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Hard Choices Moral Dilemmas in Humanitarian Intervention Edited by Jonathan Moore
Under the Auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Geneva
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Oxford End of page iii Contents
Acknowledgments vii Foreword ix Cornelio Sommaruga Introduction Jonathan Moore 1
Permanent Moral Dilemmas under Changing Political and Technological Conditions 9 Pierre Hassner Recasting the Relationship 29 J. Bryan Hehir Sovereignty in Internal Armed Conflict 55 Kofi A. Annan Romeo A. Dallaire
Culture, Neutrality, and the Military 87 Mohamed Sahnoun Colin Granderson End of page v
Monath 119 Mu Sochua Some Moral Dilemmas of Humanitarian Aid 137 Mary B. Anderson Political Failures in Rwanda 157 Ian Martin Rony Brauman Ongoing War 195 Richard J. Goldstone Violations and War Crimes 211 José Zalaquett Larry Minear Arms Transfers and Weapons Manufacture 251 Roger Williamson HIV Epidemic 269 Elizabeth Reid Aid 287 Michael Ignatieff Index 303 About the Authors 317 End of page vi 13 The Morality of Sanctions Larry Minear
The issues treated in this volume are complex, situated as they are at the intersections of colliding moral imperatives. Economic sanctions are no exception. They enjoy a privileged place in the United Nations Charter and in the tool kit of diplomats. Carefully crafted, adroitly applied, and well managed, they represent an effective expression of international law and assertion of international human rights and humanitarian values. Avoiding the resort to military force may spare civilian populations wide-ranging and inhumane consequences. However principled in concept and design, sanctions have nevertheless often failed to achieve their eminently legitimate objectives. Even when successful, they have often occasioned one degree or another of hardship among civilians in the targeted country. The same United Nations that imposes economic coercion then dutifully moves to relieve the associated suffering. The world body that seems morally schizophrenic in causing wounds that it then binds up would appear morally irresponsible were it to leave such suffering unattended. The extent to which economic sanctions place political and humanitarian imperatives on a collision course was dramatized at a workshop in December 1995 that was part of a U.N.-commissioned study on the humanitarian impacts of economic sanctions. Officials with Security Council-related responsibilities urged researchers to avoid recommending any constraints on the imposition of sanctions End of page 229 by the council in the pursuit of its political objectives. U.N. aid officials, by contrast, wanted a powerful floodlight of condemnation focused on the inhumanity of such measures. Each group claimed the moral high ground.1 This chapter examines the morality of sanctions. It views sanctions not as a clash between coercion and compassion but rather as a challenge of managing the tension between principles. After a review of the changed international political climate in the wake of the Cold War, the chapter examines recent experience with multilateral sanctions, with particular attention to the difficulties they create for humanitarian interests. It concludes by observing ways in which a more nuanced understanding of the convergence between political and humanitarian interests would benefit both.
The Changing Political Environment The passing of the Cold War has brought a fundamental shift in the traditional understanding of the relationship between political and humanitarian imperatives. For decades, international responses to human distress had been calibrated according to the location of the suffering and the politics of the host authorities. "Anyone who examines the historical record of communism must conclude," a florid editorial in the Washington Times in the mid-1980s opined, "that any aid directed at overthrowing communism is humanitarian aid."2 International policy generally reflected such editorial polemics. Nicaraguans, Cubans, Vietnamese, Angolans, and other civilians under communist control in the "third world" were denied life-saving assistance by the United States-led "first world" and received special help from the Soviet Union and its "second world" allies. By the time East-West confrontation peaked in the 1980s, the third world and its urgent human needs seemed little more than a battleground for first and second world ideologies. Multilateral humanitarian and economic assistance, heavily politicized, suffered accordingly. Ideology infiltrated the international refugee regime, with refugees from communism welcomed in the West, which End of page 230 shunned those fleeing right-wing dictatorships, and vice versa. Very little assistance was genuinely neutral, impartial, and independent. With the ebbing of Cold War tensions, humanitarian concerns during the past decade have attained a new and higher profile. The deprivation of the essentials of life and the abuse of human rights have come to be viewed as threats to international peace and security, justifying the exercise of economic and military force under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter. Humanitarian extremity and human rights abuses have figured prominently in U.N. interventions in such internal conflicts as Bosnia, Somalia, and Rwanda. Such action no longer requires the political consent of crisis-affected countries. The changes in the global environment themselves reflect political and humanitarian forces. Major humanitarian crises, politicized and/or masked during the Cold War, have become more visible and accessible during the 1990s. "As the atom is to nuclear physics, the nation-state