Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS SANCTIONS: PERSUASION OR PUNISHMENT? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Diane Coyle Producer: Jane Beresford Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 22.07.04 Repeat Date: 25.07.04 Tape Number: Duration: Taking part in order of appearance: Simon Chesterman Executive Director of Institute for International Law and Justice, New York University School of Law Denis Halliday Former United Nations Assistant Secretary General Former Head of Oil for Food Programme in Iraq Aziz Pahad Deputy Foreign Minister of South Africa David Cortright President of the Fourth Freedom Forum F.W. de Klerk Former South African President Kimberly Elliott Research Fellow at Institute for International Economics, Washington Paul Welshman Ncube Secretary General of Movement for Democratic Change Tony Leon Leader of South African Opposition Party COYLE: Before 1990 the United Nations adopted sanctions only twice. Since the end of the Cold War, they’ve been used by the international community in more than a dozen cases. But do sanctions really work - and do they cause unacceptable suffering? CHESTERMAN: Sanctions are often said to stand between words and bullets. When it’s necessary for the international community, such as it is, to do more than give a diplomatic dressing down to a country but where there is neither the willingness nor perhaps the ability to send troops into a country, sanctions are really the only other option. COYLE: For Simon Chesterman, of New York University’s School of Law, imposing sanctions on a wayward country can be a reasonable policy choice. Denis Halliday ran the Oil for Food programme in Iraq under the sanctions introduced by the United Nations in 1990 during the first Gulf War. HALLIDAY: Sanctions originate in the context of warfare. They are a form of siege, not in the military sense but in the sense that we isolate people and we punish them. We impose upon them restrictions to their lives and, in the case of Iraq, we’ve seen that that siege and those sanctions turned out to be extremely violent. COYLE: We’ve seen the shocking violence of conventional warfare in Iraq on our television screens daily. The effects of sanctions over the previous 10 years received much less attention. Denis Halliday came to see the sanctions as a continuation of warfare only after he arrived in Iraq and saw with his own eyes the appalling effects they were having on civilians. Sometimes the aim of sanctions is very specific, such as achieving the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Sometimes they seem little more than an expression of international outrage. There’s a heated debate about whether to impose them now on Zimbabwe. One example where sanctions are widely agreed to have played an important part was in bringing apartheid to an end in South Africa. Aziz Pahad, now deputy foreign minister in South Africa, was an African National Congress activist in the 1980s. Like many others, he was sent out of the country into exile during some of the apartheid years. PAHAD: Mr Mandela, in 62 when he was underground, first made a call for sanctions against South Africa and that was after the Sharpeville massacre. And then many leading people like Oliver Tambo and others were sent outside for two purposes: one, to mobilize the international community to support the sanctions call; and, two, to try to continue the struggle from exile. SEGUE CORTRIGHT: The consent of those who would feel the pressure of sanctions is very important to legitimize the use of this instrument. And in the case of South Africa, the ANC strongly advocated international sanctions against the apartheid regime; and when sanctions were imposed only partially, the ANC urged stronger and more effective measures. Always sanctions are going to be more effective if they have the support of opposition parties within the targeted state. COYLE: David Cortright of the “Fourth Freedom Foundation” is one of the world’s leading experts on sanctions, as well as an anti-war campaigner. He believes the consent of the ANC in South Africa legitimised the use of sanctions. Many countries, including the UK under Margaret Thatcher, strongly opposed them, and official international sanctions weren’t applied by the United Nations until 1986. But the sports boycotts and consumer embargoes encouraged by Nelson Mandela and the ANC much earlier were seen as expressions of solidarity with the black population of South Africa. This was very different from the use of comprehensive sanctions in Iraq only a few years later, when the first Gulf War ended in 1991, as a public punishment of Saddam and an attempt to encourage popular resistance against his regime. For David Cortright, this was less legitimate, and less effective. CORTRIGHT: One analyst called this the naïve theory of sanctions; that you could sanction the whole population and it would convince the leaders to make a change. That’s not the case and certainly in places like Iraq or Libya where sanctions were applied in very authoritarian, dictatorial regimes, ordinary people have no mechanisms for exerting pressure on their governments. It’s much better in these circumstances to put the pressure on those decision makers themselves – on the political elites, the military elites – and, thereby, hopefully begin to induce a process of bargaining that can lead to cooperation. COYLE: But the idea that the support of opposition groups makes sanctions more likely to achieve their aims is challenged by F.W. De Klerk. He was leader of the National Party and came to power as South Africa’s President in 1989. When I spoke to him in Cape Town, I asked what role he thought, with