Imposing Economic Sanctions

Geoff Simons

Description

‘This is a valuable introduction to the subject with an enlightening discussion on continuing attempts to stifle the Cuban economy.’ Red Pepper



Focusing on moral and legal considerations, Geoff Simons traces the history of international sanctions from ancient to modern times, through the League of Nations and the UN era, examining key examples such as the Berlin Blockade, South Africa under apartheid, and Rhodesia after the Unilateral Declaration of Independence. Assessing the unique role of the United States, Simons describes a range of cases including Cuba, Vietnam, Libya and Iran, with particular attention to the genocidal impact of sanctions on the people of Iraq, involving starvation and soaring rates of disease.
Preface



Introduction



1. In History



2. From League to United Nations



3. The US Role



4. Law and Natural Justice



5. The Case of Iraq



Notes



Bibliography



Index

Sujets

• Economic Policy
• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Political economy

Informations

• Publié par: Pluto Press
• Date de parution: 20 janvier 1999
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781849640312
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Imposing Economic Sanctions

Legal Remedy or Genocidal Tool?

Geoff Simons

P Pluto Press LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA

First published 1999 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 22883 Quicksilver Drive, Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA

Copyright © 1999 Geoff Simons

The right of Geoff Simons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 7453 1397 3 hbk

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Simons, G.L. (Geoffrey Leslie), 1939– Imposing economic sanctions: legal remedy or genocidal tool?/Geoff Simons. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–7453–1397–3 (hbk) 1. Economic sanctions. 2. Sanctions (International law) I. Title. JZ8373.S58 1999 327.1'7—dc21 98–46772 CIP

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Production Services, Chadlington, OX7 3LN Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton Printed in the EC by T.J. International, Padstow

To Leonie

Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgements Preface

Introduction

1In History The Sanctions Spectrum The Historical Frame The Megarian Decree The Siege Early Nineteenth Century The American Civil War Paris and the Commune The First World War Attitudes

2From League to United Nations The League of Nations Origins The Sanctions Option The Sanctions Failure The United Nations Origins The Sanctions Option The Berlin Blockade (1948–9) The Korea Question (1945–53) South Africa and Apartheid (1948–94) Portugal and Colonialism (1960–74) Rhodesia and UDI (1962–79) Libya and Lockerbie (1991–) Yugoslavia – Balkanisation (1991–) Haiti and ‘Democracy’ (1990–4) Other Cases

ix x xi

1

7 8 11 13 16 20 23 27 30 37

42 43 43 49 52 62 62 65 71 72 75 81 84 88 98 105 109

viii

3

4

5

Imposing Economic Sanctions

The US Role The Superpower Perquisite The Sanctions Options The Sanctions Ubiquity Cuba The Birth of Sanctions The Cuban Democracy Act (1992) The Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act (1996) Genocide I North Korea Vietnam Libya, Iran and the D’Amato Act India and Pakistan Other Cases

Law and Natural Justice The Key Question Are Food Embargoes Legitimate? The Relevance of Coercion The United States and Food Denial

The Case of Iraq Background The Sanctions Regime The Sanctions Impact A New Holocaust

Notes Select Bibliography Index

115 115 117 120 124 124 128

131 138 140 144 145 154 157

162 162 163 166 167

169 169 170 173 178

181 197 199

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

1.1 Selected pre-First World War examples of economic sanctions 1.2 Prussian siege of Paris (1870–1) – fatalities 2.1 Membership of the League of Nations 2.2 Mandatories and mandated territories 3.1 Some states targeted by US (acting alone) for sanctions 3.2 General Assembly votes against US blockade of Cuba 5.1 Total number of Iraqi child deaths due to sanctions

Figures

2.1 3.1 3.2 3.3 4.1 5.1

Mobil paper-chase to defeat sanctions on Rhodesia Percentage of Cuban imports supplied by US Helms–Burton Act, 1996 – Extracts Iran and Libya Sanctions Act of 1996 – Extract UN declarations prohibiting food embargoes Some items for Iraq vetoed in Sanctions Committee

ix

12 29 46 48 121 137 177

85 125 133 152 165 173

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the many people who have supplied information that relates directly or indirectly to the complex world of economic sanctions. Particular thanks are due to Alexandra McLeod (Librarian, United Nations Information Centre, London) who supplies copious UN documents (resolutions, letters, statements, interviews, and so on); the activists of the charity Voices in the Wilderness (Kathy Kelly, George Capaccio and others in the United States; and their colleagues in the United Kingdom, Stanhope House, 1 Hertford Road, London, N2 9BX), struggling to relieve the suffering of the beleaguered Iraqi people; Felicity Arbuthnot, journalist and Middle East specialist, who is generous with her expertise and who works tirelessly to highlight the gross injustices perpetrated by powerful states; and Christine Simons, whose substantial and growing archive is an invaluable resource, whose insights often find their way unremarked into my texts, and who helps in many other ways. Economic sanctions, hyped by comfortable politicians and pundits as a convenient legal remedy, are too often an undiscriminating ‘weapon of mass destruction’. As ever, I am grateful to the journalists, aid workers, academics and others whose efforts help to publicise the genocidal denial of food and medicine to civilian populations. Their names are given in the notes and elsewhere in this book.

