APPENDIX 6
Memorandum submitted by the Catholic Bishops'
Conference of England and Wales
The embargo, by its perverse and uncontrollable
effects, is destroying the soul of the Iraqi people, who desperately
see their cultural and moral patrimony being squandered and their
social fabric unravelling. (HE Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, 1998)
The clarification of terms is a necessary first
step, since the word "sanctions" is too imprecise to
be satisfactory. R Pape has usefully distinguished three modes
of international economic pressure, or "economic statecraft"1:
1. Economic Sanctions have the purpose
of coercing the target government to change its political behaviour.
2. Trade Wars attempt to make the
target government agree on terms of trade more favourable to the
coercing state.
3. Economic Warfare seeks to weaken
the economic, and especially the military, capacity of the target
state, either in a peacetime arms race or in an ongoing war.
To these must be added the category of "blockade",
by which economic siege is actually a means of war2. If this categorisation
be accepted, the current "sanctions" regime against
Iraq is rather a combination of sanctions and economic warfare
along with a further element not discussed by Pape, of reprisal
for the illegal act of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.
The current hybrid measures therefore need to be explicitly analysed
and justified as such: conversely, if considered simply as "sanctions"
they are open to challenge on the grounds of a fatal confusion
of intention: this point gains force since, as the Prime Minister
said on 16 December 1998 (the date of the launch of Operation
Desert Fox), "Our quarrel is not with the Iraqi people; it
never has been".
The specific practice of UN-mandated sanctions
is treated in Chapter VII of the UN Charter. As an instrument
used by the international community they are valid only when they
are designed to avert a threat to international peace and security,
and when they force a target country to respect the international
order. (To employ sanctions in defence of human rights as such
may therefore stretch international law, though this is a moot
point.) Sanctions are properly coercive not punitive, therefore,
though punishment can sometimes be an element in effective coercion.
They are in principle temporary, and should be lifted if peace
is no longer threatened, if the aggression ceases, or if the international
law again comes to be respected. Nevertheless, they are an essential
tool of the UN, since they provide an intermediate option between
inaction and war against states which violate international law
and which are immune to non-coercive diplomacy.
A. THE
CHARACTER OF
THE IRAQI
REGIME
No criticism of sanctions policy must be allowed
to obscure Saddam Hussein's responsibility for the prolonged and
grievous suffering of the Iraqi people. This point is fundamental
and is treated with brevity here only because it is not the focus
of this paper. The Iraqi Government has used its limited resources,
even under the pressure of sanctions, to try to rebuild the military
apparatus and to consolidate its own power, not least through
the crushing of the "Marsh Arabs" of southern Iraq (as
documented by the UN's Special Rapporteur for the Commission for
Human Rights in 1994). It has undertaken further marches into
the northern, Kurdish, region of the country.
Saddam's Iraq has already used chemical weapons:
against the Kurds, eg the infamous attack in which around 5,000
people were gassed in Halabji during the "Anfal" campaign
of 1987-88, and in the war against Iran. According to Save the
Children, 1.5 million Kurds were moved from their villages to
"collective towns" at the mercy of the state, and 200,000
further Kurds "disappeared". It is therefore inconceivable
that Saddam can be trusted to negotiate in good faith, or that
effective international monitoring be deemed unecessary. 3
Other Western criticisms, such as those about
the ruthless suppression of dissent in Iraq, could admittedly
be validly directed at allies of the West, as Saudi Arabia. But
this admission must not be taken to posit a moral equivalence.
Iraq has killed thousands of its own citizens, and it invaded
Iran in 1980 and Kuwait in 1990.
B. HUMANITARIAN CONCERN
Sanctions are explicitly intended to penalise
the target country: always and everywhere, probably, that damage
will be experienced pre-eminently by the powerless. The humanitarian
considerations therefore revolve around how far the damage is
excessive or intolerable and how far it might be irreversible.
Increasing humanitarian concern has been expressed about the damage
done to the Iraqi people and to the country's infrastructure.
Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, speaking in Iraq in June 1998, said
he was "leaving a country where one could hardly measure
the extent to which it is cut off from the world and its spirit
is endangered much more than its flesh".
