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RADIO 4
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ANALYSIS
SANCTIONS: PERSUASION OR PUNISHMENT?
TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY
Presenter: Diane Coyle
Producer: Jane Beresford
Editor: Nicola Meyrick
BBC
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Broadcast Date:
Repeat Date:
Tape Number:
Duration:

22.07.04
25.07.04

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, theyve 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 its 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
Universitys 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, weve seen that that siege
and those sanctions turned out to be extremely violent.
COYLE: Weve 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. Theres 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 worlds 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 werent 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 nave
theory of sanctions; that you could sanction the whole population and it
would convince the leaders to make a change. Thats 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. Its 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 Africas 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 didnt 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 couldnt lift sanctions because
that would be admitting that Saddam Hussein had defied them, but they
couldnt 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 its being imposed. And
the best way to maintain that consensus is through involving some
representative group of the local population so that its 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 theres 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, lets 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 UNs 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 didnt work?
amount of money or the structure?

Was it the

HALLIDAY:
Well despite all the failings of Oil for
Food the lack of money, the lack of flexibility (I couldnt use that money
for development activity for reconstruction and such), it didnt 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 weve 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:
Its 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 didnt 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 weve looked at nearly
two hundred cases of sanctions over the entire course of the 20th century,
and what weve 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 dont 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 theres also a domestic political
dynamic. Even if they dont 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 weve 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 - theres no prospect of them being imposed again in the near
future. Whats 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 thats an understandable concern, but I think
its 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 theyll 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 Zimbabwes 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 EUs 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 thats 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 theres 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 doesnt
really add up when its an authoritarian regime and the goal is democracy.
Youre 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 populations 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 Zimbabwes more like South Africa in
having an internal opposition with strong popular support, the
Movement for Democratic Change. The MDCs Secretary General,
Paul Welshman Ncube, is frustrated that theres 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:
Theres 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 wasnt in the struggle, in jail as Robert Mugabe was. Now
that might not be said directly, but at least its 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 Africas 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 dont work bilaterally or individually, and its 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 therell be very strong antiSouth African feelings emerging. And we have to, if we want to play our
role and we have to play a role because were 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 continents 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 Mugabes 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 dont
agree with that. Theyve disagreed with us and weve 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 ANCs
reluctance to impose sanctions against Zimbabwe.
DE KLERK:
While Im critical about quite a
number of aspects relating to the handling of Zimbabwe, Im not a
supporter of sort of all encompassing sanctions because already the people
are going hungry, theyre dying. Already theyre 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 Mugabes

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-PFs 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 its 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 thats a fairly modest sanction that
perhaps send a signal if your objective is modest, but if its a more
ambitious objective I just dont think travel sanctions, visa bans, that sort
of thing impose enough of a cost on leaders to really change very egregious
behaviour.
COYLE: So youre sort of saying that smart
sanctions arent 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 cant 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 Zimbabwes
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 isnt a
question of either diplomacy or sanctions when it comes to applying
effective international pressure on rogue governments. Whats important
isnt 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 theyre 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, theres 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 its that expression of outrage
thats 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. Its a high price to pay for
just an expression of moral outrage.