With a Divided Security Council, Sanctions Aren't Working

By Ian Williams

Sanctions are a very blunt instrument, aimed at tyrants but generally hitting their victims. When the sanctions are administered by a multilateral body like the U.N., they can have all the subtlety of brain surgery carried out by a committee. That is exacerbated even more when the Security Council's five vetoes are taken into consideration. Libya, Iraq, and Serbia have been at the blunt end of this weapon—but in each case individual Council members have diverging views on what should happen.

Some ambassadors think that one thing that should be done is to put a sunset clause in future sanctions resolutions so that they cannot be maintained in the face of the majority. That is the case with sanctions against Libya and Iraq, where the British and American vetoes have kept embargos going long after many other members believe the sanctions outlived their usefulness. Conversely, if sanctions on Serbia were to be voted on now, a newly combative Russia would certainly veto them.

Four years after Desert Storm, ordinary people in Iraq are suffering from sanctions imposed with the objective of undermining Iraqi President Saddam Hussain. Now campaigners for lifting the sanctions because of their effects on the Iraqi people have been joined by some of Iraq's many creditors, like Russia and France, motivated by the obvious self-interest of pocketing some of the billions of dollars Iraq has owed them since before the Gulf war.

Britain and the U.S. are increasingly on the defensive, not least since they can't publicly state their real bottom line, that sanctions stay as long as Saddam Hussain does. So they went along reluctantly with the determined Russian, French and non-aligned efforts to produce a compromise that would allow Iraq to sell a limited amount of its oil as long as the proceeds went to guaranteed humanitarian needs. However, Moscow has rediscovered the joys of being friendly with the Iraqi president, whose resounding "no" to the carefully crafted deal was a rebuff to months of diplomatic effort.

Baghdad, it seems, can be just as cynically opaque in its rhetoric as Washington and London. When the Iraqi government talks about sovereignty as being the issue, it is in fact talking about the survival of Saddam's regime.

On Libya, Washington's efforts to intensify sanctions got nowhere in the face of a majority on the Security Council who would happily lift them all if U.N. Security Council rules permitted a free, veto-less vote. Some of the Europeans would face serious economic problems if they could not buy from a major nearby source of petroleum. Many members have their doubts about the quality of the evidence implicating Libya in the Lockerbie explosion, and many of them also consider Libyan compromise proposals on the venue of the trials to be eminently sensible. In fact, Libya last year proved itself to be a model global citizen, for once at least, when it accepted the World Court's jurisdiction and judgment in favor of Chad over the contested band of territory between them. More recently, Tripoli's taunting of its neighbors by demanding access by air for its Muslim pilgrims to the holy places in Saudi Arabia also touched upon delicate sensibilities which allowed Security Council approval of flights for Libyan participants in the pilgrimage.

Britain and the U.S. increasingly are on the defensive.

In the case of Serbia, the easing of sanctions allowing flights and sports contacts remained, despite increasing evidence that Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic has been breaking his own pledge to embargo the flow of fuel, war materials and soldiers to the Serbian forces in Croatia and Bosnia. Many members now accept that Serbian helicopters were involved in such sanctions-breaking, despite denials and alibis offered by Lord David Owen's and Thorvald Stoltenberg's team on the border, which seems to have been chosen for its ostrich-like tendency to bury its collective head in the sand on the banks of the Drina River whenever the sound of Serb rotor blades becomes too obtrusive to deny (see April/May issue of WRMEA).

Since what passes for Western diplomacy hinges on Serbian President Milosevic calling off the dogs of war that he originally unleashed on his neighbors, it was a major achievement to reduce the period of review on the easing of U.N. sanctions on Serbia from 100 to 75 days.

However the major step was not due to the firepower of NATO but the perseverance of one man, Judge Richard Goldstone, the prosecutor of the International War Crimes Tribunal, who blithely announced that he was considering indicting Radovan Karadzic, the self-styled Bosnian Serb president, and his military commander Ratko Mladic as war criminals. Western and U.N. officials bravely let it be known that this would not inhibit them from groveling to the indictees.

After the Bosnian Serbs, the war crimes trail may lead to Belgrade, which will put to a severe test the U.S. administration's inclination toward making lifting of sanctions on Serbia conditional on Serbian cooperation with the Tribunal. Indicative of the way the wind is blowing is the success of the Russians in the sanctions committee in blocking newsprint and other supplies intended for the opposition media in Belgrade by turning the concept of freedom of the press upside down. The Russians are insisting that Serbian government media should get supplies if the Serbian opposition press gets them, and that the U.S. representatives should come round to the Russian point of view.

Calling for Sanctions on Israel

Of course, not much is usually needed to persuade the U.S. mission to back the Israeli point of view. During the Non-Proliferation Treaty's review conference, U.S. support for an unconditional renewal of the treaty was undermined continually by the Clinton administration's policy of unconditional support for whatever Israel wanted. In this case, that meant strong pressure on states like Iran and Egypt that have signed the treaty and do allow inspections, and none on the Middle Eastern country, Israel, that hasn't signed the treaty and does not allow its reactors to be inspected.

As we went to press, the Palestinian mission launched an attempt to "achieve action. not just to register protests," as PNA Ambassador to the U.N. Nasser Al-Kidwa put it. When Rabin's government announced the expropriation of even more Arab land in Jerusalem and the occupied territories at the end of April, the ambassador wrote to the Security Council, suggesting that it "has the duty to order the Israeli authorities to desist from taking any further illegal measures and, specifically, to rescind the declared confiscation orders."

Since the ambassador has not taken leave of his senses, he is not expecting sanctions against Israel for its illegal actions. More modestly and realistically, however, he told the Washington Report, "There's nothing being built on the ground yet, so we do hope that the Council will persuade the Israelis to rescind their decision before they have accomplished a fait accompli!"

It is a very modest expectation, that breaches of international law will attract at least verbal sanctions. But the dismal experiences of the past few years, as the international statutes optimistically enacted after World War II are eroded, with U.S. acquiescence, one by one, may make it hopelessly optimistic.

Ian Williams, a British free-lance journalist, is president of the U.N. Foreign Correspondents Association.