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POLITICS-UN: Specific Sanctions in Vogue

UNITED NATIONS, Oct 10 1999 (IPS) - The imposition of broad-based sanctions may have lost favour with most UN members as a means of putting pressure on nations but sanctions targeted at selected ‘rogue’ leaders remain popular.

Take the case of the recent push by the UN Security Council to impose a ban on flights by Afghanistan’s official airline Ariana and to freeze the central Asian nation’s overseas assets.

These moves are intended to put the squeeze on the ultra Islamic Taliban movement that controls most of Afganistan and showed that, despite concerns over the embargo on Iraq and now-suspended sanctions against Libya, the United Nations can still use sanctions as a tool in its arsenal.

The Security council will vote during the coming week whether to take action against Afghanistan.

The move has the strong support of both the United States – which wants the Taliban to hand over Saudi financier and suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden – and Russia, a Taliban foe which, nevertheless, usuially is opposed to sanctions.

Remarkably, even China, the Council’s most staunch sanctions opponent, has indicated it will not veto the effort to punish the Taliban. One Chinese official said Beijing only wants to ensure that any measures taken is narrowly targeted so that the broad population of Afghanistan will not be hurt.

In a year which has seen the Council suspend sanctions on Libya and consider an end to the nine-year embargo against Iraq, the effort to craft a precisely-targeted sanctions regime against the Taliban shows a shift in the way sanctions are pursued.

To put it simply, broad-based embargoes – such as the one which UN officials claim has led to widespread malnutrition and disease in Iraq – are “out.”

Sanctions that focus on the economic and political power of rogue leaders are still “in.”

This strategy has helped to keep sanctions on the table, even while such sanctions critics as Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov declares that “Punishment of entire nations – especially for an indefinite time and indiscriminately – is inadmissible.”

The shift on sanctions has also become evident through the action of De Beers, the South African diamond mining and marketing giant, in suspending the purchase of all diamonds from Angola.

The decision follows an effort by the Security Council – particularly by Canada, which chairs the Council’s sanctions committee on Angola – to prod diamond marketers to crack down on any prohibited commerce with the rebel National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA).

As with the measures against the Taliban, the crackdown on Angolan diamonds is intended to strike at UNITA’s source of wealth: its control over most Angolan diamond-producing zones.

Canadian officials estimate that the rebels have netted between 3-4 billion dollars in diamond sales during the past eight years, enough to fund its lengthy, brutal war against the Angolan government.

Lloyd Axworthy, Canada’s foreign minister, praises De Beers – believed to control about two-thirds of all global diamond transactions – for taking the lead in bolstering sanctions against UNITA.

“It is time to tackle the new war economy, where a direct relationship exists between certain illicit businesses, corrupt officials, mercenaries and warlords,” says Axworthy. “In Angola, that relationship perpetuates misery, conflict and the victimisation of innocent people.”

As British Foreign Minister Robin Cook notes, the “illegal trade in diamonds…pays for the small arms and, all too often the mercenaries, which sustain conflicts.”

Ironically, the De Beers example demonstrates how difficult it can be in enforcing carefully-targeted sanctions.

The only way it can be sure of not purchasing UNITA diamonds on the Angolan market is to stop buying entirely in Angola. Some legitimate Angolan sellers, trying to market diamonds from government-held zones, therefore will be excluded along with UNITA middlemen.

Nevertheless, the Angola case, like that of Afghanistan, at least marks an attempt by the Security Council to set clear rules for how to impose limited sanctions.

The new rules still must be spelled out but there are clearly some common elements to the sort of sanctions regimes governments will now accept.

First, they must be applied as a last resort, and normally imposed against groups that clearly are international pariahs.

Both UNITA and the Taliban have fallen out of favour with almost all nations. Significantly, the Angolan rebels and de facto Afghan government are fighting in former Cold War hot spots, yet are opposed by both the United States and Russia.

Second, sanctions must be crafted to hurt elites – closing their overseas offices, freezing their bank accounts – but that do not restrict commerce in general.

UNITA has already been hit with a UN-imposed freeze on its assets, while the Taliban is facing similar measures proposed by the United States and Russia. The United States has unsuccessfully tried to push the same measures – including a similar ban on flights – against the government of Sudan.

Yet the only sure means to end what UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan last year called “sanctions fatigue” is to prove that sanctions eventually will be lifted.

Most Council members are pushing for the suspension of Libyan sanctions to become an outright lifting of all bans against the Tripoli government.

Russia, China and France, meanwhile, are sticking to their position that the Iraqi embargo must end soon while the Council, as a whole, has moved toward the acceptance – or at least the principle – of lifting sanctions on Iraqi exports, if not on imports.

If these trends continue, sanctions supporters hope to see fewer cases of sanctions leading to economic collapse, as in Yugoslavia or Iraq, and more in which government and rebel leaders face greater financial difficulties.

The Security Council may face a different dilemma: whether the new targeted sanctions can be monitored as effectively as the blunt, all-embracing ones of the past – or whether UNITA and the Taliban, among others, will simply shrug off the new measures.

 
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