hindsight, the sanctions had played in overturning apartheid. DE KLERK: If the government or the country which is targeted feels that the sanctions want to force them to do things which will really undermine the very core of their existence, they will oppose that sanction. They will use it as a rallying point for gathering support for not complying. COYLE: So is there no sense in which it was easier to justify the need for change to the electorate by saying if we do make these changes, do make these reforms, then the sanctions regime will be easier? DE KLERK: Yes, but we did not use that argument; the argument which we used was the old policies have failed to bring justice. And one of the negative aspects of the old policies was that we were becoming more and more isolated, but the real underlying motivation for changes was our admission that we had landed in a dead end situation where the system which we had was not morally justifiable and, therefore, we had to change … we had to do what is right under the circumstances. COYLE: So he thinks sanctions delayed change by making it difficult for the white, Afrikaaner leadership of the country to work with the international community. But the perceived success of sanctions in South Africa sent a strong message across the West: that sanctions were a powerful tool for overturning undemocratic regimes. In the case of Iraq, though, Simon Chesterman believes that the international sanctions didn’t offer any scope for engagement with the Iraqis. CHESTERMAN: By the end of the 1990s, the United States and the United Kingdom were in really an impossible situation from their perspective – they couldn’t lift sanctions because that would be admitting that Saddam Hussein had defied them, but they couldn’t really continue with sanctions indefinitely because the humanitarian consequences, such as the death of half a million Iraqi children, were becoming impossible. Meanwhile, France and Russia were actively seeking to undermine the sanctions regime. So I think no one wants to get into that type of situation and one way of avoiding that is to ensure that there is a genuine international consensus on the appropriateness of a sanctions regime and how it’s being imposed. And the best way to maintain that consensus is through involving some representative group of the local population so that it’s not simply a bunch of foreign powers sitting around in the security council in New York determining how an economy is meant to function. COYLE: Even if sanctions alone did little to end apartheid, the participation of the ANC did give black South Africans themselves a say on the international stage. It made it possible for the UN and the members of its security council to adjust the sanctions regime and then dismantle it. But according to David Cortright, who favours the use of sanctions in some instances, this kind of flexibility was never on the cards in Iraq. CORTRIGHT: The US and UK never really were prepared to engage in any kind of bargaining with the Saddam Hussein regime and yet there’s evidence that the regime was willing to bargain, it was anxious to have the sanctions lifted, and on a few occasions it did make concessions with the hope that sanctions would be lifted. We could have used that willingness to bargain on the part of the regime as a lever to influence it and to try to get more cooperation. A whole different kind of political dynamic might have evolved between the security council and Iraq during the 1990s if sanctions had been used as a bargaining instrument rather than a punitive instrument. COYLE: The failure of the great powers to take this opportunity to bargain with the regime had catastrophic results for the people of Iraq. According to a Unicef report published in 1997, a third of the under-fives, nearly a million children, were suffering chronic malnutrition and over half a million had died due to shortages of food and medicine. The UN agency said the very young were bearing the brunt of the comprehensive economic sanctions. HALLIDAY: The comprehensive nature is not you know well understood. This was not just economic; this was all aspects of Iraqi life was hurt – communications with the outside world, in medicine, in education, travel was curbed. They were simply cut off from the first world, let’s say. And, furthermore, Iraq, due to its oil revenues, had allowed itself to become dependent on importations. Seventy percent of food consumed in Iraq was imported. This was a country that had set itself up inadvertently for the imposition of sanctions, you might say. COYLE: Denis Halliday saw the effects first hand when he travelled to the country in 1997, as the UN’s Assistant Secretary General, to administer the Oil for Food programme. This arrangement for the United Nations to use some of the revenues from oil sales for imports of essential food and medicines was meant to alleviate the human suffering. He reported his grave concerns to the Secretary General of the UN. Although the evidence did pave the way for an extension of the Oil for Food programme, Dennis Halliday resigned late in 1998. HALLIDAY: The Secretariat and the Secretary General felt very much constrained by the position of London and Washington. There was still an atmosphere of the need to punish Saddam Hussein. COYLE: Oil for Food was meant to alleviate some of the problems. Why do you think it didn’t work? Was it the amount of money or the structure? HALLIDAY: Well despite all the failings of Oil for Food – the lack of money, the lack of flexibility (I couldn’t use that money for development activity for reconstruction and such), it didn’t fail totally. It, in my view, prevented starvation and famine conditions to which the