UNITED NATIONS: Sanctions Never Work, Says Former U.N. Official

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Jun 28 1995 (IPS) - Over a period of 17 months, the United Nations sanctions committee for the former Yugoslavia has approved so many humanitarian deliveries of shoes that every Serb should by now have about 11 pairs.

At the very same time, another U.N. sanctions committee allowed Iraq to import twice the amount of sugar in humanitarian aid than the entire Iraqi population could possibly consume.

These anomalies are just some of the errors that a former U.N. official argues show the overall lack of clarity and coordination of U.N. sanctions.

The official, Paul Conlon, resigned recently after working from 1989 to 1995 as a top official in the U.N. Department of Political Affairs. He was part of a nine-member U.N. secretariat mission which provides the U.N. Security Council with information and support for its many sanctions regimes.

In a report obtained by IPS, Conlon says that U.N.-imposed sanctions regimes have not worked in any of the instances he studied. They failed equally in the former Yugoslavia, Haiti, Libya, Iraq, Liberia, Somalia, Rwanda and against Angola’s UNITA rebels, he argues.

In its entire history, the Security Council has imposed either arms embargoes or more extensive sanctions against those eight nations, as well as Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. Those two nations, plus Haiti, are the only cases where the sanctions have since been lifted.

The basic problem with sanctions, the report claims, is that Security Council members have had no incentive to create any strict legal framework to govern the various regimes.

“Most of the member states are suspicious against any attempts by U.N. officials to require accountability, and they enjoy the sympathy of many officials of the U.N. Secretariat,” Conlon says.

The lack of any central coordination or accountability among the sanctions committees allows loopholes to abound, he adds.

Items that are regarded as humanitarian goods in one regime — such as shoes in the Balkans — are listed as non-humanitarian, commercial goods in another and are thus prohibited.

One country can apply to a U.N. sanctions committee for a business deal with a country under embargo, but several other countries may actually carry out the deal.

Conlon cites a case in which a London-based company applied to the Security Council to export sugar to Iraq. Britain forwarded the application to the Iraq sanctions committee, which in turn issued a certificate to Britain.

But the London company then gave its contract to another company in Portugal, which in turn hired an exporter from Brazil. The Swiss branch of an Arab bank financed the deal, while a Spanish firm actually shipped the sugar via Jordan.

Along the complex route of the sugar’s travel, of course, Iraq has numerous opportunities to circumvent the U.N. embargo imposed against it by cutting deals among the various suppliers, financiers and exporters.

The Secretariat committee and the Council sanctions committees, Conlon adds, are ill-equipped to check transactions. The nine- member Secretariat staff and 15-member Council bodies contend with a yearly volume of between 25,000 and 30,000 documents.

As a result, Conlon contends that many humanitarian waivers for sanctions are approved without ever being seriously examined. In one example cited in his report, patchouli leaves were approved as humanitarian aid on the basis that they served as food.

Some sanctions committees approve humanitarian waivers virtually automatically, Conlon writes. Last year, he says, 12 of the 15 members on the Iraq sanctions committee did not object even once to any waiver claim before them. Only five members of the former Yugoslavia’s committee ever objected to any waiver.

Political factors also play a major role in the workings of the committees, which all conduct their affairs in secrecy. The members of the developing world’s Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) tend to be more liberal toward granting waivers for Iraq, and more strict towards the former Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro), the report claims.

In addition, he notes, many Council committee members grant exemptions for firms in their own countries, thus helping their own trade.

The end result of the process, Conlon argues, is that the sanctions regimes are full of holes, yet often the large amount of approved humanitarian aid never reaches its targets.

The report estimates that only ten percent of the 5.2 billion dollars of humanitarian exemptions approved for Iraq last year ever arrived in that country.

SAMCOMM, the European Union’s sanctions office for the former Yugoslavia, estimated that Serbia and Montenegro received only two percent of the 30 billion dollars of humanitarian aid they were allowed to obtain from Security Council waivers.

Despite all these problems, Council diplomats have repeatedly defended sanctions as an effective, if blunt, instrument in forcing nations to change their behaviour.

British Ambassador David Hannay notes that, after five years of sanctions, Iraq has begun to comply in earnest with U.N. demands that it scrap its most deadly weapons, attesting to the success of the embargo. Nigerian Ambassador Ibrahim Gambari credits the sanctions against South Africa with helping end apartheid.

But in a January position paper on the subject, U.N. Secretary- General Boutros Boutros-Ghali conceded that a new U.N. mechanism should more carefully monitor the effects of sanctions.

The mechanism, he wrote, should “assess, at the request of the Security Council, and before sanctions are imposed, their potential impact on the target country and on third countries; to monitor application of the sanctions and to measure their effects; (and) to ensure the delivery of humanitarian assistance to vulnerable groups.”

So far, Conlon says, there has been no attempt even to study whether the sanctions regimes in place have succeeded or failed, and how.