was supposed to be the basic unit of international politics," observed Peter J. Fromuth. "Yet since the end of the Cold War, the pent-up hatred and frustration of nationalist, ethnic, religious and other forces have exploded, splitting the nation-state atom and sending shock waves across the international system."3 Eroded sovereignty and greater permeability of national borders have opened new space for humanitarian action. At the same time, complex moral issues, including identifying criteria for interventions and consistency among them, have edged toward the center of an expanding international stage. The newly perceived importance of human need reflects changes in the humanitarian as well as the political ethos. The first post-Cold War decade has witnessed growing assertiveness by humanitarian interests themselves. Aid organizations have welcomed the new attention to humanitarian concerns within the corridors of power. The explosion of humanitarian need has produced exponential growth in the size and scale of the international humanitarian enterprise. Widespread disaffection with governmental action and a new sense of the importance of the institutions of civil society have contributed to a higher international profile for relief action and actors. Yet the reality that heightened human need has caught the attention of policy makers has been, according to aid groups them End of page 231 selves, a mixed blessing. Humanitarian interests, applauding the fact that human deprivation and human rights abuses have come into their own, have also warned against the accompanying dangers of politicization. Threats to humanity, they have pointed out, create their own imperative for action quite apart from perceived connections to top-drawer political issues of international peace and security. Moreover, as the locus of post-Cold War conflicts has shifted from interstate to intrastate, requiring a more diverse international tool kit, aid organizations have cautioned against substituting short-term, high-profile relief assistance for measures that tackle the underlying causes of conflict and recurrent instability. Ironically, some of the same nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that were consenting handmaidens of Cold War geopolitics now challenge governments for lack of decisive political and military action. Demands for more coercive and firm pressure on reprobate regimes now often originate in humanitarian quarters. The sea change is particularly striking in the United States, where private relief groups no longer rely on ritual incantations of their nonpolitical nature to rationalize their unwillingness to challenge inhumane government policies. Yet their growing outspokenness about the impacts of donor and host government policies on civilian populations has been slow to be reflected in more savvy humanitarian programs in the field. Cold War chickens coming home to roost are no more welcome in the humanitarian than in the political henhouse.4 The adoption in 1997 of a convention to ban the production and use of land mines represents the latest and most dramatic example of the post-Cold War reevaluation of humanitarian imperatives in relation to political-military necessity. It demonstrates a new level of effective advocacy by humanitarian and other groups, now graced with a Nobel Peace Prize that in turn lends greater political force to a humanitarian cause célèbre. Yet reversing the traditional preemption of humanitarian imperatives by political interests would not have been possible without converging political pressures. These included leadership by key "middle powers" such as Canada, Norway, and South Africa; a well-orchestrated coalition that enlisted active and retired military personnel; the well-documented contribution of unexploded ordnance to the destabilization of peace End of page 232 agreements around the post-Cold War world; and the heightened role played by the media. These twin trends--the higher humanitarian component in political decision making and the greater assertiveness of humanitarian interests in the political arena--have converged in the world's highest political body. In recent years, the U.N. Security Council has not only invoked humanitarian values as a rationale, or rationalization, for its actions. It has also demonstrated a new openness to hearing from humanitarian interests themselves. Access to the council for the U.N.'s own humanitarian organizations had traditionally been closely guarded by the U.N. secretary-general.5 Member states had been the sole point of access to the council on matters of concern to NGOs and government aid agencies. Beginning in 1997, Secretary-General Kofi Annan encouraged the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs (DHA) to play a more visible and direct role vis-à-vis the council. Moreover, the council itself has sought wider input. In February 1997, members received an informal briefing by three NGOs on the crisis in the African Great Lakes and, in June 1997, on the preliminary findings of the sanctions study referenced earlier. Newfound interest in things humanitarian, however, has yet to be reflected consistently in Security Council action. Indeed, the post-Cold War repositioning of humanitarian action in relation to political priorities has not resulted in a new "balance." Even an appropriate figure of speech to describe the evolving relationship has yet to be devised. It is in this new and still-fluid context that debate about the morality of sanctions takes place. That debate draws strength from the current repositioning of humanitarian and political concepts and interests; it also contributes to the changing political environment.
