Cover story:
Analysis
Can
sanctions be alternative to war?
By TOM ROBERTS
NCR Staff
Sanctions at first glance seem a reasonable alternative to
conventional warfare: no bombs, no ground troops, no chemical or biological
weapons.
Used in a limited way, economic sanctions were credited, for
example, with having expedited change in South Africa. But as the comprehensive
sanctions imposed on Iraq by the United States via the United Nations have
shown, such measures can become a quiet extension of the bombs, causing
considerable death and destruction (NCR, May 21).
Although there was little written on the ethics of economic
sanctions prior to the Gulf War, according to experts, the idea of economically
punishing an enemy is not a new idea.
Jesuit Fr. Drew Christiansen and Gerard F. Powers, in an essay on
the ethics of sanctions, cite President Woodrow Wilsons argument for
sanctions as an alternative to war:
A nation boycotted is a nation that is in sight of
surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy and there will
be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside
the nation boycotted, but it brings pressure upon the nation that, in my
judgment, no modern nation could resist.
The Christiansen and Powers essay, Economic Sanctions and
the Just-War Doctrine, is included in the book Economic Sanctions:
Panacea or Peacebuilding in a Post-Cold War World? edited by David
Cortright and George A. Lopez (Westview Press, San Francisco, 1995).
Christiansen is director of the U.S. Catholic Conferences Office of
International Justice and Peace. Powers is policy adviser for Europe and
security policies for the office.
Wilson was not without his critics at the time. In a report after
World War I, John Foster Dulles opposed economic sanctions on the moral
grounds that they tended to harm innocents, not the rulers responsible for
aggression.
That is the primary objection among peace groups and others to the
economic sanctions imposed on Iraq. The United Nations has estimated that an
average of 4,500 children under the age of 5 have died annually as a direct
result of the sanctions, which have been called the most severe in modern
history. In 1996, it was estimated that some 500,000 children had already died
as a result of the sanctions, for lack of food and proper medical care.
Unlike their first cousin, war, sanctions have largely
escaped serious moral analysis, write Christiansen and Powers. Yet
as the early debate between Wilson and Dulles indicates, key ethical issues are
at stake.
Christiansen and Powers argue that comprehensive sanctions
may be legitimate under certain conditions:
- They are a response to grave evil;
- they are part of a concerted diplomatic effort to avoid war and
find a just resolution to the problem;
- the sanctions avoid irreversible, grave harm to the civilian
population of the target country;
- less coercive means are pursued first;
- the harmful effects of sanctions are proportionate to the good
ends likely to be achieved;
- sanctions are imposed by a multilateral entity.
The main objections to sanctions, write Christiansen and Powers,
are, in the policy arena, serious skepticism about their effectiveness and, in
the moral area, the harm inflicted on civilian populations.
Among policy analysts, they note, a frequent criticism is that
sanctions not only fail to change the conduct of a government but they often
solidify a populations support of the targeted leaders.
One notable exception was South Africa. But the difference in
South Africa, they write, was a real hope of democracy and the willingness of
at least a portion of the population to accept the consequences of sanctions as
one means of toppling apartheid.
Some argue that in instances such as Iraq and its leader Saddam
Hussein, the real fault lies with the regime that allows people to suffer
rather than give in to international demands.
But here Christiansen and Powers assert that even when the
targeted government refuses to use resources at hand to ensure its
populations basic needs are met, the international community may only
stand aside for so long. From a moral point of view, at least, a government
which fails to provide for its own people under such conditions rules
illegitimately. Therefore the responsibility for protection of the civilian
population reverts to other legitimate authorities, particularly the
sanctioning parties.
In a practical application of the thinking, the U.S. bishops have
urged the U.S. government to reshape the sanctions and end some of the
restrictions, calling on the words of Pope John Paul II and noting the
suffering of ordinary citizens.
In a February 1998 letter to Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, Archbishop John McCarrick of Newark, N.J., chairman of the
USCCs International Policy Committee, called for lifting controls
on food, medicine and essential humanitarian goods, and reshaping but not
eliminating the remaining sanctions so that they are more narrowly targeted
against those who bear actual responsibility for Iraqs actions.
National Catholic Reporter, June 18,
1999
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