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Iran Sanctions Hit the Wrong Target
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi*
Asia Times
January 25, 2008The Iran nuclear crisis has now reached a new threshold with several unintended consequences, one of which is the potential to damage the legitimacy of the United Nations. The more the world powers try to sustain or bolster UN sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program, unwittingly the more they undermine not only their own efforts but also the credibility and effectiveness of the preeminent world organization responsible for global peace.
Indeed, this much is clear by examining the poor logic of renewed attempts to toughen Iran sanctions on the part of the UN Security Council's five permanent members (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China) plus Germany - the Five plus One - reportedly agreeing in their latest meeting in Berlin on Tuesday to a draft new resolution. This will, while avoiding draconian economic measures, nonetheless impose new travel bans, certain "asset freezes" as well as calls for "vigilance" with respect to the transfer of "banned material" for sensitive nuclear activities, and "monitoring" of the sanctions regime.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad immediately dismissed the sanctions move. "They should know that such illegal behavior will be ineffective against the will of the Iranian people," state television quoted him as saying. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, said the agreement demonstrated a firm international consensus on preventing Iran from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. "We do not want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, and we will continue to hold Iran to its international obligations," she said.
In March 2007, the Security Council imposed a second round of sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend its uranium-enrichment program the West fears may be aimed at making bombs. The penalties included the freezing of foreign assets of 28 Iranian individuals and entities. While the exact text of the latest draft resolution remains confidential, its main outline reported to the world press warrants a healthy pause on two key questions: will they be effective? And what impact will they have on the UN system itself in case they are not?
Unfortunately, until now all eyes have been focused on the former question, with little if any consideration given to the likely negative ramifications of a failed UN initiative regarding Iran on UN itself. The basic policy assumptions and political strategy underlying the current efforts with regard to Iran at the Security Council need to be re-examined and recast away from the naive, narrow-focus approach that has ignored the likely swinging of the pendulum against the UN and the increasingly illegitimate Iran sanctions begin to corrode the legitimacy of the UN machinery, due to the following.
It is improbable that Iran will comply with the "unreasonable" UN demand that it halt uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities, as allowed under the the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to which Iran is a signatory. In all likelihood, Iran's defiance, reflected in Ahmadinejad's latest statement that Iran will proceed with its activities regardless of the "illegal pressure" from the outside, will not bend as a result of the "watered down" sanctions that lack effective economic teeth and, per the statement of a European diplomat, simply send a "symbolic message" to Iran.
The "moderate tightening" of UN sanctions is more than anything a symbolic face-saving measure to hold a crumbling coalition together, yet at the exorbitant cost of accentuating the UN's ineffectiveness and its "instrumentalization" as an arm of US foreign policy.
Already, with both Russia and China taking full advantage of the new US intelligence report on Iran, confirming that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003, the stage has been set for a complete evaporation of the "grand coalition" built around the Iran "nuclear threat". Firstly, China's Sinopec is engaged in a multi-billion dollar energy deal with Tehran, and then Moscow has delivered nuclear fuel to the plant it is building in Iran.
Iran's partial compliance with UN demands, with respect to cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , renders somewhat moot the other demands regarding Iran's "proliferation sensitive" activities. Recalling UN Resolution 1747 (March 2007) calling on Iran to "comply with the requirements of the IAEA", and in light of Iran's steady cooperation with the agency, including its de facto re-implementation of the intrusive additional protocol by allowing the IAEA's "complementary visit" to the "P-2" centrifuge site, it is a sheer error to argue that Iran has simply defied the will of the UN. Rather, Iran has had a studied, measured response, addressing the legitimate demands of the Security Council and weeding out the "illegitimate" demands.
As a sign of Iran's serious intention for steady cooperation with the IAEA, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, addressing the Foreign Affairs Committee of the European Union, pledged Iran's commitment for cooperation with Europe and stated that "Iran has gone beyond its international obligations" with respect to the IAEA. This belies earlier Western media hype that compared to his predecessor, Ali Larijani, Jalili would represent a new level of belligerency on Iran's part.
The latest draft UN resolution's provisions for "travel bans" simply lack a sound strategic design, rigorous monitoring and enforcement mechanism and will likely fail to generate international cooperation and compliance. Thus, instead of ostracizing Iran, such UN initiatives will likely backfire on the UN and diminish its standing, particularly among the majority of the world's population who belong to the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), given NAM's solid support of Iran's nuclear rights.
Problems and prospects
Historically, when the UN has imposed travel sanctions, its efforts have been systematically impeded by the lack of institutional capacity to enforce those "focused" sanctions, often as a part of broader sanctions, as was the case with Libya that was also hit with an "aviation sanction". According to a UN finding in 1998, "The list of reported violations of the flight ban on Libya is long." In another case, a travel ban on Angolan rebel leaders was broken as they traveled to many countries, mainly because of exceptions in the resolution that allowed for "travel to promote the peace process". Similarly, Resolution 1747, while providing a short list of several scientists and heads of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps as intended targets for a travel ban, [1] nonetheless opens a loophole by stating "except when such travel is for activities directly related to items in certain sub-paragraphs. One such exemption deals with religious pilgrimage, another deals with Iran's non-proliferation sensitive nuclear activities.
Thus, as with past UN experiences, the travel sanctions on "targeted individuals" in Iran faces familiar problems, above and beyond the question of their legitimacy and fairness. There is a lack of sound synergy with other efforts to resolve the dispute, given the likely possibility that further sanctions on Iran will hamper Iran-IAEA cooperation. There is always the availability of false passports and travel documents and the challenges of effective customs and border monitoring, particularly by Iran's neighbors [2] . Then there is a lack of incentives for cooperation by other states, especially those which are critical of the US-led sanctions on Iran and which agree with Iran that these measures have the character of "psychological warfare".
It is noteworthy that the US's unilateral sanctions do not simply complement the UN sanctions, as is usually claimed by US pundits. In fact, given the US's pressure on foreign banks to stop issuing letters of credit for trade with Iran and other such pressures exceeding the limits of UN sanctions, the latter are trumped by the US sanctions to some extent, raising the question of their legality from the prism of international law. The proposed travel sanction also faces the hurdle of coming up with an accurate list of targeted individuals to transmit effectively to appropriate authorities in countries throughout the world. Since the present list omits political leaders and decision-makers, the question arises as to the grounds on which poor scientists who simply follow orders should be penalized, and their freedom to travel curtailed.
Another pertinent question is whether it would not be better to save the UN from another embarrassing failure, harming its global legitimacy, by avoiding such rash moves that have absolutely no chance of success and will simply perpetuate the image of an ineffective world organization.
The answer is a resolute yes, all the more reason for the UN to return Iran's nuclear dossier to the IAEA, in light of the IAEA's near conclusion of giving Iran a clean bill of health, and the US's own spy agency's admission that Iran is not presently involved in the nuclear proliferation business.
Notes 1. See Security Council release.
2. It has been noted that "if one or two countries violate a travel ban, especially if they are neighboring of the targeted regime, the ability to enforce the travel restrictions will be compromised". Quoted in Design and Implementation of Arms Embargoes and Travel and Aviation Related Sanctions (Bonn International Center For Conversion, 2007).
About the Author: Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the author of “After Khomeini: New Directions in Iran's Foreign Policy” (Westview Press) and co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu. He also wrote "Keeping Iran's Nuclear Potential Latent", Harvard International Review, and is author of “Iran's Nuclear Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.”
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