Humanitarian Action on Unfriendly Political Ground Recent sanctions episodes provide a rich set of experiences. They range from highly specific (selective embargoes of arms trade, transport, communications, financial transactions, cultural and sports exchanges) to more comprehensive measures that ban virtu- End of page 233 ally all international intercourse. Some sanctions are imposed by a single government (e.g., the United States against Cuba), others by a coalition of governments (the Economic Community of West Africa against Liberia), and still others by the United Nations Security Council (against Libya) or the U.N. General Assembly (against South Africa). Some sanctions originate among governments within a given region (e.g., the Organization of American States [OAS] against the military regime in Haiti) and are then embraced by the United Nations. Others (against Southern Rhodesia) originate with the U.N. itself. Most are against countries, although political factions such as the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia or UNITA in Angola have themselves been targeted. Sanctions have been crafted to advance such highly moral political objectives as reversing international aggression, reinstating elected regimes, punishing terrorism, and condemning human rights violations.6 Some respond to, or win, constituencies within target countries; others never garner such support or lose it over time. Although history provides far more examples of unilateral or coalitional than multilateral sanctions--more than half of all sanctions to date have been of United States origin--multilateral sanctions have become much more frequent in the post-Cold War era.7 Of the sixty-some cases of sanctions during 1945-1990, only those against Southern Rhodesia and South Africa were multilateral in nature. In the 1990s, however, the Security Council has imposed or maintained sanctions against South Africa, Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Libya, Liberia, Haiti, Angola, Rwanda, Sudan, and Sierra Leone. Irrespective of their nature, origin, and scope, sanctions involve issues of moral legitimacy and political effectiveness. Moral issues are most thoroughly joined by when global legitimacy is conferred through the U.N. action, even though the U.N. imprimatur does not necessarily make for greater efficacy. Multilateral action highlights tensions between widely shared political objectives and universally affirmed moral principles, particularly when coercion is associated with serious humanitarian consequences. Unilateral sanctions should not, however, be held to a less rigorous standard. The health consequences associated with the U.S. embargo against Cuba have been no less serious than those End of page 234 associated with the OAS/U.N. embargo against Haiti. The toll in Haiti, however, flowed from an action graced with the formal endorsement of the international community, not from the political agenda of a single country. U.S. economic pressure to isolate Cuba and others deemed hostile to its national security interests deserves close scrutiny in its own right, although that is beyond the focus of the present chapter.
Sanctions and Suffering Multilateral sanctions have three major kinds of negative humanitarian impacts: they increase human suffering, they complicate the ability of humanitarian organizations to provide succor, and they politicize humanitarian activities. Varying by degree from episode to episode, these impacts are nevertheless sufficiently recurrent and serious to call into question the moral legitimacy of sanctions as an appropriate instrument of international policy. First, sanctions increase the distress of civilian populations. That result is indelibly clear in the case of Iraq, where, since their imposition in August 1990, U.N. sanctions have had wide-ranging and far-reaching impacts. Analysts do not disagree on the extent to which the health and welfare of the Iraqi population have eroded during this period: all key social and economic indicators have shown alarming deterioration. They differ, however, on the extent to which sanctions themselves--as distinct from economic mismanagement, war damage in the 1990s by Iran or in 1991 by the Allied Coalition--are implicated. Most agree that though sanctions are not the sole cause of the continuing misery, they bear a heavy responsibility for the deteriorating condition of civilian populations.8 The Iraq experience is far from unique. Sanctions have also created a widening circle of suffering in Serbia and Montenegro, Haiti, and other settings where such coercion has been applied and maintained. In fact, they are designed to force policy changes even at the risk of civilian hardship and, indeed, precisely through generating pressure on such regimes. That civilians suffer therefore comes as no surprise. The fact that in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Haiti, large segments of civil society welcomed sanctions as a means of changing conditions of apartheid or military rule gave them added moral legitimacy. However, the linkage between sanctions and End of page 235 increased suffering was not in dispute. The premise that political gains will be achieved by extracting civilian pain does not prevent supporters of sanctions from claiming that such suffering is unintended. Yet as new sanctions are imposed and as experience with their effects multiplies, protestations of ignorance become less intellectually persuasive or morally dispositive. "The amount of information available today on the devastating economic, social and humanitarian impact of sanctions," concluded a U.N. study, "no longer permits [policy makers] to entertain the notion of `unintended effects."'9 Proponents of sanctions argue that however inevitable the pain, the political gains involved justify such suffering. That calculus, however, raises both empirical and moral questions. A review of the political effectiveness of sanctions in South Africa, Iraq, Serbia/Montenegro, and Haiti suggests that such measures can be said to have achieved their objectives only in South Africa. Incalculable pain in Iraq has not forced changes in national policy; instead, sanctions have allowed the regime to tighten its grip. Sanctions against the former Yugoslavia leveraged support for the Dayton Peace Agreement, which reduced the level of civilian suffering, although a durable and just peace remains elusive. In Haiti, the restoration of democracy was produced not by three years of sanctions but by the threat of military intervention. The associated moral questions are troubling as well. While politicians and policy analysts talk of the pain-gain "equation," the