x

Preface

Research for this book soon confirmed what I had long suspected: economic sanctions are a universe. They have always been used by contending domestic factions and exploited as a multifaceted tool in the service of foreign policy. They run through all of history and are indelibly stamped on international affairs in the modern world. In one form or another they have always been a concomitant to military action in war, and a ubiquitous and weighty element in the peacetime relations between states at times of commercial expansion and rising tensions. Do they ‘work’? Economic sanctions are so diverse – in their type, ambition and manner of application – that no general answer is possible.Internationaleconomic sanctions, the theme of this book, are variously porous, ineffectual, counterproductive, misdirected, persuasive, effectual and devastating. They invariably have some impact, and they may achieve covert objectives quite different to those that are publicly proclaimed: the deliverers of sanctions often have hidden agendas. Economic sanctions, in isolation, are rarely alegal remedyto an international crisis. They have the habit of antagonising and consolidating recalcitrant regimes which are then forced into repression and self-reliance; and of bringing immense suffering to innocent human victims. Alas, economic sanctions are more often agenocidal tool, subjecting helpless civilian populations – in solitary city or entire country – to comprehensive siege. And they frequently have serious consequences also for states other than the target victim. Economic sanctions are a complex ecology – bringing minor perturbations, drastic effects and extinctions in their wake. They are seldom imposed with discriminate skill or with ethically proportionate impact. Too often, in their successes and their failures, they do no more than reflect and amplify the unjust shape of international power.

xi

Introduction

There is no sense in which this book represents an exhaustive treatment of economic sanctions. The field is immensely complex, and space dictates that the focus must be on primary concerns and important selected examples. The entire field of trade, commerce and finance – multifaceted in modern society – invites sanctions at many different levels when states are in conflict. A single state may take unilateral economic action in an attempt to achieve coercive affects elsewhere: as when the United States in July 1940 placed an embargo on the supply of aviation fuel and scrap iron to Japan (and so helped to ‘precipitate the Japanese attack on 1 Pearl Harbor’ ); when Moscow in 1948 applied economic coercion in an attempt to counter the Yugoslavian struggle for independence from the Soviet bloc; and when Washington in late 1979 imposed wide-ranging sanctions (grain embargo, block on high-technology sales, curtailment of trade credits) on Moscow following the invasion 2 of Afghanistan. Alternatively, a group of states with a common interest may take concerted action: as when the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON), created in 1949 as a response to the Marshall Plan, tried to influence international trade in Soviet interests; and when the Western importing countries imposed a boycott of Iranian oil (1951–3) following the nationalisation of the Iranian oil industry by the Mossadeq government. Or an attempt can be made to imposeuniversaleconomic sanctions, via such organisations as the now-defunct League of Nations and its successor body, the United Nations. Individual states can imposede factoorde jureeconomic sanctions against other countries as unambiguously hostile acts (for example, by attempting a blockade on the high seas), or as part of traditional trading practices (for example, in developing a protective tariff structure – which today may violate the regulations of the World Trade Organization). A group of countries acting in concert may typically have regional objectives: as when the Organization of American States (OAS), invoking Articles 6 and 8 of the Rio Treaty in August 1960, imposed economic sanctions against the Dominican Republic for committing acts of aggression against Venezuela; and when the 1

2

Imposing Economic Sanctions

Arab League developed its Central Boycott Office (CBO) in 1949 to 3 stifle the newly created Israel in the heart of Arab land. Where so- called ‘universal sanctions’ have been imposed, with mandatory obligations stipulated by the League of Nations or the United Nations, the impression ofconsensual policyis always illusory: one or more powerful states – particularly in the UN Security Council – have been able to suborn the organisation into support for their own foreign-policy objectives. It is clear that the instances of economic sanctions (all types taken in toto) in the twentieth century alone run into the thousands. Every major case of sanctions itself usually involves a hierarchy of economic prohibitions, constraints, pressures, limitations, disadvantages, and so on – variously affecting the shipment of goods, access to markets, the availability of credit, the freezing of assets, the sequestration of funds, the erection of tariffs, the withdrawal of ‘most favoured trading nation’ status, the blocking of aid, and many other devices to bring coercive force to bear on one or more target states. One authoritative source profiles well over a hundred major instances of economic sanctions (each discussed in detail in terms of chronology, 4 component factors, economic effects, intended goals, and so on). The capacity to impose sanctions necessarily varies from one state to another: here, as in the rest of politics, the powerful have their perquisites. In today’s post-Soviet world it is inevitably the United States that is best placed to use economic sanctions as a tool of foreign policy. Here Washington either imposes sanctions unilaterally, or coerces the UN Security Council into adopting resolutions that stipulate mandatory sanctions on selected target states. In one estimate it is suggested that today no less than ‘two-thirds of the 5 world’s population is subject to some sort of US sanctionsthe same’. At time the one surviving superpower is able to protect recalcitrant allies from sanctions that in other circumstances would be automatically imposed: as when the Israelis broke US law in selling 6 ballistic missile components to South Africa, and when they 7 constantly violate numerous UN resolutions. But Washington is not alone in imposing sanctions or in protecting allied states from sanctions regimes. Examples of economic sanctions in the 1990s include the following.

•

Limited sanctions (‘sanctionettes’) imposed (by Commonwealth, EU, US, UK, etc; 1992 to present) on the Nigerian military regime: mostly a limited military sales embargo; World Bank withdrawal from large natural gas project; suspension of financial credit; and various other minor measures.