The embargo, by its perverse and uncontrollable
effects, is destroying the soul of the Iraqi people, who desperately
see their cultural and moral patrimony being squandered and their
social fabric unravelling. 4
Members of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation
study team of 1995 estimated that the deaths of 567,000 Iraqi
children had been caused by sanctions imposed after the Gulf War,
and this estimate has passed into common currency. (The population
of Iraq in 1995 was approximately 20 million.) Though this estimate
was subsequently revised sharply downwards by the original authors,
it remains true that the scale of the tragedy has been immense.
In a speech at Harvard University in November 1998, Mr Denis Halliday,
who had recently resigned from his post as UN Assistant Secretary-General
and Chief UN Relief Co-ordinator for Iraq, claimed, on the authority
of the World Health organisation, that the mortality rate each
month of Iraqi children of under five years of age was between
six and seven thousand, and that this terrible figure was in large
part attributable to the impact of long-term sanctions. 5 Again,
the Secretary-General of the UN reported in 1997 that the rate
of "acute malnutrition" (which entails wasting) among
children up to five years old was 11 per cent, and that of "chronic
malnutrition" (which entails stunting) among the same age-group
was 31 per cent. According to UNICEF, childhood typhoid cases
jumped from 2,000 in 1990 to 28,000 in 1996.
Before 1991 Iraq was a "middle-income"
country, though it had suffered the effects of its terrible war
against Iran from 1980-88. But the 1991 Gulf War severely damaged
Iraq's social and economic infrastructure. Eighteen of Iraq's
twenty power-generating plants were destroyed or incapacitated
at that time and electricity generation was reduced to 4 per cent
of pre-war levels. Water and sanitation systems were disabled.
Sanctions have naturally prevented any adequate rehabilitation
of this infrastructure. In his Havard speech, Mr Halliday estimated
that electricity supplies now run at less than 40 per cent of
their 1990 level.
Within the sanction period the UN Security Council's
Resolution 986 of April 1995, commonly known as the "Oil
for Food Agreement", had an explicit humanitarian purpose,
However, its implementation began only in 1997 because of unduly
protracted negotiations. The Agreement has narrow limits and conditions,
and the funds are allotted to a range of purposes other than the
"humanitarian needs of the Iraqi population", such as
the reimbursement of the expenses of the Special Commission (UNSCOM,
the UN monitors in Iraq) and the payment of reparations stemming
from the 1991 Gulf War. Though the Oil for Food Agreement in no
way matches the scale of need, it bears a heavy weight of political
rhetoric. For instance, on 18 March 1998, Derek Fatchett, Minister
of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, said that the
ordinary people of Iraq should not be punished for the decisions
taken by their leadership.
If they were to exercise what we would consider
a basic human right and criticise the regime, their lives would
be short . . . They are clearly not responsible for the decision
of totally irresponsible and out-of control leadership, and it
is our task to help them if we can. We are determined to do so.6
One recurring theme of such rhetoric is the
claim that destitution is not the fault of the enforcers but of
the Iraqi government. This claim operates at two levels: firstly,
that it was Saddam who dragged Iraq into the desperate situation
in which it now finds itself; secondly, that the Iraq Government
itself blocks the humanitarian relief effort. Both claims have
some evident foundation. In the second instance, Kofi Annan has
told the UN Security Council that Iraqis were prevented from getting
the food they need both by low oil prices and by bureaucratic
delays by Baghdad: for example, that only half of the $540 million
of the medical supplies delivered to Iraq since 1996 through the
Oil for Food Programme has reached hospitals and clinics7. But
Mr Annan's statement still allows one to deny the kind of absolute
disjunction of responsibility that runs counter to the common
experience of conflict situations. On the contrary, the Iraqi
regime's own guilt does not of itself render the sanctions-enforcers
innocent. Neither is the claim of Iraq's sole guilt compelling,
because it amounts to a tacit but crucial acknowledgement that
the sanctions in fact miss their mark and target the wrong people.
At least to some extent, therefore, the effect of sanctions contradicts
the political rhetoric used to legitimate them.8
Recent US proposals under the Oil for Food Agreement
have suggested that some liberalisation appears possible. However,
differences remain between, for example:
— France, which (according to The
Times of 15 January 1999 and The Economist of 16 January
1999) wishes to lift the oil embargo entirely, and proposes instead
a monitored embargo directed specifically towards Iraq's arms
purchases and related financial transactions.
