By Darren Ibrahim Wang

During the month of September, two Russian planes, as well one French, one Yemeni, and one Jordanian all arrived in Iraq with humanitarian aid and diplomats in defiance of U.N. sanctions that have been leveled against Iraq for the past ten years since its invasion of Kuwait. These flights to Baghdad landed without permission from the U.N. committee amid a growing consensus that the ten year-old comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq should be lifted. The United States and Great Britain, two members of the permanent U.N. Security Council, seem to be the only governments that insist planes should obtain U.N. committee permission before landing. What have these sanctions done to draw such broad support for Iraq? In Iraq, these sanctions have killed thousands of innocent civilians, just as they have in Cuba, Haiti, Sierra Leone, and many other impoverished countries.

Sanctions are sometimes considered a middle ground in international politics as they are more severe than diplomatic or verbal condemnation yet seem to be less severe than direct use of military force. Economic, travel, military, and cultural sanctions are common classifications. One type of economic sanction, the trade sanction, restricts imports and exports to and from a target country. Another type is a financial sanction, which involves freezing government assets held in other countries and limiting the target country from access to financial markets. Travel sanctions, such as those imposed against Libyan diplomatic personnel by U.N. Resolution 748 in March 1992, limit diplomatic personnel serving abroad. Military or arms embargoes can terminate any military assistance or training, as they are intended to target certain armed forces. Such actions have been taken by the United Nations against Rwanda in 1994, Liberia in 1992, and more recently, against Sierra Leone in 1997. A cultural sanction may prevent athletes of a target country from participating in the Olympics or prevent students from studying abroad in student exchange programs.

The economic sanctions is a deliberate, government-inspired withdrawal of customary trade or financial relations. It is usually carried for the purpose of inducing some change in a country’s foreign or domestic policy. Trade sanctions deprive people of certain products and interrupt lifestyles of civilian populations in a target country. The reasoning follows that the civilian population, through some form of protest, vote, or coup d’etat will cause its government to change its ways so that the sanctions can be lifted. Such reasoning has proven o be flawed in multiple cases.

The United States, in 1960, in an effort to curb and undermine Fidel Castro’s future regime, imposed a unilateral trade embargo on Cuba, which was later amended by the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996. These acts essentially ban all commercial ties between the United States and Cuba, and impair the right of U.S. citizens to travel to or carry out cultural exchanges with Cuba.

Furthermore, the Cuban Democracy Act prohibits any merchant ship that stops at a Cuban port from entering the United States market for six months. The vast majority of this trade was in needed food and medicine for the Cubans. The implementation of this legislation has caused a sharp decrease in the availability of medical equipment and drugs necessary to treat an already malnourished population. In a report to the General Assembly, UNICEF referred to the embargo in Cuba as having an especially harmful effect on children. Such legislation has been enacted for almost half a century, yet Castro’s regime in Cuba still stands.

There has been much speculation as to whether or not economic sanctions should be considered a weapon of war. To designate sanctions as a weapon of war would mean that they must comply with the conventional rules of war, as established by the Geneva Convention and other war conventions.

Many people believe that sanctions are a peaceful alternative to “sending in the troops”; the goal of economic sanctions, however, is actually to attack an enemy’s economic resources instead of its military capabilities. This is devastating to the civilian population to the point at which some consider economic sanctions an act of genocide when they are imposed with the knowledge that they will cause mass malnutrition, starvation, and diminish a society’s ability to treat medical conditions. War theory comes into play in discriminating between legitimate targets and innocents. Although noncombatant deaths are often unavoidable in war, economic sanctions devastate the noncombatants as the rule and not the exception. An interesting twist to the argument is to attempt to consider economic sanctions as something other than a weapon of war. With the amount of destruction and devastation they clearly and intentionally cause, what else can one consider sanctions?

