U.S. Planning Sanctions Against North Korea

Sanctions have two important drawbacks:

They often harm countries that trade with the target country, and they can hurt children, the elderly, and other vulnerable groups in the target country.

These unintended(??) effects arouse opposition to sanctions and calls for softening sanctions when civilians suffer.

In 1949, the United States joined most of the civilized world in signing the four treaties of the Geneva Convention. Together, these documents spell out acceptable wartime behavior, encouraging combatants to treat military and civilian foes in as humanitarian a way as possible. For half a century, violating the Geneva Convention has been the most definite yardstick of tyranny, oppression, and war crime.

The United States, one of the loudest and most strident advocates of international human rights, often fails to abide by it.

One of the most frequently broken clauses appears in a 1977 amendment: specifically, Part IV, Chapter 3, and Article 54. The article, titled "Protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population," states that "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited."

"Starvation of civilians" may not sound like something the United States often engages in, but it's not hard to uncover our euphemism for the taboo practice: we call it "sanctions."

According to the Department of the Treasury, trade sanctions are currently in place against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Yugoslavia (excluding Kosovo, of course).

The rationale behind these embargoes postulates that without the business of the United States and its allies, two things will happen. The economies of the embargoed nations will fail, and their leaders will be forced to reconcile their policies with our demands.

In practice, however, the former often occurs while the latter does not. Despite 27 years without US commerce, the communist Cuban government still stands. Ten years of US sanctions and the losing of the Gulf War haven't felled Saddam Hussein; failures like this are the rule, not the exception, in these misguided bits of foreign policy. When sanctions against Nigeria were lifted in March, it was because the ruling dictator had died, not because the oppressive government was forced to knuckle under to economic pressure.

The logic behind these sanctions is questionable at best. By limiting a country's economic opportunities and its ability to import food, medicine, or even raw materials or technologies essential to production, it's unquestionable that the general populace of a nation will suffer.

But when a report critical of the sanctions on Iraq was presented to the United Nations Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights, US Ambassador George Moose defended the sanctions by helpfully pointing out that the Iraqi regime is not composed of nice people, emphasizing that they attacked Kuwait and Iran without provocation. The sanctions, he explains, are intended to neutralize the threat these people pose.

Ambassador Moose, however, also makes a point at odds with his ardent defense of the sanctions. The Iraqi regime, he notes, "butchered thousands of its own citizens."

Obviously, this is not a government working in the best interests of its citizens. It isn't reasonable, then, to assume that they will give up power in order to feed the people they care so little about. Butchered with machine guns or slowly starved to death by economic sanctions: to Saddam Hussein, to anti-democratic leaders in other nations, what difference does it make how their people die?

Moose goes on to say the sanctions "never limited or prohibited Iraq from importing humanitarian goods, such as food and medicine." While it's very kind of the US to allow Iraq to import these things, without wider trade ability, there's no way for them to fund the expenditures. Instead, Moose touts the highly publicized Oil-for-Food program. But over the four years it's been active, the UN council overseeing the program has only approved $980.4 million worth of medical expenditures. In contrast, Iraq's medical budget for the year before the Gulf War totaled over $500 million.

The truth is that these sanctions have been responsible for thousands of deaths in every country on the Treasury Department's list. According to a 1999 United Nation's Children's Fund (UNICEF) report, over 500,000 Iraqi children have already died because of the sanctions, and thousands more are dying each month. Although Cuban leaders remain tight-lipped with numbers, they blame US sanctions for a dearth of medicine in their country.

You don't hear much about the other countries on the list. Some of them, like Syria and Libya and Sudan, have been on the list for decades and will probably languish there longer still. Others, like North Korea and Yugoslavia, have hope that sanctions will be loosened or removed. But in every country, US economic sanctions have exacerbated the existing problems and have yet to claim a single victory over tyranny and oppression.

These sanctions are at odds with the humanitarian morals the US is so quick to espouse in its condemnation of communist regimes such as those found in China and North Korea (only one of which is under sanctions, by the way). If we truly care about the citizens of these countries, we need to realize that the immediate lifting of these sanctions is the first step in helping them recover their peace and prosperity.

On Tuesday, Pyongyang ratcheted up tensions in its four-month nuclear dispute with the U.S. by warning it would quit the armistice, which ended the Korean War.

The South Korea president repeated a call for prompt U.S.-North Korea talks, saying they were "the only way to solve this problem."

The standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons program began in October when the U.S. said Pyongyang admitted to secretly pursuing plans to enrich uranium, violating a 1994 agreement.

In the latest episode on Tuesday, North Korea's army accused the United States of violating the 1953 agreement and vowed to "immediately take all steps to cope with it" .

"If the U.S. side continues violating and misusing the armistice agreement as it pleases, there will be no need for the DPRK (North Korea) to remain bound to the AA (Armistice Agreement) uncomfortably," an army spokesman was quoted as saying in the state-run Korean Central News Agency.

"The armistice agreement that was signed to provide a peaceful solution to the Korean issue has been systematically ditched by the U.S. and used for the purpose of its hostile policy toward the DPRK," the statement said.

The North accuses the United States of bolstering its forces by putting "aircraft carriers and strategic bombers in and around the Korean Peninsula in violation" of the armistice.

Such moves were part of Washington's plan for "preemptive attacks" on North Korea -- a situation "getting more serious as the days go."

The statement also cited a December incident in which the United States boarded a North Korean vessel bound for Yemen with missiles among its cargo.

Referring to that incident, the army spokesman said, "This is little short of an open declaration of war in the long run."

"The grave situation created by the undisguised war acts committed by the U.S. in breach of the AA compels the KPA, its warring party, to immediately take all steps to cope with it."

Pyongyang has said before that it would not adhere to the 1953 pact, which was signed by China and North Korea on the communist side and by the U.S.-led United Nations Command on the side of the international community.

South Korea did not sign the pact and is technically still at war with the North.

In Seoul, South Korea's Defense Ministry said no unusual moves by the North Koreans were sighted and that the comments appeared to be more of Pyongyang's sabre-rattling as it agitates for direct talks with Washington over the North's nuclear program, Reuters reports.


CNN

Hard to believe, but I can't recall an instance in which sanctions worked.