use of human suffering as a political element in a calibrated calculus raises serious moral issues. These are particularly acute to the extent that the persons who suffer are generally poorer segments of societies and often persons largely without influence over their governments' policies. In the application of sanctions, proportionality is essential: civilian pain must be offset by political gain in order to be countenanced. However, the reality that political gains are often elusive and ephemeral while social and political impacts are prompt and ongoing renders such equations anything but precise. When sanctions achieve political objectives that themselves End of page 236 have a clear moral component, the ethical issues associated with their use are reduced. Yet even when sanctions produce the desired political change, the attendant suffering is not thereby automatically justified. Indeed, the creation of civilian suffering as a political change agent is highly questionable. In January 1998 fifty-four U.S. Catholic bishops appealed to President Clinton for the immediate cessation of sanctions against Iraq, observing that "they violate the human rights of Iraqi people, because they deprive innocent people [of] food and medicine, basic elements for normal life."10 Sanctions figured prominently in the challenge by the Iraqi government in late 1997 to the presence of American nationals on United Nations weapons inspections teams. Some diplomats and analysts found vindication of more than six years of sanctions in Iraqi insistence on their lifting. Sanctions provided the leverage, they said, to prevent the development of lethal weapons. In seeking to prevent the creation of weapons of mass destruction, the international community clearly enjoyed the moral high ground. Yet the showdown produced Baghdad's grudging and only temporary compliance with continued U.N. weapons inspection but not with Security Council resolutions passed at the end of the Gulf War. In fact, the crisis shifted the spotlight from the importance of sanctions to their inability to produce the desired political change. In the process, the human toll of sanctions was highlighted in ways that implicated not only the policies of the Iraqi authorities but also the limitations of the U.N. program that allowed the proceeds from limited sales of Iraqi oil to purchase humanitarian necessities. Reflecting the experience in Iraq and elsewhere, sanctions are coming to be viewed as morally viable only to the extent that their likely impacts are reviewed in advance, their actual impacts monitored closely, and the extent of civilian suffering proportionate to political gains. Governments themselves now speak increasingly of the humanitarian limits of sanctions, acknowledging the need for clearer and more restrictive parameters to govern their use. Such limits are in keeping with international law, which prohibits starvation of a civilian population. The evolving consensus also reflects a growing awareness that in responding to what is often perceived End of page 237 as short-term political problems, sanctions create long-lasting obstacles to reconstruction and development. Concern to minimize civilian pain is also fueling attempts to devise what have come to be known as "smart sanctions." These are measures that target reprobate regimes and their supporters, thereby avoiding more indiscriminate impacts. While an approach is of course unobjectionable in principle, the jury is still out on whether approaches more discriminating in their choice of targets will also be more effective in their results. The secret to the success against South Africa lay not in the precision of sanctions but in their comprehensiveness. Sanction proponents also note that sanctions are one element in a series of incremental measures legitimized by the U.N. Charter. Although the charter does not require that military force be invoked only after sanctions have been tried, the human costs of sanctions, it is widely believed, are less serious than those that might result from military action. Thus, the prevailing thinking is that application of military force to advance such objectives as reversing international aggression, reinstating elected regimes, punishing terrorism, and condemning human rights violations should be used only when sanctions have failed. The view of sanctions as an alternative to military force, however, requires review, as does the assumption that military action is necessarily less civilian-friendly or morally justifiable than economic coercion. Rather than representing an alternative to war, sanctions against Iraq laid the political groundwork for the use of force. Imposed in August 1990, they had begun to make themselves felt by January, when the Security Council nevertheless approved military action. Moreover, although airstrikes may have avoided major "collateral damage" to civilians, seven years of sanctions have ravaged the essential infrastructure that military action had largely spared.
Sanctions and Succor In addition to widening human suffering, sanctions make it more difficult for humanitarian organizations to respond. They restrict exports to, and imports from, targeted countries. Comprehensive End of page 238 sanctions block all transfers and transactions, affecting the essentials of day-to-day civilian life. Focused sanctions--for example, those that embargo arms transfers, cultural exchanges, or tourist travel--leave generally unaffected such economic transactions as the importing of food and medicines essential to the health of civilian populations. In authorizing sanctions that affect trade flows, the Security Council normally makes special provision for certain items to continue to reach targeted countries. Such "humanitarian exemptions" represent, in effect, "the hinge between using sanctions to achieve political objectives, on the one hand, and safeguarding the rights of civilian populations in targeted countries, on the other."11 Aid organizations and commercial suppliers that import basics such as food and medicines thus may continue to do so. Without pass-through provisions that spare humanitarian indispensables, the morality of sanctions would be seriously undermined. Yet in practice humanitarian exemptions have exacerbated rather than eased the moral issues. What should be considered "humanitarian"? Food staples for the general population, along with supplementary food for infants and pregnant and lactating women, clearly qualify, but what of luxury foods, alcoholic beverages, or tobacco? Are the ingredients of food production such as seeds, tools, fertilizer, and pesticides themselves humanitarian? Medicines are