Iraqis were very close in 95, 96. We stopped that by bringing in the basic foodstuffs. We failed however, in my view, because we allowed the member states of the security council to sort of feel, well, now we can keep the sanctions with good conscience because we’ve got rid of the criticism we had from some member states and some NGOs. And, therefore, I found myself in that ridiculous position of in a sense alleviating the guilt of the member states by running a programme which made sanctions, superficially at least, more tolerable, more acceptable to Washington and London in particular. COYLE: His experience casts doubt on the effectiveness of sanctions in achieving their stated aims. Simon Chesterman. CHESTERMAN: It’s depressingly hard to find examples of where sanctions have actually worked. South Africa is typically held up as one of the best examples, although that clearly took decades, and I think other factors like the end of the cold war, the transformations on the ground in South Africa (particularly in terms of the economy), the personalities of particular leaders like Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, Bishop Desmond Tutu – all of those were extremely important. And if it was simply a case of sanctions working, then that really begs the question of why they didn’t work faster. So advocates of sanctions actually face a very difficult prospect of demonstrating that sanctions on their own have ever worked. SEGUE ELLIOTT: At my institute we’ve looked at nearly two hundred cases of sanctions over the entire course of the 20th century, and what we’ve found is that on average about one in three cases have had some degree of success – not total success but have achieved at least some of the sanctioners’ goals. And this is including users of sanctions beyond the United States. COYLE: Kimberly Elliott is a research fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington. ELLIOTT: If you break it down a bit, in the more recent period – the 70s to the end of the century – only about one in four overall were effective in that period; and when the US acts alone, less than one in five of US unilateral sanctions have achieved even partial success since the 1970s. COYLE: If so many sanctions don’t work and they are very costly, why would we keep on using them? ELLIOTT: The reason that we continue to see the US using economic sanctions is there’s also a domestic political dynamic. Even if they don’t succeed in foreign policy terms, sometimes sanctions can be very effective as a domestic policy tool and I think that is one reason that you see fairly frequent use in the United States of this particular tool. COYLE: So you mean something has to be seen to be done and this is quite an easy something? ELLIOTT: People want to see something done, exactly. They want to see a response to what they view as an international outrage. COYLE: This raises a question about the purpose of sanctions. Are they meant to work as levers to modify the behaviour of errant regimes? Are they supposed to overthrow a regime without the costs of going to war? Or are they really designed for domestic political consumption? If the latter, Iraq may turn out to be a watershed, because the sanctions themselves aroused such outrage. And yet, according to David Cortright, they did succeed in restraining an appalling dictator. CORTRIGHT: The sanctions were very effective in cementing the system of political and military containment that prevented Saddam Hussein from rebuilding his war machine after the Persian Gulf War. It denied the regime vast amounts of oil revenues that might have been used to redevelop its weapons programmes. COYLE: The perceived failure of sanctions against Iraq means the emphasis now is on targeting the pain of sanctions on the villains, not the innocent victims. The buzzword is ‘smart’ sanctions – as if the ones we’ve tried so far have been dumb ones. Simon Chesterman of New York University. CHESTERMAN: There is no prospect of sanctions of the kind that were imposed against Iraq, one day after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990 - there’s no prospect of them being imposed again in the near future. What’s troubling is that for some people even discussion of targeted sanctions is linked with the humanitarian consequences that were suffered in Iraq. And I think that’s an understandable concern, but I think it’s a misplaced concern because the whole purpose of targeted sanctions is to avoid that type of humanitarian consequence. COYLE: Targeting sanctions will cushion the general population from hardship, but does it mean they’ll be less effective? Take Zimbabwe, whose increasingly autocratic leader Robert Mugabe has been subject to specific EU and US sanctions for just over two years. Twenty of Zimbabwe’s ruling elite are subject to a travel ban preventing them from travelling to Europe and America, and their assets in both places have been frozen. The EU’s aim is to overthrow the Mugabe government and ensure democracy. But African countries oppose any sanctions, targeted or not, preferring to apply diplomatic pressure behind the scenes. They believe that’s more likely to bring about change in Zimbabwe than the symbolic humiliation of being barred from visiting London or Brussels. Their lack of support meant Britain failed to get the Commonwealth to approve sanctions on President Mugabe. But will either approach, official sanctions or quiet moral pressure, make any difference? The problem lies with the aim, not the method, according to Kimberley Elliott. ELLIOTT: The problem with democracy using sanctions to try and promote democracy when you have authoritarian regimes is obviously that you are asking regimes to commit