Global Policy Forum

By Nicholas D. Kristof

It would take some chutzpah for me to accuse President George W. Bush, Democrats in the U.S. Congress and a courageous Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident of bolstering some of the world's most odious dictators. But here goes. The Bush administration has variously backed, threatened, acquiesced in or hinted at tough new sanctions against Cuba, Syria, North Korea and Burma. Democrats helped lead the fight for a new ban on imports from Burma. And the gutsy Nobel laureate from Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi, backs sanctions that help impoverish her own people.

The United States imposed 85 new unilateral economic sanctions on foreign nations from 1996 to 2001. But sanctions, which cost U.S. companies up to $19 billion in 1995 alone, aren't a policy; they're a feel-good substitute for one. Usually they hurt just the people they are meant to help. Fortunately, the U.S. Senate joined the House of Representatives last month in voting to ease restrictions on travel to Cuba. There is now some hope that the United States will dismantle the Cuba sanctions, which have hurt ordinary Cubans while helping Fidel Castro, giving him a scapegoat for his economic failures.

Take Burma (or Myanmar, as its thuggish generals have tried to rename it). Republicans and Democrats alike voted to approve tough new sanctions against Burma this year. The reality is that Western sanctions have already been failing in Burma for the last 14 years, as they have for more than 40 years in Cuba, as they did for a dozen years in Iraq. We should have learned from Iraq that arms embargoes and United Nations inspections can do some good, while economic sanctions kill children. The claim that sanctions killed 500,000 Iraqi children, a figure that originated in a UN Children's Fund report, was probably exaggerated, but no one doubts that UN sanctions contributed to child malnutrition and mortality in Iraq.

The State Department says in a new report that the July ban on Burmese imports has already led to 30,000 to 40,000 layoffs in the garment industry and that ultimately 100,000 Burmese will lose jobs. Most of these are young women who have no other way of earning a living, and the State Department says that some are being forced, or duped, into prostitution (where many will be killed by AIDS).

"We do believe that some of those young women have gone into the sex trade," said Richard Boucher, the State Department spokesman, although he defended sanctions and said that they would eventually make life better in Burma. So in the best-case scenario, the U.S. sanctions are ousting 100,000 people from their jobs - while the generals keep theirs. Burmese are already living on the margins: In Burma, one child in 10 dies before his or her fifth birthday, 44 percent of children are malnourished and 58 percent of pregnant women are so poorly fed that they have anemia. Fewer births are attended by a trained nurse now than back in 1982.

So the sanctions will cause babies to die, young women to succumb to AIDS and families to go hungry. Aung San Suu Kyi has shown exceptional courage in standing up to Burma's generals and the harm they cause. She should also be brave enough to back down and call for ending sanctions that hurt her people. If we knew that sanctions would lead to a better Burma, I could understand sacrificing helpless young women. But when sanctions, especially unilateral ones, are mostly ineffective - one major study found that they worked to some degree one-third of the time - why is the United States so eager to adopt measures that impose such suffering on innocent Burmese, or Cubans or Syrians?

In fairness, I was also skeptical of sanctions against South Africa, and in retrospect I was wrong: Partly because they were multilateral, they were one of many factors that led to peaceful change there. But in the more typical cases of Iraq, Haiti, Cuba and North Korea, sanctions seemed only to empower dictators.

Sanctions are ill suited to a complex world where a senator can nobly stand before the cameras to denounce Burmese tyrants and the effect is that a child on the other side of the world dies of hunger

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