Economic sanctions placed upon countries whose current form of government does not support democracy have proven themselves ineffective. These sanctions are meant to force the people to seek change in their government or their government’s policies. Although this model may sound reasonable, in the case of a dictatorship, the people have no say and are unable to rally any change in government. Furthermore, economic sanctions placed upon dictatorships tend to disproportionately affect the lower income classes, as the higher income ruling classes and the dictator gain control of a growing black market of scarce goods. The dictator’s control of the country is often strengthened when he rallies his people against a common enemy, the imposer of economic sanctions. Such is the case with Cuba and Iraq, in which Castro and Hussein, despite the starving and strained lifestyles of their people, continue to have support through mass demonstrations. Saddam Hussein even has voluntary human shields around his palaces to deter U.N. jets from bombing them. The innocent continue to suffer and Saddam continues to live in his lavish palaces.

UNICEF’s report on child mortality rate show that Sierra Leone, Angola, Afghanistan, Liberia, and Somalia are all ranked in the top eight countries with the highest mortality rate for children under five. Five out of the eight countries with the highest child mortality rates have had U.N. sanctions placed upon them in the past ten years. This clearly demonstrates the target of sanctions are people who are already struggling to survive. The sanctions merely exacerbate serious situations. From a humanitarian standpoint (and we are all human), to place undue pressure on these people in addition to what they are already going through is unjustifiable and unacceptable. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 require the protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population. If a sanction regime authorizes military action against any of these objects necessary for survival, it is in violation of the convention and must be deemed illegal. All too often, economic sanctions are placed on a country instead of trying to find a legitimate, alternative solution. Militaries sent to foreign countries such as Somalia, Iraq, and Bosnia to achieve some change for humanitarian purposes are pulled back by their governments all too quickly to avoid military casualties. In Somalia, the United States immediately pulled out its personnel when 18 American soldiers were killed in a gun-fight with local warlords. In Bosnia, Quick Response troops gave new meaning to their title when the United Nations pulled its forces out of Sbrenica upon siege by the Serbs. The world watched in horror as a U.N.- designated safe haven for Bosnians was allowed to fall. The U.N. troops gave up the city without any military confrontation with the Serbs. This directly resulted in the genocide of thousands of people. The problem in Somalia and Bosnia demonstrate that policing governments do not resort to real solutions because they deem their military casualties are not worth the tenfold civilian deaths that could be prevented.

According to the Bossuyt Report released by Global Policy Forum, sanctions should be strenuously evaluated before they are imposed to ensure that they are for the common good and not for some narrow self-interest. They should be imposed for valid reasons. As the United Nations states, sanctions must be imposed only when there is a threat of or actual breach of international peace and security. The target of the sanctions should not be civilians who are not involved with the threat of peace of security, nor should they interfere with humanitarian goods or goods need to ensure basic subsistence of the civilian population, including food, drinking water, and basic medicine. To quote on analyst, “humanitarian exemptions cannot provide an adequate safety net against the social and economic dislocation that prolonged trade embargoes cause.” The degradation of societal infrastructure and the lacking ability of a community to provide necessary social services have been documented in detail. The aim of sanctions should be clearly stated and should target the appropriate goods and objects. In addition to being imposed upon proper targeted goods, sanctions must be reasonably limited by time. Sanctions that last for too long without any meaningful results become a form punishment if they continue to be imposed after a country’s wrong is ceased. The reasons for implementing sanctions should be legitimate and valid. To do otherwise is to take away from the legitimacy of the sanction. The Security Council imposed multilateral comprehensive economic sanctions in Resolution 661 against Iraq for invading Kuwait; it did not, however, do the same to Turkey, Israel, or Morocco, when they occupied foreign lands. Three members of the U.N. Permanent Security Council have disapproved of the sanctions imposed in Iraq. Because of the veto power that the United States and great Britain hold, however, their efforts in voting against further sanctions in Iraq have been dragged out indefinitely. Sanctions must follow certain rules in order to comply with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. Although countries in general have the right to trade with whomever they please, they do not have a right when they are knowingly causing human rights violations an the suffering of innocents.

As history has proven, the implementation of economic sanctions does not succeed, and in addition, causes tremendous amounts of damage to the social and humanitarian infrastructure of the target country. In 1995, Boutros Ghali, the Secretary General of the United Nations, stated the crux of the issue when he called sanctions, “a blunt instrument…they raise the ethical question of whether suffering inflicted on vulnerable groups in the target country is a legitimate means of exerting pressure on political leaders whose behavior is unlikely to be affected by the plight of their subjects.”