30th April 2000

Smart sanctions vs dumb sanctions

The sanctions were clearly not meant to punish countries like Sri Lanka but they did bring our tea exports to a virtual standstill.

Since Iraq was a vibrant, multimillion dollar tea market, the ban on tea exports to Baghdad also took a toll on the Sri Lankan economy.

As the UN begins re-evaluating the effectiveness of sanctions as a method of punishment, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says they are, by and large, a "blunt instrument" because they hurt large numbers of people who are not the intended targets. Last week, Annan made the distinction between what he calls "smart sanctions" and "dumb sanctions." According to his definition, UN sanctions imposed on Iraq by the Security Council were dumb sanctions.

Sanctions, after all, were originally designed to punish political leaders for their erratic behaviour or penalise member states for defying the international community.

Since they were first imposed against Southern Rhodesia back in December 1966, UN sanctions have been considered one of the few weapons at the disposal of the world body in its crusade for world peace.

Although the Iraqi sanctions were meant to punish President Saddam Hussein for invading neighbouring Kuwait, those who suffered — and continue to suffer — are mostly the people of Iraq, largely women and children.

The Iraqis were not expected to bear the brunt of the sanctions at all. But in the long run they were the unintended victims.

In a newspaper interview last year, Farid Zarif, deputy director of the UN humanitarian aid programme in Iraq, complained about the ridiculousness of the sanctions.

"We are told that pencils are forbidden because carbon could be extracted from them that might be used to coat airplanes and make them invisible to radar," he said.

"I am not a military expert, but I find it very disturbing that because of this objection, we cannot give pencils to Iraqi school children," Zarif said. Last month Annan singled out Haiti as an example of a country where UN sanctions were smart — more specific and targeted at individuals. "The leaders were not allowed to travel, they were not given visas to move around, their bank accounts were frozen, and individual families were not allowed to travel," he added.

The primary objective of UN sanctions is to change in specific ways the behaviour of a government or a regime which poses a threat to international peace and security.

And, in a conflict situation, sanctions were aimed at diminishing the capacity of protagonists to sustain a prolonged war by cutting off arms supplies, military spares and training for armed forces.

Both in Southern Rhodesia and the former apartheid regime of South Africa, the UN sustained longstanding military sanctions. But despite these embargoes, both countries established fast-developing domestic arms industries. In countries such as Angola, Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone, weapons sales by shady arms brokers and middlemen have continued in total violation of UN sanctions.

In March, a UN Sanctions Committee released a report providing details of how the rebel group, Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), conducted a brisk illegal trade in diamonds in return for oil and weapons supplies in defiance of a UN embargo.

Ambassador Robert Fowler of Canada, chairman of the Sanctions Committee, said that sanctions in Angola have been "grievously flouted" for nearly seven years, primarily by UNITA.

"Every member of this organisation (the UN) knows these sanctions have been violated," he said. In its 54-year history, the UN has imposed sanctions on 13 member states: Afghanistan, Angola, Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa (during the apartheid regime), Southern Rhodesia, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia (a second time after its breakup).

Of these, sanctions have been fully lifted only in the case of Haiti, South Africa, Southern Rhodesia and the former Yugoslavia.

The range of UN sanctions have traditionally included arms embargoes, the imposition of trade and financial restrictions, interruption of relations by air and sea, and diplomatic isolation.

Annan believes that sanctions need to be refined and fine-tuned if they are to be seen as more than a "fig leaf" in the future.