Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 14, 1994 TAG: 9408230044
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By R.C. LONGWORTH CHICAGO TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But there is one big problem: Sanctions don't work very well.
Even their proponents admit sanctions work less than 25 percent of the time, usually indirectly. Opponents say they seldom work at all and often do more harm than good - hurting the innocent, enriching crooks and propping up evil regimes, while enabling the United States and the United Nations to claim they are doing something to solve a problem.
Officially, the governments that impose sanctions don't know whether they work or not.
The U.N., which has imposed four times as many economic sanctions in the past four years as it did in its first 45 years, has never done a study on the results. The only U.S. government study, done in 1990-91, concluded that sanctions seldom make another country do what it really doesn't want to do.
For example, take Serbia.
The three-year U.N. embargo on all economic ties, including all trade except food and medicine, was meant to stop the fighting in the former Yugoslavia and, with luck, topple Serbian Republic President Slobodan Milosevic.
It hasn't worked that way. Sanctions-busting tactics, big and small, have mocked U.N. intentions.
In northern Macedonia, U.N. peacekeeping troops reported seeing herds of cows crossing into Serbia, each laden with canisters of gasoline. From Hungary, fleets of cars drive into Serbia and back again, each delivering a tank of gas to Serb drivers. On the Bulgarian frontier, trainloads of crude oil cross into Serbia past the unseeing eyes of well-bribed border guards. Greece is one of Serbia's few friends, and Greek-owned ships have delivered oil to the Serbs.
In Belgrade, almost everything is available. Ordinary citizens, unable to afford the high prices of smuggled goods - gas, for instance, is $8 a gallon - are suffering. But Milosevic and his cronies have set up 450 front companies in the Greek-influenced part of Cyprus to supply everything the Serbian strongman needs, including money, to stay in business.
The embargo is enriching smugglers and black marketeers in Serbia. It is impoverishing and corrupting neighboring countries, like Bulgaria and Macedonia, that the West is committed to help.
Drugs flowing from the Middle East to Europe, which once went through Serbia, have been diverted across Macedonia. Some of the drugs stay behind, creating a narcotics problem where none existed before.
Mail from Serbia, supposedly covered by the embargo, goes north by rail to Hungary where it is sent by an international postal system that sees nothing wrong in honoring Serbian stamps.
The war continues, and Milosevic still rules. All reports say the embargo has persuaded most Serbs that the rest of the world is at fault, not their leaders, who are more popular than ever before.
``The sanctions have made the situation worse, increasing the likelihood that war will continue and spread rather than cease,'' said Susan Woodward, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Then there's Haiti.
According to reports from Port-au-Prince, military leaders get rich from smuggling, the professional class flees, and the poor suffer. More than 100,000 jobs have vanished, projects to provide clean drinking water have been postponed and the malnutrition rate among children has risen from 45 to 69 percent since sanctions began.
``The price Haitians are paying for the crisis and this political warfare is too high,'' said a physician working in Haiti.
The Clinton administration hopes the sanctions will bring down the military government, removing the need for stronger U.S. action, such as an invasion, to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president.
``More than anything else, it [the sanctions] is a way of not doing anything,'' said Hrach Gregorian of the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington. ``Actually, it's become only a way to hurt the people.''
The U.S. and U.N. imposed sanctions on Iraq when it invaded Kuwait. Eventually, military action drove the Iraqis out. The sanctions against Iraq remain, but so does Saddam Hussein.
The Clinton administration threatened sanctions to force North Korea to submit its nuclear facilities to international inspection. Most experts felt any embargo would fail, because foreign trade accounts for only 10 percent of North Korea's consumption and because Japan and China both opposed the plan. In the end, the administration grabbed a compromise solution negotiated by former President Jimmy Carter.
Economic sanctions are any sort of economic penalties that nations, acting alone or in cooperation with other nations, impose on another nation to try to force it to change its behavior. They can range from pinprick policies, such as barring some imports or halting foreign aid, to full-scale embargoes, turning the target country into an international pariah.
