Understanding the Effects of Economic Sanctions

Picture by Mike Prysner, taken in Iraq ca. 2003

As we are currently in a time when the word “sanctions” gets thrown around left and right by the media, it is a well in place to attempt to clarify what exactly sanctions are, how they’re used and what their effects on a country are. In 2017 and now 2018, we have especially experienced the call for sanctions on Venezuela, Iran, North Korea and Russia, and hence I believe it is of crucial importance to understand more about what these sanctions entail given our historical understanding of foreign policy.

Economic sanctions are a way for one or several governments to put pressure on another country’s government, hoping for it to stop behaving in a certain way, and/or align itself in the way desired by those imposing the sanctions. Within diplomacy, sanctions can be placed somewhere in between condemnation and warfare. Yet the actual effects of sanctions on a targeted country’s population seem to still be vastly misunderstood given that right now, the majority of the Western world are cheering at the idea of further sanctioning Russia and Venezuela based on current political events.

If we go back in time a little bit, we can recall the sanctioning of Iraq in the 1990’s. The UN Security Council was not pleased with Saddam’s dealings in Kuwait, and enacted both financial and trade embargoes on Iraq which lasted until 2003, when Saddam was forced off power. By 1995, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations had reported that the sanctions had had a direct effect in the death of over 500.000 Iraqi children. By 2003, it is estimated that more than one million Iraqis had lost their lives because of the sanctions. Dennis Halliday, then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations resigned in 1998 after experiencing the effects of the sanctions first hand. In a 2000 interview with The Guardian, he stated : "I had been instructed to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible." To this day, this part of the middle eastern conflict seems to be almost forgotten when assessing the current situation in the area. The sanctions in question nurtured a strong anti-American and anti-Western sentiment throughout the country, and went on to become one of the main reasons for Al Qaeda to want to kill Americans as stated in the 1998 fatwā issued by Osama Bin Laden. In 2004, Osama called the sanctions “the greatest mass slaughter of children mankind has ever known". On the other hand, then US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright believed they were “worth it”.

Even though these sanctions were enacted by the UN Security Council, The UN itself has for long condemned the use of sanctions, as they most often achieve the exact opposite with regards to everything which the UN stands for (such as human rights, right to development, human dignity and so on). A 2000 UN report named The Adverse Consequences of Economic Sanctions written by then President of the Constitutional Court of Belgium, Marc Bossuyt, for the UN Subcommission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, states with regards to sanctions that “(ii)They most seriously affect the innocent population, especially the most vulnerable; (iii)They aggravate imbalances in income distribution; (iv) They generate illegal and unethical business practices”. Under the Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, such sanctions, given the prior knowledge we have of the effects of sanctions on a population, could be condemned as crimes against humanity by international law.

Now in the case of Venezuela : the US, Canada, and other Western Countries imposed sanctions in 2017 that have already been seen to affect the public health of the Venezuelan population. The embargos instated against the sale of Venezuelan oil which stands for about 95% of Venezuela’s income, atop the financial system embargo, makes it very difficult for the general population to acquire necessities such as medicines which they must buy from abroad. Venezuela suffered through a malaria crisis back in November 2017 and has had to go as far as India to be able to buy the needed medicine. The blockades added to a higher scarcity in med supplies and higher prices - not only in malaria medicines but also others such as insulin which too are vital for many. Although no statistics of the death count seem to have been gathered yet, UN rapporteur Dr. Alfred de Zayas who visited Venezuela last year is quite certain that a significant amount of Venezuelan people have already died due to the sanctions in place. As he stated in an interview with The Real News : “the policy of imposing sanctions, the policy of preventing the Venezuelan government from issuing bonds and selling those bonds et cetera, et cetera, who is suffering the consequences? The Venezuelan people. It's not something like you are freezing the assets of the ministers or Mr. Maduro or whatever. You're actually hurting the people. And to the extent that sanctions have caused death--and they have.”. Such sanctions do go against the UN General Assembly Resolutions 25th Session (2625 XXV), which states that “No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State.” and “No State may use or encourage the use of economic political or any other type of measures to coerce another State in order to obtain from it the subordination of the exercise of its sovereign rights and to secure from it advantages of any kind”. Again, it can thus be argued that the sanctions at hand are in violation of international law.

Iran was under sanctions up until January 2016, which made it very difficult for the Iranian people to acquire the necessary medicine to cure a large array of diseases, just as in Venezuela. Given that most Western high quality medicines were suddenly unavailable, Iran had to import more expensive and lower quality versions from China or India, and even through some black market channels. Many treatments today are patent protected by Western firms, which made it virtually impossible for Iran to import them. The financial blockades also severely the amount of money available by the government to afford the treatments. All in all, shortages were seen in the treatment of about 30 illnesses (such as cancer, multiple sclerosis and heart diseases) which ended up hurting and killing the poor, weak and sick people of Iran.

In 2014, the West imposed heavy sanctions on Russia after it went on the annex Crimea, which have measured to cause a 2.4% drop in pre-crisis Russian GDP. Russia was at the same time suffering because of falling oil prices (which is the same case for Venezuela), which led the total net capital inflow losses due to the sanctions from 2014 through 2017 to amount to 8% of the 2013 Russian GDP. So far it seems that Russia has managed to deal pretty well with its sanctions although they have been felt strongly throughout the country. Yet with the current Russiagate scandal which taints the current US administration, and even more recently with the probable false flag Salisbury Attack in the UK, it would seem that the West is pushing for even stronger sanctions towards Russia.

The end line is that sanctions should not be taken lightly by either our politicians, medias or the general population. North Korea called the latest 2017 sanctions “an act of war”, and the US-Russia relation is today worse than at the height of the Cold War mainly due to the enacted sanctions. Sanctions can easily be argued as being a better option than warfare, but at least when starting a war, mountains of evidence, political and public backing - both nationally and internationally - are usually required. On the other hand, sanctions seem to be imposed too lightly nowadays, for many of the wrong reasons, and with complete disregard towards the effects they have on the poor and non-resilient demographics of the targeted country. As sanctions most often are in direct violation of international law, and many could be framed as “crimes against humanity” by the Statute of Rome - imposing them should be done so with all of these aspects in mind, and with the same respect and consideration as for military interventions.

Just as much as it is wrong to cheer for war, it is wrong to cheer for sanctions as well . Yet more often than not, sanctions are met by the Western media and general public with great appreciation, and are generally seen as strong acts of political decisiveness, and hence are usually encouraged and welcomed. If anything, this only reaffirms the complete detachment that we in the Western world have with regards to our foreign policies, and how we often affect the world in negative ways, with very little knowledge of it.