political suicide. And there’s very little in the way of economic pain that can come close to equalling the pain that these individual regimes and rulers will suffer from complying with sanctions demands, so the equation just doesn’t really add up when it’s an authoritarian regime and the goal is democracy. You’re sort of asking for the ultimate sacrifice. SEGUE CHESTERMAN: The implicit aim is to make things so bad that eventually the population will rise up and overthrow the dictator, as it were. And if the population is not in a position to rise up and if the centralized regime has coercive mechanisms at its disposal to make it difficult for a population to rise up, then all you end up doing is putting pressure on a population, perhaps increasing the population’s dependence upon a very strong leader who has extraordinary control over most of the resources in the country and you can actually end up strengthening a dictatorial regime. COYLE: So Simon Chesterman, the international lawyer, fears the use of sanctions in this case could even be counter-productive. In Zimbabwe, like Iraq, the challenge is to bring about the overthrow of a dictator who has seized the state for his own power and enrichment. But Zimbabwe’s more like South Africa in having an internal opposition with strong popular support, the Movement for Democratic Change. The MDC’s Secretary General, Paul Welshman Ncube, is frustrated that there’s no support for sanctions on Zimbabwe from neighbouring African countries, especially from the ANC in South Africa. WELSHMAN NCUBE: We believe that a more robust approach, like for instance in respect of the anti-apartheid movement, would be more effective on Zimbabwe. They respectfully disagree and think that there is no parallel between the Zimbabwean situation and South Africa under apartheid. We think they are wrong - the people of Zimbabwe deserve the international solidarity that the people of South Africa received under apartheid. The Mugabe regime, in our view, commits the same sort of atrocities, brutalities, the extensive abuse of the police, the central intelligence organization, the army. The almost endemic violence which is taking place in the country is not dissimilar what used to happen to South Africa. The difference is that you have this time likely black on black violence and black on black suppression and oppression whereas under apartheid it was a group of people believed in racial supremacy who were doing the sort of same things that Mugabe is doing to the people of Zimbabwe today. COYLE: Some South Africans would also like the ANC to take a stand in supporting sanctions against the Mugabe government. Tony Leon is leader of the official opposition party. Why does he think the South African government appears to be so hypocritical in now opposing sanctions - a measure that it welcomed in its own liberation struggle? LEON: There’s a lot of solidarity politics at work here. I also believe that our President, Mr Thabo Mbeki, is to a real extent mesmerized – if not slightly intimated – by Robert Mugabe, and I think Mr Mbeki is behind closed doors having it thrown in his face that he wasn’t in the struggle, in jail as Robert Mugabe was. Now that might not be said directly, but at least it’s then a logical and coherent explanation for our complete contradiction that runs through the centre of our approach to Zimbabwe. The South African government says the only type of diplomacy to practice is so-called silent diplomacy, but in fact we do practice a megaphone diplomacy in respect of areas of the world where we have very little influence – the Caribbean, the Middle East being two examples – where South Africa has an enormous amount to say, rushes off to the International Court of Justice; and yet on Zimbabwe where we have a human rights catastrophe on our doorstep, we are completely quiet. COYLE: South Africa’s Deputy Foreign Minister Aziz Pahad says the kind of pressure that will bring about change in Zimbabwe is African solidarity, working through the official regional organisations. PAHAD: South Africa cannot adopt any measures that are outside the framework of a regional and sub-regional decision. As the European Union are now moving on common foreign policy programmes, they work only within the framework of the European Union. They don’t work bilaterally or individually, and it’s very difficult for South Africa to go it alone. COYLE: But surely South Africa, a powerful neighbour and important trading partner, does bear a special responsibility in Zimbabwe? PAHAD: Precisely because of that, that we must never allow ourselves to act as a super power not taking into interest what the rest of our partners in the continent say. We have to work together as a continent, otherwise very soon there’ll be very strong anti- South African feelings emerging. And we have to, if we want to play our role – and we have to play a role because we’re the strongest economy in the continent, etcetera – we have to carry many of the countries with us on any major foreign policy issue that we take. COYLE: It sounds a weak excuse, but the South African government is sensitive to growing sentiment elsewhere in Africa that the continent’s richest and most powerful country is throwing its weight around too much - that it should lead by finding consensus in Africa. For Paul Welshman Ncube of the Zimbabwean opposition, though, genuine solidarity requires ANC leadership in taking action against Mugabe. WELSHMAN NCUBE: We do not believe that quiet diplomacy in its various manifestations is the correct policy to apply. We think Mugabe’s quiet diplomacy is appeasement and at the end of the day that is not likely to move him. But that is the choice that