Global Policy Forum

By Ramesh Jaura

Bonn - Criticising the comprehensive economic sanctions against Iraq, now in their eighth year, a think-tank here has called for setting up a special body of the United Nations Security Council to oversee such measures. In a paper presented at an international conference last Friday, the Bonn-based Development and Peace Foundation (SEF) also expressed reservations about the sanctions placed on Libya since 1992 to punish it for its alleged involvement in the bombing of a U.S. airliner over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988.

''With the exception of former Yugoslavia, all existing sanctions are targeted against countries of the South,'' adds the so-called SEF policy paper. This, it says, underlines the ''North-South divide''. Such a divide could be bridged by establishing a 'sanctions council' or a 'central sanctions committee' which would ensure that the Security Council is not deployed ''as a means of pushing through the foreign policy interests of a (permanent) member''.

The United States, together with China, France, Great Britain and Russia, is a veto-wielding permanent member of the Security Council, but since the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union 1990, Washington has been dominating international relations. The end of the Cold War was marked by the reunification of Germany which a former west German chancellor and Nobel Peace Prize winner Willy Brandt hoped, would result in a multi-polar world. He also headed the independent North-South Commission which focussed in the early 1980s on the need for a genuine dialogue between the industrial and developing nations. To continue the effort, he founded the SEF in 1986.

The SEF policy paper presented by Manfred Kulessa, a former official of the U.N. Development Programme, pleads for ''an agreement between permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council'' which is responsible for maintaining international peace. In the absence of an accord between the veto-wielding permanent members and the ten non-permanent members, each of whom are elected for two years by a two-thirds majority vote in the U.N. General Assembly, sanctions will neither be credible nor just and effective, adds the paper, co-authored by Dorothee Starck, a researcher at the Heinrich Heine University in Duesseldorf.

The paper titled 'Peace Through Sanctions?' argues that an agreement among permanent members on the one hand and between them and the non-permanent members on the other should actually be easier in the aftermath of the Cold War. But this has yet to happen. ''China and Russia,'' says the paper, ''are more cautious than the United States, and each country has its own particular stance.''
For China, adds the paper, the principle of sovereignty ranks high and its representatives at the U.N. regularly stress that disputes should be resolved by peaceful negotiations between states of equal standing -- a solution which, they say, has not been tried often enough. As a result, China has often abstained when controversial resolutions have been voted in the Security Council.

The SEF policy paper's signatories include Larry Minear, co- director of the Humanitarianism and War Project at the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies of Brown University in Providence in the north eastern United States.
The paper backs in particular the proposal made by the then U.N. secretary general Boutros Boutros-Ghali in January 1995, for the establishment of a mechanism to monitor the application of sanctions. Such a mechanism, said Boutros-Ghali, should assess, before sanctions are imposed, their potential impact on the target country and on third countries. This would enable the Security Council to fine-tune sanctions with a view to maximising their political impact and minimising collateral damage.

Boutros-Ghali wanted the mechanism also to explore ways of assisting member states that are suffering collateral damage and to evaluate claims submitted by such states under Article 50 of the U.N. charter. The proposed mechanism would also ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance to vulnerable groups in the country against which sanctions are imposed. According to authors of the SEF policy paper, the humanitarian problems associated with economic sanctions are illustrated best by the example of Iraq, against which comprehensive economic sanctions were imposed beginning of August 1990. From 1991, increasing number of alarming reports began to circulate about the impact of sanctions on the civilian population. The food and health situation was described as worrying; many observers feared a ''humanitarian catastrophe''. Humanitarian aid was permitted but was not available in necessary quantities.

The Security Council responded to this emergency by developing 'oil for food' programme. Under U.N. supervision Iraq was to be allowed to export a specific quantity of oil, the revenue from which was to be used, amongst other things, to make reparation payments and to acquire humanitarian goods such as food and medicine for the ailing population.
But until the end of 1996, Iraq refused to implement this programme on the grounds that it constituted an infringement of its sovereign rights. In the meantime, the country's general economic situation, and the provision of basic supplies to the population, deteriorated further. Nearly 90 percent of Iraq's foreign currency revenue prior to the war derived from the export of oil, and these funds -- as well as the money in the foreign accounts frozen by the Security Council -- were no longer available for rebuilding the infrastructure destroyed in the war.
''The sanctions helped prevent the Iraqi economy from growing strong again after the war, but they did so chiefly at the expense of Iraq's civilian population, says the SEF policy paper. It adds: ''U.N. studies assume a five-fold increase in the mortality of infants under the age of five. Iraq's health system is on the brink of collapse. The 'oil for food' programme has now been put under stricter U.N. supervision. What change this will bring in the situation in Iraq remains to be seen.'' The deterioration of the humanitarian situation in Iraq is not an isolated case. Economic sanctions, particularly where they are comprehensive and effectively implemented, are by nature such that they mainly affect the civilian population, argue the authors. ''Thus, adverse effects on people in the target countries are also reported for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro) and Haiti,'' they point out.

Comprehensive economic sanctions, comprising a ban on service- sector business, sporting and cultural sanctions and a ban on traffic were imposed between 1992 and 1996 on Serbia and Montenegro, which remained federated under the name Yugoslavia when the other former Yugoslav republics seceded in 1991.
From 1993 to 1994, foreign bank accounts were frozen and oil and arms embargo was imposed on Haiti after the military coup against the elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide.

The most disputed case in terms of international law, the paper's authors say, is that of the sanctions imposed against Libya. Security Council Resolution 748 of Mar. 31, 1992 demanded that two persons suspected of having carried out the Lockerbie bombing be handed over to the U.S. and Britain and that Libya in general renounce terrorism. Libya refused to recognise the legitimacy of this demand and brought an action against it at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. The case is still pending, though the ICJ did refuse to issue a provisional injunction in Libya's favour in 1992.
The paper says: ''Occasional declarations by Libya that it is ready to reach a compromise have been rejected by the authors of the resolution as inadequate. In the meantime, more and more doubts have been expressed about the guilt of the suspects and about Libya's responsibility for the Lockerbie affair and for recent acts of terrorism.'