— the USA, which proposes simply to
allow oil revenues to be spent without limit on food and medicine,
as against the 1998 limit on exports of $5.2 billion per six months
(a limit itself increased at that point from $2 billion). However
Iraq's oil industry, itself debilitated by sanctions, cannot even
fulfil the present allowance: in the most recent six-month period
Iraq was able to pump only £3 billion of oil, and capacity
is declining by about 6 per cent per year. The UN has allowed
Iraq to buy $600 million of spare parts—but since then,
the main pipeline to Turkey has been damaged by air attack.9
It cannot be confidently predicted how these
differences among members of the Security Council will be resolved.
Even in its original form of 1995, the Oil for Food Agreement
allows for expenditure on "essential civilian needs"
not just foodstuffs and medical supplies, so the new US proposal
actually appears in this respect more restrictive. Further, the
current depression of the price of oil will damage Iraq, so that
even increased sales will bring less benefit. Naturally, it remains
true that any policy of exempting certain classes of goods from
sanctions presents problems of implementation, eg in respect of
dual-purpose commodities such as fuel. In addition, according
to Save the Children, the Oil for Food Agreement has undermined
any locally sustainable development work, since it has created
dependencies on the distribution mechanisms of the UN and its
partner organisations. This dependency simultaneously reduces
the capacity of Iraqi civil society to resist the domination of
the regime.
C. THE MORAL
BASIS FOR
SANCTIONS
Arguments proposed to justify the imposition
of sanctions against Iraq include the following. In what follows,
each argument is in turn briefly discussed:
— that sanctions are the international
community's only intermediate option, between inaction and military
force, to induce change in another country's policies. This
claim assumes that diplomatic pressure is equivalent to "doing
nothing", and such an assumption is unwarranted. Other forms
of coercion include formal diplomatic protests, withdrawal of
ambassadors and expulsion of the target's diplomats, the suspension
of cultural exchanges, the prevention of tourist, professional
and sporting contacts. 10 Such measures, which stigmatise and
isolate a target country without immediately destructive consequences
for the population at large, ought to be considered before resort
to sanctions is taken. In the case of Iraq, because sanctions
were imposed in the wake of military action, the sequence of events
was different.
— that war would be worse, and that
sanctions are therefore tolerable as a step short of war.
Detailed comparisons of the gross destruction wrought respectively
by war and by sanctions are invidious and perhaps impossible.
Even "conventional" modern weaponry is horrifyingly
destructive, and it would therefore be difficult to argue that
sanctions are more destructive than a full-scale war. However,
military action can be targeted, at least to some extent, whereas
the present sanctions are not so targeted; and given Mr Halliday's
figures already quoted, it is arguable that sanctions have caused
incomparably more deaths and more human suffering than even the
Gulf War itself. Also, it is crucial to note that sanctions and
military action have not, in the case of Iraq, been mutually exclusive
alternatives. Sanctions have become the virtually permanent horizon
against which military action still erupts sporadically (and from
November 1998 onwards, regularly).
To speak of sanctions as "virtually permanent"
raises the question whether the undue or even indefinite prolonging
of sanctions may not undermine the moral basis of their initial
use: that is, that they constitute a temporary instrument to bring
about a clear political good with the minimum human suffering.
The notion of "minimum human suffering" in this case
seems grotesque, and the clear political good has not ensued.
— that the target regime is so evil
that it must be removed at all costs, and therefore that inaction
is a greater moral hazard than excesive pressure. As noted
above, this is a serious argument, as may also be seen in the
furious criticisms of UN or EU vacillation in the former Yugoslavia.
However, UN resolutions consistently note the "commitment
of Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity
of Iraq", which implies that the removal of Saddam (or anyone
else) cannot be a valid or explicit objective of multilateral
sanctions policy as such. However, the US Government's policy
has become gradually more explicit about the underlying intention
to remove Saddam. A senior diplomat, Mr Frank Ricciardone was
appointed in January 1999 to lead a team which will include military
and political advisers, to work alongside the diverse Iraqi opposition
groups. US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said, "We
will persist in helping the Iraqi people reintegrate themselves
into the world community by freeing themselves of a leader they
do not want, do not deserve and never chose"; and President
Clinton said that several different Iraqi opposition groups would
receive more US support, including up to $97 million in military
aid. 11 Once sanctions pass from being an instrument by which
the international community disciplines the Iraqi government (coercively,
but nevertheless legitimately, in terms of the UN Charter) into
being a fundamental plank of a single state's aim of overthrowing
that government, they become ethically dubious precisely as sanctions.