essential, but should fuel and spare parts for the refrigerators to store vaccines be included? What of disposable hospital supplies, kidney dialysis machines, blood program supplies, spare parts for operating room equipment, and family planning and AIDS prevention devices? Widening the circle further, what of retirement annuities from former employers, newsprint, and electricity for civilian installations? So-called "dual-use" items needed by aid agencies such as computers, two-way radios, and the fuel for vehicles engaged in distributing and monitoring relief supplies create special problems. Framing and managing humanitarian exemptions represents a quagmire, complicating the already problematic moral landscape of sanctions themselves. Neither the political nor the humanitarian institutions within the U.N. system have common definitions of what should qualify as humanitarian. Political interests favor a strict-constructionist approach, whereas humanitarian agencies are more End of page 239 expansive. Individual U.N. agencies are strong advocates for including items within their own specializations (e.g., women and children, food and agriculture, health and medicine, refugees, family planning, and education). Because the Security Council has no definitional template or standard language, each new episode is undertaken without juridical or moral sextants. Definitional disarray is compounded by administrative difficulties. The Security Council sets up a separate sanctions committee for each episode, each composed of a representative of each of the council's fifteen member governments and with its own secretariat of U.N. staff. Meeting behind closed doors, each committee establishes its own ground rules and procedures, reflecting its particular perception of the humanitarian and political situation. Procedures based on consensus or "no objection" give individual governments enormous power. Processing exemption requests has become a nightmare for all concerned. U.N. aid agencies as well as NGOs have had to commit considerable time and resources to preparing and monitoring exemptions applications. For U.N. secretariat staff, the workload is formidable. During a period of almost four years, the Yugoslavia committee, meeting in formal sessions almost 100 times, received and processed some 140,000 applications, most involving essential items for import by aid or commercial organizations.12 The delays experienced on the operational end in each successive crisis are well documented, although over time some of the kinks are worked out of the review process. The lack of clear and consistent guidelines, whether from one crisis to the next or even for a given crisis, has created confusion among humanitarian groups and commercial suppliers. In a letter to their headquarters from Belgrade, officials of the World Health Organization (WHO), the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies noted, "While the sanctions in principle do not cover medical supplies, in practice they have contributed to breaking the health care system. . . . [A]ll health care institutions in all parts of the country lack vital drugs, equipment and spare parts." Alerting their headquarters, they said, was part of their "ethical obligation" to End of page 240 call attention to "the detrimental effect of the sanctions on the health of the people and on the health care system of the country where we work."13 Sanctions often challenge the professional and personal ethics of those practicing humanitarian vocations. Faced with day-to-day challenges in environments of proliferating human need, aid personnel frequently see sanctions and associated administrative problems as their nemesis. The important policy objectives that sanctions are seeking to advance often become obscured by the operational difficulties that they create. Such problems are compounded by the heightened difficulties faced by aid agencies in the sanctioned countries themselves. These include increases in the climate of insecurity affecting aid activities and personnel, in lawlessness and black-marketeering, and perhaps also in repression of minority or dissident groups. In Haiti during the sanctions period, an inoculation campaign and other health activities were suspended for fear of attacks on those using and providing such services. Government suspicion of humanitarian activities may also increase their vulnerability. Although such difficulties exist in many countries experiencing internal armed conflict, they are heightened when sanctions are applied. External and internal difficulties combine to create major problems for humanitarian actors. Increased suffering associated with sanctions coincides with decreased ability to provide succor. An official of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, recalling his experience from Iraq in particular, observed that "the magnitude of the impact of sanctions is so large that [the offsetting humanitarian contributions] of any and all relief programs are dwarfed by comparison."14 A WHO official, based on his experience in Belgrade, stated, "Sanctions make the life of humanitarian organizations almost impossible."15 In Haiti, "sanctions were more damaging to humanitarian organizations than to the regime against which they were invoked."16 Difficulties notwithstanding, the essentials of survival must be ensured. Such essentials not only encompass the staples of food, medical care, and shelter for vulnerable groups but also extend to the infrastructure needed to sustain the health and welfare of the civilian population. In a concession to the political constraints of the End of page 241 circumstances, however, ingredients to support longer-term development in a target economy would probably not merit inclusion. Inputs intermediate between emergency relief and longer-term development (e.g., seeds, fertilizer, educational materials) would qualify by virtue of their centrality to survival. The determination of what is to be allowed wherever sanctions are imposed would thus be less expansive than humanitarians advocate but also more inclusive than sanctions would support. Dual-use items would require special review. Standard operating procedures to facilitate rather than impede their provision are also indispensable. There is, in short, no substitute for improvements in the definitional and administrative aspects of sanctions management. However, since even the most effectively functioning exemptions regime will be overmatched if it is expected fully to offset sanctions-associated need, the fundamental issue remains that of sanctions as an instrument of policy rather than how sanctions arrangements are managed.
