Editorial
Targetted sanctions;the new weapons of war
View(s):Sanctions are the necessary middle ground between war and words, said Kofi Annan, former United Nations Secretary-General. Today, sanctions are widely used as a political tool to impose the will of some countries upon others, without the commitment of troops or military hardware. The United States takes the lead. Its list of designated persons is more than 500 pages long and there are separate sanctions regimes for countries. The Office of the US Treasury unabashedly states that trade restrictions, etc, are used to accomplish foreign policy and national security goals.
Other countries have their own lists. Britain’s inventory is 76-pages long — modest by US standards — and covers a large number of countries, commercial entities and individuals. Particularly after the relentless bloodletting in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western governments have realised that exporting troops is not the best way to change things. Sanctions are now the new weapons of war.
The UN, too, has sanctions regimes in operation across the world. This practice is not new. In the 1930s, the League of Nations, the precursor to the UN, introduced sanctions against Italy for invading Abyssinia during the rule of Benito Mussolini. South Africa was weighed down by a sanctions regime during some of its apartheid years. There is a 50-year-old US embargo on Cuba. More recently, Iran and Russia have been targets but there are a large number of other countries in the proverbial doghouse.
Some sanctions are successful, some are not. Often, sanctions hit the very countries that impose them — as some present-day examples show. In Europe, farmers have been left holding buckets of fruit and other produce because Russia has introduced a food embargo on many EU and US goods in retaliation to sanctions against Moscow. The EU has just committed millions of Euros to compensate for “market disruption”. During embargoes on Iraq and Iran, middlemen are the beneficiaries. Sri Lanka might be a case in point. The Media Minister recently admitted that Sri Lanka had been buying Iranian crude from various countries via third parties, thereby avoiding the US embargo.
The financial services sector is the most affected by these controls. They are penalised for doing business with countries against which there are sanctions. The US is pursuing several financial institutions with branches in New York City for violating US sanctions against Sudan, Cuba and Iran. The French bank BNP Paribas was recently fined nearly US$ 9 billion and banned for a year from conducting certain US dollar transactions.
But international trade in goods and services is a complicated, interdependent exercise. Years of free trade and globalisation have led to intricate webs of reliance that cannot be easily untangled. Therefore, new strategies are also being devised for the effective imposition of sanctions. One of these is to target not countries but individuals — particularly those with close connections to Heads of State and Government. For instance, the EU recently blacklisted 87 Russians, mainly oligarchs — close allies of President Vladimir Putin. They had bled the citizenry dry to make big bucks.
In recent years, as a natural outcome of repeated resolutions at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva, the question of whether Sri Lanka may have to face sanctions is quietly being discussed. The word is certainly being bandied about more often than before. The fear is that, in the face of continued Governmental intransigence on allegations of war crimes and a failure to take convincing domestic steps towards reconciliation, stronger international action may soon become inevitable.
The Government has reacted to international calls for accountability by routinely constructing national mechanisms (such as the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission), and then disregarding their recommendations. It has also openly insulted and challenged persons and countries it deems through its narrow prism to be personally against the regime. A stinging indictment of Human Rights Council chief Navi Pillay issued by the Ministry of External Affairs just weeks before her retirement is one example of this.
And the fear must run deep. As the Sunday Times exclusively reported last week, the Attorney General’s Department has started objecting to ‘sanction clauses’ in the export credit insurance agreements it receives from export credit agencies. Experts say these provisions are becoming increasingly standard with the spread of sanctions around the world but Sri Lanka seems to have little confidence to face them. Most loans covered by export credit insurance are repayable over a long period. Is the Government worried that sanctions will be imposed somewhere down that line, leaving it with a crisis on its hands?
The fact is that sanctions against Sri Lanka — as a country or an economy — don’t seem probable. They require significant steps and processes. Sri Lanka simply does not “rise” to the level of Sudan, Russia, Iran or North Korea. Even in the US, laws need to be passed in the Senate and in the House. While Executive orders can be used based on other general laws, this, too, seems unlikely.
That does not, however, mean individuals and institutions are off the hook and those in authority here must be deeply conscious of it. The US has virtually “sanctioned” the Sri Lankan military already by rejecting any training nominees associated with units involved in end-of-war events. Visas have been refused to certain ministers and their close relatives in recent years. More visa denials or denials on a targeted basis may occur.
Foreign policy tools like travel and security warnings might be ramped up, along with tough statements. US citizens might be held accountable even before the ongoing UNHRC’s investigation concludes. They could find themselves individually targeted for human rights violations or even tax issues. Countries with offshore banking services — such as Seychelles, the United Arab Emirates and Uganda — will open up if the US Government asks for data.
The US Department of Justice, it is learnt, has been interviewing diaspora Tamils, ex-Sri Lankan military officials in the US and Europe and others. Sri Lankan military personnel, retired or serving, are also vulnerable. The US has a trove of intercepts and satellite images that have not yet been declassified. How and when these will be used is unclear.
In no way has the danger passed. The Government will have to take stock and adopt genuine measures to address longstanding international concerns. Half-hearted attempts at “investigating” disappearances — already done multiple times before — don’t really fool anybody anymore. And negotiating standard clauses out of insurance agreements is only a temporary solution to a more serious problem. A little more than surgical spirit is needed to clean up this festering wound.