POLITICS: Regional Sanctions on Burundi Have Failed, UN Says

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Dec 14 1997 (IPS) - Year-long sanctions imposed by Central African nations against Burundi’s military dictatorship have failed to block the flow of goods, and have made the work of humanitarian groups more difficult, the United Nations says.

A report prepared by the world body’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) concludes that the sanctions regime, imposed after President Pierre Buyoya regained power in coup in July 1996, created problems for the delivery of humanitarian aid and produced a thriving black market trade.

“The carriers most sensitive to political pressure, such as international humanitarian organisations which are obliged to deal formally with government authorities, were the most affected by the sanctions,” the survey, written by DHA policy adviser Claude Bruderlein and research assistant Peter Erhardy, argues.

“Other carriers, commercial or otherwise, were less affected since they relate with lower and less political echelons of the administration,” it adds.

In recent months, the DHA report says, the humanitarian problems have eased – but only because Central African nations have all but stopped enforcement of the sanctions.

“According to UN representatives, the sanctions regime has now become impractical,” Bruderlein and Erhardy write. “It is maintained only to sustain the influence of (regional mediator and former Tanzanian President Julius) Nyerere … The sanctions will continue to dilute themselves until regional parties have the courage of lifting the sanctions.”

By last summer, the sanctions were already ailing after Laurent Kabila took power in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and said the Kinshasa government could no longer close its borders to commercial transactions with Burundi.

Kenya unilaterally lifted measures against commercial transfer of fuel and allowed the resumption of Kenyan flights to the Burundian capital, Bujumbura, in June. UN and other observers concluded that sanctions “stopped having a substantial impact on Burundian internal markets by mid-summer 1997.”

Nevertheless, the regional cutoff of all non-humanitarian traffic had a major, if unintended, effect in delaying deliveries of exempted goods, like food and medicine, to Burundi’s population. By January 1997, UN humanitarian coordinator Martin Griffiths warned that “agencies will be unable to provide life- sustaining assistance to thousands of extremely vulnerable people in Burundi.”

Ironically, the problems hindering humanitarian aid from arriving only stopped after the sanctions in general were treated less seriously throughout the region.

At one point, a UN official speaking on condition of anonymity told IPS, the borders were so loosely patrolled that some humanitarian agencies chose to buy goods in Bujumbura from the black market at slightly inflated prices rather than grapple with delays in transporting them across the border.

“Humanitarian agencies are often the first targets of sanctions,” the official argued, noting that they must transport large, visible quantities of goods with the cooperation of regional governments. Smugglers face fewer problems as “You can always cross a border in Africa if you want.”

The result of that disparity, he said, was that “we can see black-market goods going over the border, but we cannot get assistance through to the needy population.” Both the Central African embargo against Buyoya’s regime and the recent Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) embargo against the military junta in Sierra Leone have suffered from such contradictions, he added.

In a further irony, the Arms Project of Human Rights Watch revealed in a report released here this week that, despite the regional embargo, Burundi has been flooded with weapons over the past year – provided by China, France, North Korea, Russia, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, the United States and the former Zaire.

“The international community, while noting almost as a matter of bureaucratic routine the serious abuses that have occurred, has taken precious few steps to stop them,” Joost Hiltermann, director of the Arms Project, said of the Burundi arms sanctions.

Regional sanctions are just as arbitrary in Sierra Leone, where the Nigerian-dominated ECOWAS has blocked aid convoys, Hiltermann said. The lesson of such regional sanctions is that the humanitarian effects of all possible sanctions should be reviewed by the United Nations – even when they are imposed by regional groups.

Just as crucially, he added, the 15-nation UN Security Council – if it endorses regional sanctions – must also ensure that the appropriate exemptions are in place for humanitarian deliveries.

Otherwise, past experience shows that there will be “a stonewalling of the border regarding humanitarian assitance” – but often little effect on military regimes or arms traffickers, Hiltermann said.