Sanctions and Politicization The challenge of meeting increased human need despite circumscribed institutional capacity is complicated by the politicization of assistance activity--the third respect in which sanctions situate humanitarian action on tricky ground. Politicization takes place within the United Nations itself, in the perceptions of the authorities and populations of targeted countries, and among contributors to relief activities. First, sanctions set the U.N. system against itself. As noted in a recent comment by a U.N. committee, "sanctions should always take full account of the provisions of the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights." In actual practice, however, "While the impact of sanctions varies from one case to another, . . . they almost always have a dramatic impact on the rights recognized in the Covenant."17 The impacts of sanctions also exist in tension with other international legal safeguards, including the Geneva Conventions and Protocols, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Political interests, both among member states on the Security Council and its sanctions committees and in the U.N. secretariat's End of page 242 political department, place humanitarian action within a carrot-and-stick framework. Assistance levels and humanitarian exemptions are expanded or contracted as reward or punishment for political intransigence or concessions. Strict constructionist definitions of humanitarian assistance and exemptions keep humanitarian activities on a short leash, with aid efforts viewed as threats to effective sanctions and aid workers not as team players but as apologists for sanctioned regimes. For their part, aid officials ground their action on humanitarian law and human rights, which, they point out, are not derogated when sanctions are imposed. They see humanitarian action as devoid of political agendas and thus undermined when permission is withheld--or even when it is granted--as an element in a larger political calculus. They view the secrecy of the sanctions committee review process as contrasting starkly with the transparency of humanitarian action. That process requires all but U.N. organizations and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to solicit approval via member state intermediaries, yet another political intrusion. The friction between political and humanitarian actors is palpable. Second, perceptions among political authorities and beneficiary populations are affected by sanctions. The linkage with sanctions of the U.N.'s own humanitarian organizations and their partners has transferred their unpopularity to aid efforts. Aid activities in Serbia and Montenegro lost credibility as a result of the perception that, as one NGO expressed it, "[h]umanitarian organizations here are on the bad side" of the conflict.18 While association with the U.N. embargo against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a liability in Serbia and Montenegro, association of humanitarian activities with ineffectual U.N. military action in nearby Bosnia undercut aid efforts there. The perception problem was so excruciating that aid officials based in Croatia with responsibilities for Bosnia-Herzegovina had business cards printed that omitted their Zagreb address. Yet the problem was one not only of perceptions but also of reality. Although the sanctions committees function behind closed doors and without public accountability, their rulings and dynamics do become widely known not only among insiders in New York but also in the wider circle of humanitarian organizations and constituencies in recipient countries. The restrictive approach taken End of page 243 by the United States and the United Kingdom to humanitarian exemptions for Iraq is no secret. The former held up a UNICEF shipment of health kits on grounds that scissors could double as weapons.19 The U.S. and the U.K. have micromanaged the administration of the humanitarian component of the oil-for-food program set up under Security Council Resolution 986. Small wonder that those in targeted countries view humanitarian activities as extensions of political agendas. Third, sanctions over time also affect perceptions of human need and obligation. It is difficult for governments to ostracize a regime and express solidarity with its people through assistance activities. In practice, the punitive animus of sanctions often clashes with the instincts that animate relief assistance and human rights protection. Indeed, the level of resources committed to countries under sanctions have proved difficult to sustain year after year, although available data do not establish whether appeals for programs in countries targeted by sanctions have experienced greater difficulty over time than other headline humanitarian emergencies. Politicization of donor involvement also blunts the perceived obligation among those who impose sanctions to come quickly and effectively to the aid of those affected. Those who impose sanctions usually issue ritual disavowals that their target is a given regime and that they have no quarrel with innocent civilians. However, because member states provide contributions for multilateral and bilateral humanitarian programs on a voluntary rather than assessed basis, each government is free to weigh its responsibilities and make its own financial commitments to populations living under pariah regimes. Those who underscore moral obligations are often faulted for downplaying the behavior that unleashes the use of economic or military pressure. "If a target regime doesn't avail itself of the option provided by the Security Council," remarked a senior official in the U.N.'s Department of Political Affairs in a discussion, "humanitarian organizations must criticize the regime rather than the Security Council." There is no doubt that sanctions, whatever suffering they may cause, are not the illness but the medicine for the illness, however much a regime may seek to scapegoat the doctor and the attendant medical staff. Yet the international community is more directly implicated in the suffering associated with its own End of page 244 policies than if only the actions of the host authorities were involved. Even if a regime shifts responsibility for the misery of its population to the outside world, the moral obligations of the international community do not cease. Often those targeted with sanctions are without particular concern for, or accountability to, their own populations. Paradoxically, sanctions are likely to be more effective in settings where a regime is responsible and accountable, yet such are seldom the regimes against which sanctions are imposed. Whether through the conceits of the regime or the dynamics they unleash, sanctions often shift the focus from the crime to the punishment and from the punishment to the punishers. "Does a regime's refusal to help its own citizens give the international community ethical license to exact punishment on an entire civilian population, particularly the poor and the young?"20 Those who use a given weapon must take responsibility for its consequences, however limited their influence over its repercussions. In sum, the moral character of the policy objectives that sanctions are designed to serve exist in tension with the recurrent humanitarian problems that sanctions entail. The reality that in situation after situation sanctions create major difficulties for civilian populations and aid institutions points toward their more sparing and discriminating use. Those who impose sanctions are morally obligated to avoid disproportionate harm and to come to the aid of the affected civilian populations. Neither human needs nor assistance to persons in distress should be used as political weapons. The negative humanitarian consequences of sanctions must be carefully weighed, monitored, and addressed.