This does not ipso facto render sanctions evil: the UN
sanctions regime might have its own moral logic, even though each
participant state will inevitably harbour its own policy objectives.
But ethical assessment becomes even more complex than otherwise.
— those most harmfully affected
by the sanctions have either assented to them or have assented
to the aggressive or unjust policies that have prompted their
employment. 12 In the case of Iraq no evidence has been brought
forward to support the thesis that the general population of Iraq
supports the sanctions regime (and the gathering of such evidence
is hard to imagine): and the words of Mr Blair and Mr Fatchett,
as quoted above, rule out the attribution of blame to the population
of Iraq.
— the UN Charter envisages sanctions
in certain cases, and Iraq eminently fulfils the conditions set
by the Charter. Thus Article 41 of the UN Charter states:
the Security Council may decide what measures
not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give
effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the
United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete
or partial interruption of economic relations and or rail, sea,
air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communications,
and the severance of diplomatic relations.
Thus it is in principle legitimate, in terms
of the Charter, that the measures are evidently intended as coercive.
The question to be resolved concerns the character and limits
of sanctions, and the proportionality of the evil they bring about
as against the good which is intended and foreseeable.
In this respect, the Holy See re-stated its
fundamental perspective on the use of sanctions at the 53rd Session
of UN General Assembly on 9th October 1998. The core of Monsignor
James Reinert's speech clearly signifies that the Holy See regards
the ethics of sanctions as in some manner cognate to the ethics
of a "just war":
The Holy See recognised [ie the previous year]
that there are legitimate reasons that the international community
may resort to sanctions. But starvation may not be a means of
warfare or the consequence of a legal decision. Sanctions should
be a temporary means of exerting pressure on decision-makers whose
choices threaten international peace. Sanctions must be proportionate
to the goals they hope to achieve and they must always be accompanied
by a dialogue between the parties involved. 13
D. THE EFFICACY
OF SANCTIONS
AS AN
INSTRUMENT OF
INTERNATIONAL POLICY
Efficacy and morality are not totally discrete
categories. Potential efficacy is a necessary but not sufficient
condition of morality, given the severe suffering that must inevitably
result from stringently applied sanctions. But there are indeed
serious doubts about the efficacy of the current sanctions programme
against Iraq:
— their extreme duration, now of
almost eight years, it itself a sign of inefficacy, unless crushing
a people counts as success. It has been argued that "sanctions
tend to be slow-acting . . . more like the war of attrition than
the blitzkrieg".14 The gradual and cumulative character of
their impact offers one advantage, that it allows for negotiation
and compromise, whereas war is much more difficult to combine
with diplomacy. However, Iraq's eight years' consistent social
and economic deterioration has resulted in the loss of key skills
by atrophy or emigration, the blight of a whole generation's prospects,
and widespread deprivation and demoralisation. The appallingly
high death-rate is attributed by Mr Halliday, in his Harvard speech,
not least to the exceptional duration of sanctions, leading to
"the collapse of the water and sanitation system . . . and
the [poor] health of mothers over many years of inadequate dietary
intake". Political compliance has not been secured by this
deprivation.
— sanctions may be incoherent as
an instrument of policy, when the intention is to undermine the
current regime.
1. they disempower democratic political opposition
by demoralising the targeted society. In the case of Iraq, the
emergence of any possible opposition to Saddam would presuppose
some degree of normal societal life, whereas Mr Halliday and others
have noted the disruption of all normal social and even family
life in Iraq as the extended family system collapses, mothers
struggle alone, homelessness increases sharply, the savings and
earnings of the professional classes are wiped out, and small
children drop out from school to earn money. Given such sustained
deprivation, any well-funded opposition party will tend to be
seen as a puppet of the sanctions-enforcers.
2. it must be asked whether the regime is able
to manipulate sanctions so as actually to strengthen its relative
power in a destitute society. There have been credible reports
that the Iraqi military and elite have been able to reserve for
themselves food and other essential commodities, so reinforcing
their own position—even acquiring an ample supply of luxury
goods. 15 Saddam has himself neutered civil society, and has seemingly
imposed a system of personalised clan rule in which dissent is
crushed. But comprehensive sanctions arguably facilitate this
process of ensuring the regime's untrammelled power by relieving
the regime of some of the political pressure that sanctions seek
to create. Internationally, such sanctions can gradually transform
the image of a country from one of transgressor to one of victim.