the South African government has made. We have said to them we don’t agree with that. They’ve disagreed with us and we’ve agreed to disagree. COYLE: Having been on the receiving end of the sanctions against South Africa backed by the ANC in the days of apartheid, former president F.W. De Klerk now supports the ANC’s reluctance to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe. DE KLERK: While I’m critical about quite a number of aspects relating to the handling of Zimbabwe, I’m not a supporter of sort of all encompassing sanctions because already the people are going hungry, they’re dying. Already they’re streaming over the borders into neighbouring countries – South Africa, Botswana. Help is needed there, not further deprivation. I would like to see the problem to be addressed by cooperation between South Africa and Great Britain and the Southern African states creating a sort of a sense of a common purpose rather than pointing fingers at each other and passing the buck. COYLE: The Movement for Democratic Change in Zimbabwe would certainly like South Africa and other neighbouring countries to join in taking action against Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party - whether it takes the form of sanctions against the Zimbabwean president or noisier diplomacy. Paul Welshman Ncube does think African attitudes have been shifting since the confirmation by outside observers of widespread irregularities in the elections in 2002. WELSHMAN NCUBE: In our view, we have gone a long way. Two years ago, the African countries did not accept the nature of the crisis in Zimbabwe as being a crisis of governance and a crisis of violations of human rights. They then accepted Zanu-PF’s propaganda, which was to say the crisis in Zimbabwe is over land and is a dispute between the United Kingdom and Harare. But today there is hardly anybody serious in Africa who believes that. It appears to be accepted now that the crisis in Zimbabwe is a crisis of governance COYLE: The MDC hopes, of course, for a fair fight in the elections due in Zimbabwe next year. These could prove to be the acid test for the merits of quiet persuasion over formal sanctions. Because there are obvious limitations to the effectiveness of sanctions applied to autocratic leaders. One glaring omission is that they rarely target the foreign banks and arms suppliers. And the sanctions targeted on powerful individuals like Robert Mugabe are unlikely to add up to more than annoying inconveniences. Kimberley Elliott of the Institute for International Economics. ELLIOTT: If you think about the kinds of rogue regimes that might be the target of these personalized kinds of sanctions, quite often those leaders are corrupt and are already stealing from their countries and, therefore, they already have an incentive to hide those assets. So the problem you have is can you find the assets in order to freeze them? Even if you can find them and freeze existing assets that are held abroad, if it’s a leader that has access to resources from within their country, like oil or like diamonds or timber, then the decision has to be made well are you going to actually go beyond those targeted sanctions against the person and also impose trade sanctions against particular type of resources. Travel sanctions - again that’s a fairly modest sanction that perhaps send a signal if your objective is modest, but if it’s a more ambitious objective I just don’t think travel sanctions, visa bans, that sort of thing impose enough of a cost on leaders to really change very egregious behaviour. COYLE: So you’re sort of saying that smart sanctions aren’t quite smart enough and we need to think through what the actual consequences would be? ELLIOTT: You absolutely have to think through what can be achieved with the sanctions and what can’t be in a given circumstance. And in some cases too diplomacy, I think, gets under appreciated. If you look at Zimbabwe, for example, I think diplomacy could be much more powerful there if Zimbabwe’s neighbours, if President Mbeki would take a lead in really confronting Mugabe and telling him that from within the region that his behaviour is not acceptable. COYLE: Whatever happens in Zimbabwe next year, the experience of both Iraq and South Africa suggests it isn’t a question of either diplomacy or sanctions when it comes to applying effective international pressure on rogue governments. What’s important isn’t the method for dealing with dictators, but the aim of the international community. If sanctions are an expression of outrage, and aim for a change of regime, they pose an ultimatum no autocratic leader will ever accept. If instead they’re one amongst several diplomatic policy options, they can offer a means of putting pressure on a dictator, with varying degrees of effectiveness. According to Simon Chesterman, there’s a danger of losing sight of their purpose. CHESTERMAN: There has been greater enthusiasm to ensure that sanctions get adopted rather than getting them right. What that can lead to is sanctions will be imposed and then it becomes a way of putting a crisis on the international back burner. So in so far as countries determine that they must make some sort of expression of outrage, sanctions will get adopted. But it’s that expression of outrage that’s much more important in certain circumstances than actually ensuring that the policy change that they are requiring takes place. COYLE: The lesson from both South Africa and Iraq is that there is no gentle way to change a regime. Sanctions, like war, cost lives, and can entrench the very regimes that the international community is trying to change. It’s a high price to pay for just an expression of moral outrage. 3