Converging Political and Humanitarian Interests The foregoing analysis has examined the extent to which humanitarian interests find themselves on unfriendly ground when economic sanctions are imposed. Operating within the political End of page 245 context and constraints of the Security Council, its sanctions committees, and U.N. member states, humanitarian interests are expected to cushion impacts of sanctions on civilians that are well beyond their ability to redress. Their ministrations are even viewed by some within the United Nations and member states as a threat to the efficacy of their chosen political strategies. Meanwhile, those on the receiving end see their work as conveying a hostile political animus. Despite such formidable difficulties, sanctions are not entirely or inherently hostile to humanitarian interests. When sanctions succeed, they lead to more humane and just conditions, with far-reaching benefits for civilian populations. In the case of South Africa, sanctions played a pivotal role in dismantling apartheid and establishing democratic governance. Efforts by the South African government and private sector to counteract the effects of the embargo through import substitution also led to expanded opportunities for employment among blacks.21 Even when sanctions do not succeed, as in Haiti, humanitarian values can be affirmed and humanitarian interests strengthened. Despite serious problems caused by sanctions for Haitian civilians and those seeking to assist them, international funding for some aid programs there increased during the 1991-1994 period, thanks to the increased awareness of the difficulties of life under the de facto regime. Sanctions need not represent an unmitigated disaster for humanitarian interests. The ledger sheet for any set of sanctions will have entries in both the plus and minus columns. The sanctions debate at the United Nations, among governments and humanitarian agencies, and in academic circles is itself beginning to evidence changes in attitude on both the political and the humanitarian sides. Reflecting the new prominence of humanitarian concerns and the increased assertiveness of humanitarian interests described earlier, governments these days seem on their best behavior, or at least they are restraining their own negative political reflexes. The General Assembly has approved recommendations designed to make sanctions more consistent, transparent, accountable, and humane.22 In a 1995 letter to the president of the Security Council, ambassadors of the permanent five member states demonstrated the shifting balance between humanitarian and political concerns. "While recognizing the need to maintain the effectiveness of sanctions imposed in accordance with the Charter," they wrote, "further collective actions in the Security Council within the context of any future sanctions regime should be directed to minimize End of page 246 unintended adverse side-effects of sanctions on the most vulnerable segments of targeted countries."23 Such views gained credibility with a decision of the council related to Sudan, from which it sought to hasten the extradition of persons suspected of an assassination attempt on Egypt's president. The council's decision to delay a ban against international flights by Sudanese aircraft allowed the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs to assess the likely impacts of such a measure on civilians and aid efforts. If the council eventually decides to proceed with sanctions, the report "has laid the groundwork for crafting eventual sanctions measures to mitigate adverse humanitarian consequences."24 In this instance and in responding to Iraq's treatment of the U.N. weapons inspection team in late 1997, the Security Council showed itself deeply divided on sanctions. In seeking advance information regarding the humanitarian impacts of such measures on Sudan, some governments were concerned that such increased solicitousness might set a precedent that would prove unhelpful, constraining the council's future freedom to act with dispatch. The sanctions committees themselves have made strides in clarifying and simplifying their procedures. After delays of months in processing applications in the early days of the Yugoslav crisis, some of the hitches were out of the system by late 1995. The needs of the ICRC, which enjoys a high level of council respect and a special relationship to it, were accommodated earlier in that year with the approval of a blanket exemption for material used in its programs. Yet some governments remain wary. They continue to resist placing humanitarian activities outside the "carrot-and-stick" framework and tackling the real threat to the efficacy of sanctions that comes not from humanitarian succor but from smuggling, arms trade, and other illicit commerce. Signs of change are also apparent on the humanitarian side. Aid agencies are taking a more sober view of the difficulties encountered in settings where international economic and military coercion is imposed. Gun-shy as a result of recent experiences with military humanitarianism, NGOs may also become more sanctions-shy in selecting venues for mounting their programs. Yet some senior humanitarian officials, like their political counterparts, still End of page 247 underestimate the magnitude and complexity of the problems created by sanctions. The U.N.'s schizophrenia is still real, although the patient's symptoms for the time being may have receded from severe to moderate. Sanctions represent uncertain moral terrain both for political actors who are seen as tampering with the health and welfare of civilian populations and for humanitarian actors who are trying to function effectively in highly politicized surroundings. Nevertheless, the needs of civilian populations in such settings remain urgent; political and humanitarian imperatives alike require that they be met. In the quest for an international sanctions regime that will be an adequate match for reprobate regimes, consistency, transparency, and accountability will be the essential hallmarks. In the final analysis, humanitarian and political interests are not as antagonistic as often supposed. The humanitarian and the political are not positioned at opposite ends of a playground teeter-totter, with advantages by one party gained at the expense of the other. Relevant experience from the Cold War and early post-Cold War eras suggests, however, that for humanitarian and political objectives alike to be accomplished, the fulcrum may need careful and deliberate repositioning nearer the humanitarian end.