3. comprehensive sanctions affect the general
population (and especially the poor) immediately. Even
if one assumed a target government's good-will, its task of providing
for the well-being of its poor is rendered incomparably more difficult:
in the case of Iraq, since the international community specifically
accuses the regime of callous indifference to the fate of its
own people (or worse), no other outcome than the present one can
possibly be expected.
— against these arguments, it has
been forcibly maintained that sanctions have indeed checked Iraq's
capacity for both aggressive expansion and internal repression.
Thus, "sanctions backed by US military power appear to have
helped secure access for foreign military forces and humanitarian
agencies to protect the Kurdish minority in the north and to achieve
the demilitarisation of Iraq", at least for a time. They
also (till 1999) ensured access for UNSCOM inspectors and thereby
at least restrained Iraq's subsequent arms manufacture and deployment.
16 In particular Iraq no longer has a nuclear weapons capacity.
So it must be recognised that the sanctions policy would seem
to have attained, in part, certain of its objectives.
E. THE WEST'S
ROLE IN
THE DEBACLE
1. Before the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, neither
the USA nor other powers had attempted to impose preventative
sanctions in the face of the growing threat from Iraq. 17 The
historian Peter Calvocoressi argues that the USA, Britain and
other countries turned a blind eye to the invasion of Iran and
even to Iraq's slaughter of the Kurds with chemical weapons in
the 1980s. "In the United States, attempts to chastise Iraq
through sanctions had been thwarted in Congress and the White
House." 18
2. Therefore it can be said that the West,
for its own purposes, allowed the power of Saddam to grow. This
pattern of disastrous patronage seems recurrent, eg in the West's
support of the Afghanistan resistance (now the core of the Taliban)
against the Sovient Union. 19 How can one know that the opposition
to Saddam, now being openly nurtured by US policy, would not be
equally vicious given its chance? It can be argued that such an
intensity of interference in other countries' political life,
seemingly so natural an impulse for the superpowers, is politically
irresponsible. Against this, one must recognise the dilemma of
the world community, and ask whether it is despicable to try to
save the Iraqi people from Saddam.
3. There are serious ambiguities about the
role of UNSCOM. Firstly it is evident (and now admitted by US
officials) that UNSCOM has reported to the USA (and even to Israel),
not just to the UN. 20 Iraqi resentment against this procedure
seems entirely understandable. Secondly UNSCOM's mission was open-ended:
so long as the West has an economic or military interests to prolong
it, Iraq could never successfully or definitively prove its compliance
and therefore attain the removal of UNSCOM. If this last suggestion
is fair, it follows that Saddam could have no incentive to comply,
knowing that the Western powers were determined to bring about
his downfall anyway.
4. The UN is in danger of being seen, especially
by some Arab states, as an instrument of the USA's own policy
rather than as an impartial arbiter. For instance, Israel is also
in long-term defiance of UN Resolutions 242 and 338, with impunity.
Israel has occupied territory of neighbouring states by force,
and has also refused to ratify the Non-proliferation Treaty and
the 1972 biological and toxic weapons conventions, which Iran,
Libya and Saudi Arabia all signed, and this failure receives no
mention in the US Defense Department's annual listing of WDM (Weapons
of Mass Destruction) Violators. No doubt the search for impartial
disinterest in international affairs is a chimera, but there seems
to be no parallel instance of such a dramatic asymmetry of attitude
and policy. On the fiercest interpretation of the discrepancy,
Israel is a formidable proxy for US regional interests. 21 It
is plausible to argue that US policy in the Near East is dominated
by the twin aims of assuring oil supplies and supporting Israel,
and that the UK (for whom the alliance with Washington has underpinned
foreign policy since the Second World War) readily accepts these
priorities. These twin aims are, however, not shared by China,
France and Russia, the other three permanent members of the UN
Security Council, which all tend to work for the dilution of perceived
US hegemony. At least, this analysis demonstrates that the case
of Iraq cannot properly be torn out of the broader regional and
geo-political context. 22
5. This suspicion about a profound Western
bias is reinforced because the US and (as its ally) Britain have
enforced their operational military requirements without the explicit
endorsement of the UN. Thus the "no-fly" zones over
Iraqi airspace decreed after the Gulf War and again after Operation
Desert Fox would seem to constitute a prima facie infringement
of the UN's continuing formal affirmations of Iraq's "sovereignty
and territorial integrity". The original purpose of the Northern
zone was undoubtedly to protect the Kurds' "safe haven",
and the Southern zone was intended to protect the Marsh Arabs.
