A look at sanctions

The use of sanctions gets threatened frequently on the news – particularly in current attempts to control the behaviour of Iran.

They are generally the last line of political attack before a country physically invades another. So what exactly are sanctions?

To put it simply, they are a punishing set of laws applied to countries with the intention of influencing the way they operate.

They are tools that legally restrict trade, money flow and other commercial activity to try and persuade governments (often via their frustrated citizens) to play by the rules.

As well as economic restrictions, they can also see a country’s leaders getting the international cold shoulder when it comes to formal relations and people banned from travelling to certain places.

So why would a nation attract such heavy handed restrictions?

Human rights abuses, unfair trade practices or the intent to get weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are reason enough to have sanctions imposed.

They are brought in as a result of failed negotiating efforts and are an alternative to military action.

Any country can impose their own sanctions on another as they see fit. But the sanctions that are more likely to pack a bigger punch are those from collective groups such as the United Nations, European Union and the Commonwealth.

Last week, Barack Obama and his French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy called for tougher United Nation sanctions against Iran to be in place “within weeks.”

Iran has been subjected to three rounds of UN sanctions but continues its uranium enrichment operations saying it is merely developing the peaceful use of nuclear power. Western nations insist Iran is building nuclear weapons.

Sanctions that would really hurt Iran's economy would be those against its oil exporting industry. But that’s unlikely to happen because China and Russia are two of its biggest oil customers and have the power to block sanctions in the UN Security Council.

They have expressed reservations towards a tougher set of sanctions, and this shows the influence business and politics can have on getting them approved.

However, just as blocking sanctions can be political, so can imposing them.

Many believe the West is just trying to impose sanctions on Iran so that the resulting hardship will cause the Iranian people to vote for a new, pro-Western government.

In any event, the impact of sanctions isn’t always particularly effective. One such example is Cuba.

Back in the 1960s, the US enacted an economic and financial embargo on the island nation. It was imposed after Cuba’s president Fidel Castro confiscated the properties of United States citizens and corporations.

The idea was to topple the Castro regime. However, 40 years later and it still hasn’t happened.

Again, prolonged UN sanctions against Burma to free pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi and to consider democracy over military rule have largely failed.

And current efforts against Iran have seen members of the government simply inventing creative new ways to move money around through places like Dubai.

In fact, many argue sanctions end up making the target country more self-sufficient and strengthen its resolve to continue its policies.

In the 1980s, US President Ronald Reagan imposed economic sanctions on South Africa because of the country’s apartheid regime. A South African economist at the time stated, "Given time, we can probably replace whatever we can't import."

Sure enough, it dealt with the ban on oil imports by developing a synthetic-fuels industry that manufactured oil and gas from abundant supplies of available coal.

Nevertheless, sanctions can still be effective. Years of economic and travel restrictions against Libya resulted in their notorious leader Colonel Gaddafi publicly condemning WMDs and paying compensation to victims of the Lockerbie bombing.

And sometimes they can work too much. The infamous sanctions in Iraq after the first Gulf War were arguably the most comprehensive in human history.

They are reported by UNICEF to have caused the death of half a million children as a result of, among other things, the banning of chlorine to clean the country’s water.

All up, estimates suggest that over 1 million Iraqis died from the sanctions that were intended to impose sufficient suffering on the people so they would overthrow Saddam’s regime.

So it’s fair to say sanctions are at best a grey political weapon. This relates to the motivations behind them, the motivations to block them, and their overall effectiveness.

The fact is though, when trying to influence countries’ behaviour, no one option is a certainty.

But when sitting at the negotiating table, it certainly benefits everybody to have a viable threat in between public condemnation and all out war.

By Charlotte Whale