Notes 1. See Larry Minear, David Cortright, Julia Wagler, George A. Lopez, and Thomas G. Weiss, Toward More Humane and Effective Sanctions Management: Enhancing the Capacity of the United Nations System (New York: United Nations Department of Humanitarian Affairs, October 1997). 2. "Resistance Aid, Not Party Games," Washington Times editorial, 10 May 1985, 9. 3. Peter J. Fromuth, "The Making of a Secure Community: The United Nations after the Cold War," Journal of International Affairs 46, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 344. 4. For a review of the embryonic effort in the mid-1980s by private U.S. relief groups to examine the political aspects of humanitarian action, see Larry Minear, Helping People in an Age of Conflict: Toward a New Professionalism in U.S. Voluntary Humanitarian Assistance (New York, D.C.: InterAction, 1988). 5. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali discouraged un End of page 248 dersecretaries-general from dealing directly with the council, including the undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, a post created in 1992. However, even before Kofi Annan became secretary-general in January 1997, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and other individual U.N. organizations dealt with the council on matters of special interest. For a number of years, the International Committee of the Red Cross has given the Security Council president monthly briefings on humanitarian issues. 6. For a more extended discussion, see Thomas G. Weiss, David Cortright, George A. Lopez, and Larry Minear, Political Gain and Civilian Pain (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). The volume also includes an extensive bibliography of literature on economic sanctions. 7. See Gary Clyde Hufbauer, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott, Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy (Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics, 1990). 8. For an analysis that connects the deterioration of the physical quality of life in Iraq principally to sanctions rather than to war-related damage, see Eric Hoskins, "The Humanitarian Impact of Economic Sanctions and War in Iraq," in Weiss et al., Political Gain. 9. Claudia von Braunmühl and Manfred Kulessa, The Impact of U.N. Sanctions on Humanitarian Assistance Activities (Berlin: Gesellschaft für Communication Management Interkultur Training, 1995), p. iii. The study was commissioned by the U.N. Department of Humanitarian Affairs. 10. Letter to President William J. Clinton, 20 January 1998, 2. 11. Minear et al., Toward More Humane and Effective Sanctions Management, 37. 12. Letter dated 15 November 1996 from the chairman of the Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution 724 (1991) Concerning Yugoslavia addressed to the president of the Security Council, S/1996/946, para. 7. 13. Quoted in Larry Minear, Jeffrey Clark, Roberta Cohen, Dennis Gallagher, Iain Guest, and Thomas G. Weiss, Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia: The U.N.'s Role, 1991-1993 [Occasional Paper 18] (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 1994), 94-95. 14. Quoted in Minear et al., Toward More Humane and Effective Sanctions Management, 11. 15. Minear et al., Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia, 94. 16. Robert Maguire, Edwige Balutansky, Jacques Fomerand, Larry Minear, William G. O'Neill, Thomas G. Weiss, and Sarah Zaidi, Haiti Held Hostage: International Responses to the Quest for Nationhood, 1986-1996 (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 1996), 49. 17. Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, "The relationship between economic sanctions and respect for economic, social and cultural rights," General Comment 8 (1997), paras. 1 and 3. End of page 249 18. Minear et al., Humanitarian Action in the Former Yugoslavia, 100. 19. Larry Minear, U. B. P. Chelliah, Jeff Crisp, John Mackinlay, and Thomas G. Weiss, United Nations Coordination of the International Humanitarian Response to the Gulf Crisis, 1990-1992 (Providence, RI: Watson Institute, 1992), 21. 20. Eric Hoskins, "The Humanitarian Impact of Economic Sanctions and War in Iraq," in Weiss et al., Political Gain, 141. 21. For a detailed discussion see Neta C. Crawford, "The Humanitarian Consequences of South Africa: A Preliminary Assessment," in Weiss et al., Political Gain. 22. Subgroup on the Question of United Nations Imposed Sanctions of the Informal Open Ended Working Group of the General Assembly on an Agenda for Peace, "Provisional Text," 10 July 1996. 23. Letter of 13 April 1995 to the president of the Security Council, S/1995/300, Annex 1. 24. Minear et al., Enhancing the Capacity, 8.
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