It is less plausible to imagine that these purposes determine
the enforcement of the zones today. Indeed Walter Slocombe, US
Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, told the Senate Armed Services
Committee in February 1999 that the active engagement policy was
intended to "create the political and military conditions
that will permit a successful change of the regime and the accession
of an Iraqi government that is prepared to meet its obligations
to the international community|" Thus during 1999 Iraqi encroachments
into the no-fly zones, and its radar tracking of US aircraft,
have been met with ruthless bombing which have caused civilian
deaths (as missiles have "gone astray", killing 17 in
a single instance) as well as military damage. 23 A survey by
Caritas Iraq has found that about 2,500 residential units have
been damaged or destroyed in recent airstrikes.
F. "SMARTER
SANCTIONS"
Given that the sanctions regime remains in place,
a complex and technical debate is current about the advantages
and problems of far more selective sanctions, eg those which could
be directed at the level of internationally mobile capital. The
outcome if this debate is impossible to predict. But the following
considerations have been put forward:
Advantages
— Such sanctions specify the international
funds of the target government (or of its major business interests)
and therefore affect the poor only indirectly. In principle, local
economies could survive or even flourish under a sufficiently
sophisticated regime of financial sanctions: protection from the
international market might allow mechanisms of import-substitution,
as well as an industry which focused on domestic need rather than
export. But in practice, no local economy discrete, and the poor
would never be exempt from effects of sanctions. In a totalitarian
state, the impact of any measures taken by the international
community will be passed on to the population. This proviso does
not mean that all sanctions regimes are equivalent, however, and
the impact of selective sanctions could be less harsh and immediate
than at present;
— despite the speed with which funds
can be remitted electronically, monitoring is not impossible,
given that there are very few major world centres (ie the money
markets) for such large financial transfers;
— the international community now has
some successful experience in tracking the money-laundering of
major drug dealers. Methods of transferring huge sums of money
are not infinite, so lessons can be applied in the present different
case; and
— assets can be sequestered without
being confiscated. This fulfils a key element of acceptable sanctions
policy, that a country is suspended, not expelled, from the international
community.
Problems
— despite the first point above, there
still exist unregulated banking centres. Those centres would first
need to be adequately regulated; and
— prior analysis of the targeted government/economy
is required to ensure the efficacy of financial sanctions (eg
to trace and measure the financial assets aimed at). Such analysis
instantly serves as a warning to the bodies targeted.
G. CONCLUSION
This paper earlier quoted Cardinal Etchegaray,
speaking in June 1998. The Third Christian Conference, "The
Church in the Service of Peace and Humanity" (Baghdad June
8-10, 1998) which he had attended, made the following statements
in its final message:
— at the end of each war the captives
are set free, but in Iraq the whole people are still in captivity
while war ended more than eight years ago; and
— during a war, international law and
the Geneva Convention conventions forbids the attacking of children,
the sick and civilians. In Iraq, however, even after war ended
and the cannon were silent, children the sick and the needy are
still punished.
That 1998 conference insisted that the embargo
"threatens peace and does not build justice". Increasingly,
this judgement is being endorsed by other sections of informed
Western opinion. Mr Halliday ended his Harvard speech by summarising
as follows:
"Sanctions continue to kill children and
sustain high levels of malnutrition. Sanctions are undermining
cultural and educational recovery. Sanctions will not change governance
of democracy. Sanctions may create a danger to peace in the region
and in the world. Sanctions destroy Islamic and Iraqi family values.
Sanctions have undermined the advancement of women and have encouraged
a massive brain drain . . . Sanctions breach the Charter of the
United Nations, the Convention of Human Rights and the Rights
of the Child."
It is encouraging that re-assessments of UN
Sanctions policy are currently taking place. Kofi Annan has stressed
the need for new mechanisms that render sanctions a less blunt
and more effective instrument, "aimed at exerting pressure
on targeted governments rather than peoples and thus reducing
humanitarian costs".24 Indeed, in a parliamentary answer
on 15th March 1999 the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, himself
wrote:
"The Government has decided to launch a
new policy of better targeted "smarter" sanctions. This
will sharpen the focus and effectiveness of sanctions whilst trying
to minimise their impact on ordinary people, including children,
and on our own commercial and economic interests."
