norton-Taylor
August 16, 1999
Sanctions make governments feel good. They are easier to sustain than war, especially when western states want the support of the international community. The phrase, "UN sanctions", has an uncontroversial, almost pious, ring to it. They are meant to punish regimes we regard as unacceptable. Yet elites of those regimes always get round them. Sanctions invariably hit the most vulnerable, members of society. Iraq is the prime example, though come winter, Serbians may suffer a similar fate.
Last week, Unicef, the UN children's agency, reported that sanctions had contributed to a dramatic increase in child deaths in central and southern Iraq, the areas controlled by the government. Children under five are dying at more than twice the rate of 10 years ago. There were 56 deaths of children under five per 1,000 live births in 1984-89 and 131 per 1,000 in 1994-99. The figures place Iraq on a par with Pakistan, Haiti, or Uganda. If the decline in child mortality rates in Iraq in the 1980s had continued during the 1990s, said Carol Bellamy, Unicef's executive director, there would have been half a million fewer deaths of children under five between 1991 and 1998. Meanwhile, in the autonomous, largely Kurdish, northern region of Iraq - subjected to the same sanctions regime but where the UN has a more hands-on role - child mortality has fallen. The Iraq government is siphoning medicines and food from the "food for oil" deal (though this did not come into effect until 1997).
Saddam Hussein continues to lavish money on palaces and his family and other privileged groups indulge in black marketeering. Copper is being smuggled out of the country. Iraq may soon become the world's second-largest oil exporter, second only to Saudi Arabia, largely because the decrepit state of its refineries leaves it little choice but to export as much crude oil as possible. Iraq's pariah status exempted it from production cuts agreed by Opec earlier this year, cuts which nearly doubled the price of oil. But sanctions have given the Iraqi government a powerful propaganda weapon. It can blame child mortality, and the general infrastructure of the country, on sanctions. It says that more than 1.5m people, including children, have died as a result of sanctions.
The US and Britain say that sanctions could be suspended when there is evidence that Saddam Hussein has got rid of all weapons of mass destruction and stocks of biological and chemical weapons. Ever since Unscom inspectors were effectively kicked out of Iraq last year - a move that led to Operation Desert Fox, there is no independent way of verifying Iraqi claims that it has abandoned its biological and chemical weapons programmes.
The west's encouragement to the Kurds in the north, and the Shias in the south, to rise up after the Gulf war, and subsequent CIA- funded attempts to topple Saddam have led to disaster and more deaths. Bombing from the air, as later against Slobodan Milosevic, was the west's, or America's, only answer. The bombing of Serbia, or the humanitarian operation as Nato called it, eventually allowed ethnic Albanians to return home (and wreak vengeance against the Serbians). Nato set out to achieve its avowedly humanitarian aims by bombing civilian targets, including power supplies, to encourage the Serbian people to rise up against Milosevic.
Sanctions against Serbia, and the west's refusal to help reconstruct the economy and infrastructure so long as Milosevic is in power, have not had the desired effect, though his position is more precarious than Saddam's. Serbia is different from Iraq and the reasons for imposing sanctions are not the same. However, the consequences of sanctions have been the same. For years they strengthened Milosevic's position just like Saddam's. They have led to deep resentment of the west, and have encouraged a laager mentality. They have caused widespread suffering among the innocent population and set back the values of civil society.
Elites, whether in Iraq, Serbia, or Cuba, have avoided the impact of sanctions. They increase divisions in society while holding out no hope to those who are most affected by them. And the more tyrannical, dictatorial, the regime, the less likely sanctions will achieve their objectives. Sanctions may have been a factor in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa and in persuading to agree to a trial of the two men indicted for the Lockerbie bombing. But they were only a factor. Will sanctions ever help to topple Saddam Hussein? The west's policy towards Iraq appears bankrupt. The British government is looking at ways of easing sanctions against Baghdad. But tampering with sanctions will serve no useful purpose. Better to lift them completely, to open the floodgates to foreign trade and investment. Some may say this will hand Saddam a propaganda victory. Yet it would deprive him of an excuse for his country's dire state. Constructive engagement, which the US has been prepared to pursue with North Korea, will provide his citizens with some hope for the future - and even encourage them to question the morality of stockpiling chemical and biological weapons.