In practice, sanctions usually are imposed when a government feels it absolutely must do something but doesn't want to go to war. One analyst called it ``foreign policy on the cheap.''
The United States has used sanctions far more than any other nation. Sanctions have been imposed somewhere in the world 104 times since World War II and America was involved in 70 of these cases.
Sanctions have a long history, often with baleful results.
Athens used them against the Corinthians in the 5th century B.C. and touched off the Peloponnesian War. Britain tried to blockade the United States during the Revolutionary War. The League of Nations fell into terminal disrepute in 1935-36 when its attempt to enforce sanctions on Italy failed. U.S. sanctions against Japan in 1941 were a factor leading to Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor.
The West embargoed high-tech exports to the Soviet bloc during the Cold War, more or less successfully. But President Ronald Reagan's attempt to keep European allies from helping the Russians build a natural gas pipeline failed, mostly because the allies needed the gas.
Sometimes sanctions boomerang. The U.S. embargo on Cuba drove Fidel Castro into Soviet arms. Thirty years later, the embargo's aim - to topple Castro - remains unachieved.
But even critics concede that economic sanctions worked in two important cases - as part of the pressure, domestic and foreign, that led to the end of white rule in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and of apartheid in South Africa.
The Rev. Drew Christiansen of the U.S. Catholic Conference says these sanctions were useful because both were ``differentiated societies where the government didn't hold a monopoly of power.'' In both, strong and independent business classes felt the sting of sanctions so strongly that they pressured the government to change policies.
``But if the government holds all the cards, as in Iraq or North Korea, sanctions don't lead to anything,'' Christiansen said.
The most thorough study of sanctions ever done, by the Institute for International Economics in Washington, concluded in 1992 that sanctions ``are of limited utility in achieving foreign policy goals that depend on compelling the target country to take actions it stoutly resists. ... At most, there is a weak correlation between economic deprivation and political willingness to change.''
Nevertheless, the study said 34 percent of 115 sanctions it studied were ``successful,'' although the rate since 1973 is only 25 percent, partially because, as America's economic clout declined, so did its ability to carry off a unilateral embargo.
According to Kimberly Ann Elliott, one of the authors, a ``successful'' sanction is one that contributed ``substantially'' to the final result.
By this standard, sanctions helped overthrow Salvador Allende in Chile, Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic and Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, even though all three stayed in power until they were assassinated.
Backers of sanctions argue that they encourage opponents of the rogue leader to overthrow him. Usually, though, more direct action is needed.
From 1987 to 1989, the United States tried to topple Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega by suspending foreign aid, halting imports of Panamanian sugar, freezing Panamanian assets in U.S. banks, withholding U.S. payments of Panama Canal fees, suspending trade benefits, barring U.S. companies from paying taxes to Panama and banning business with 120 companies close to Noriega.
All of these sanctions hurt Panama, but none budged Noriega. It took an American invasion to do that.
James C. Ngobi, head of the U.N.'s Sanctions Committee, claims the sanctions toward Serbia ``are very stringent, the most stringent so far, the most effectively applied.''
In fact, Serbia's borders leak copiously.
Much of the Serbian sanctions-busting going on in Bulgaria and Macedonia stems from sheer desperation. Bulgaria says the sanctions have cost it $5 billion; Macedonia puts its cost at $2 billion. Both are small, poor countries trying to emerge from communism. Serbia is Macedonia's biggest trading partner and much of Bulgaria's trade with the West used to cross Serbia.
Theoretically, countries hurt by sanctions imposed on their neighbors can ask the U.N. Security Council for restitution. Bulgaria and Macedonia have asked for help but have received nothing.
The U.N. Charter ``only confers that right of consultation,'' Ngobi said. ``It does not mean the Security Council is obliged to come up with answers.''
In practice, Ngobi said, this hardship ``is an inconvenience that has to be faced by the countries concerned.''
by CNB