Sanctions should:
— be targeted to hit the regime, rather
than ordinary people;
— include exemptions to minimise the
humanitarian impact on innocent civilians;
— have clear objectives, including
well-defined and realistic demands against which compliance can
be judged, and a clear exit strategy;
— have effective arrangements for implementation
and enforcement by all states, especially by neighbouring countries;
and
— avoid unnecessary impact on UK economic
and commercial interests.
However, at least within the UK, these debates
have not yet permeated the public consciousness or the popular
press. Further, Mr Cook's press statement of 15 March 1999 judges
that Iraq is one of the rare cases in which comprehensive sanctions
should be imposed, "where the behaviour of the target regime
justifies the toughest measures". Therefore, the British
Government continues to side with the US in arguing for the continued
enforcement of "comprehensive" (ie virtually indiscriminate)
sanctions. This discussion paper has sought to question the legitimacy
of this specific judgement on Iraq.
Since weighing up the complex factors of the
particular is always immensely difficult it is crucial to keep
sight of two clear principles.
1. The international community has a pressing
obligation to restrict the destructive potential of the present
Iraqi Government.
2. This obligation cannot be discharged
by the destruction of the livelihood of the Iraqi people themselves,
since sanctions are not, like blockade, a form of war.
It seems essential to seek to implement these
twin principles by a combination of the following elements:
— the effective monitoring of Iraq's
military capacity and of its import of weapons materiel. Given
recent history, and as long as Saddam shows every sign of aggressive
intent, measures against Iraq must at least permit an effective
embargo against its military recovery, by means of the UN's supervising
of the extent of Iraqi arms purchases and disarmament. This aim
will in fact be difficult to achieve, since the abuse of UNSCOM
(referred to above) and the US and British recourse to regular
air-strikes has made it almost unthinkable that weapons inspectors
can be reinstated in the very short term.
— the clear agreement that compliance
with such monitoring will result in a gradual lifting of all non-military
economic sanctions, even sanctions more precisely targeted than
those currently enforced. But there is at present no clear
agreement about what Iraq needs to do to secure the ending of
sanctions. Iraqis must therefore assume that relief will come
only when the Western powers have installed a government they
can control and, maybe in addition, only when they certify that
all due recompense has been made for the Gulf War of 1991. But
such recompense cannot reasonably be demanded at present, given
the terrible deprivation of the Iraqi people and the collapse
of its economy.
— meanwhile, that the present regime
of destructive comprehensive sanctions be brought to an end as
quickly as possible. There is needed either a far more selective
programme of sanctions devised to minimise the direct impact on
the poor or Iraq, or a much more effective programme of humanitarian
exemptions to the comprehensive sanctions than applies at present.
Catholic Bishops' Conference of England and Wales
April 1999
THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS' CONFERENCE OF ENGLAND AND
WALES HAS AUTHORISED THIS DISCUSSION PAPER FOR PUBLICATION. IT
IS NOT AN OFFICIAL POLICY STATEMENT ON THEIR BEHALF.
NOTES
1 R Pape, "Why Economic Sanctions do
not Work", in International Security, 1997, 22 (2)
pp. 90-136.
2 Drew Christiansen SJ and Gerard F Powers,
"Economics Sanctions and the Just War Doctrine", in
Economic Sanctions: Panacea or Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold
War World?, ed. David Cortwright and George A Lopez, Westview
Press, San Francisco, 1995, pp. 97-117.
3 cf. the passionate, brief article by a
journalist of integrity John Sweeney, "The West created a
monster. Now it's time to destroy him. As a good liberal, I personally
vote for obliterating Saddam", The Observer, 10 January
1999.
4 L'Osservatore Romano, 24 June 1998.
5 The speech was delivered at Harvard Divinity
School, 5 November 1998. See also the "criminal complaint"
lodged against the United States in November 1996 by its former
Attorney General Ramsey Clark, in which the deaths of 750,000
children under five years was alleged as a consequence of the
USA and its allies. cf Geoff Simons, The Scourging of Iraq,
Macmillan, London 1998, pp. 310-12.
6 Hansard, column 1266. Iraq may
therefore be regarded as a "rogue state" rather than
a "pariah state". A rogue state is marked by the character
of its leadership, a pariah state by the dominant character of
its entire national demeanour. This distinction is clearly relevant
to the present discussion. cf G. Evans, Dictionary of International
Relations, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1998, pp. 417-18.
7 International Herald Tribune, 25
February 1999
8 Mr Fatchett's position was re-stated in
the House of Commons on 25 January 1999 byTony Lloyd, Minister
of State at the FCO. See Hansard, column 119. However Mr
Lloyd goes on to cite the UN Rapporteur on Iraq, Max van der Stoel,
as attributing to Iraq "primary responsibility for
the precarious food and health situation" (emphasis added).
He then describes Britain's aid to Iraq.
9 cf The Times 15 January 1999: The
Economist 16 January 1999 and 6 February 1999.
10 Andrew L Yarrow, "Economic Sanctions:
an Overview", an unpublished paper delivered to the Carnegie
Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1995.
11 BBC News Website, 22 January 1999. Cf
also George Joffe«, "Can Iran help to overthrow Saddam",
The Tablet, 5 December 1998.
12 cf Christiansen & Powers, op cit,
pp. 104-97.
13 L'Osservatore Romano, 28 October
1998.
14 Evans, op. cit. p. 145.
15 eg Maggie O'Kane, "Iraqi rich make
mockery of sanctions", The Guardian, 21 November 1998.
16 John Stremlau, Sharpening International
Sanctions, a report to the Carnegie Commission on Preventing
Deadly Conflict, New York 1996, p. 23.
17 Stremlau, op. cit., p. 22.
18 P Calvocoressi, World Politics since
1945, Longmans, London 1993, p. 363. Simons, op. cit,
pp. 74-75.
19 This claim is naturally not intended
to single our the West for blame. Russia has been a far more consistent
supporter of Iraq, as has Pakistan of the Taliban.
20 The Guardian, 8 and 9 January
1999.
21 "The Containment Myth: US Middle
East Policy in Theory and Practice", Middle East Report,
Fall 1998.
22 In this regional context, the situation
of Iran must also be taken into account. Any long-term resolution
of Middle East tensions will require that Iran emerges from its
recent pariah status without further developing weapons of mass
destruction. If Iraq has showed brutal aggression towards Kuwait,
its posture towards Iran has been defensive as well as aggressive.
23 The Guardian, 6 February 1999.
24 The Secretary-General's 1998 report of
the work of the organisation, cited in "Coping with the Humanitarian
Impact of Sanctions" by the UN's Office for the Co-ordination
of Humanitarian Affairs.
SUMMARY
No criticism of sanctions policy must be allowed
to obscure Saddam Hussein's responsibility for the prolonged and
grievous suffering of the Iraqi people. Nevertheless, though sanctions
are explicitly intended to penalise the target government, they
have inflicted enormous suffering on the innocent.
There are serious humanitarian considerations
about how far the damage is excessive or intolerable and how far
it might be irreversible. In particular the health and well-being
of hundreds of thousands of children has been destroyed, and Iraq's
infrastructure has been devastated. the "Oil for Food Agreement"
has in no sense allowed an adequate mitigation of this suffering.
The paper discusses some of the key arguments
used to assess the moral justification for sanctions:
— that they are the international community's
only intermediate option, between inaction and military force,
to induce change in another country's policies;
— that war would be worse, and that
sanctions are therefore tolerable as a step short of war;
— that inaction would be a greater
moral hazard than excessive pressure;
— that they fall within the UN Charter's
criteria for legitimate sanctions.
Next the paper considers the efficacy of sanctions
as an instrument of international policy:
— their duration of more than eight
years;
— their effects on the security of
Saddam Hussein's leadership;
— their success in checking the regime's
repression and expansionism.
After discussing whether the West is in part
responsible for the present crisis, and briefly assessing the
plausibility of a programme of "smarter sanctions" the
paper concludes by invoking the following twin principles:
1. The international community has a pressing
obligation to restrict the destructive potential of the present
Iraqi Government.
2. This obligation cannot properly be discharged
by the destruction of the livelihood of the Iraqi people themselves,
since sanctions are not a form of war.
In virtue of these principles the paper recommends
the combination of three unified policies:
— the effective monitoring of Iraq's
military capacity and of its import of weapons materie«l;
— the clear agreement that compliance
with such monitoring will result in a gradual lifting of all non-military
economic sanctions, even sanctions more precisely targeted than
those currently enforced;
— that the present regime of destructive
comprehensive sanctions be brough to an end as quickly as possible.
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