ABSTRACT
Figure 38.1 UN Security Council sanctions 1966-2000 606 Figure 38.2 The phenomenon of child soldiers and the UN Protocol (2000) 609
UN sanctions policies
Of the total of 170 bilateral and multilateral sanctions imposed between 1914 and 1999 35 per cent, or one third, was effective (Cortright and Lopez 2000, 15). At first the UN rarely applied sanctions, with the exceptions of those against Southern Rhodesia and South Africa in 1966 and 1974, respectively (see §28.1). This policy however changed during the 1990s, when the UN began to use sanctions for a diverse range of purposes: ‘to reverse territorial aggression, restore democratically elected leaders, promote human rights, deter and punish terrorism, and promote disarmament’ (Cortright and Lopez 2000, 2). Some sanctions proved effective, such as those against Iraq after its occupation of Kuwait in 1990, in the wars in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s and against Libya because of its terrorist support. Other sanctions had no success, such as those against Angola, Liberia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone (see Figure 38.1). Most sanctions consist of economic measures which aim at distorting trade, but an economic impact does not necessarily imply political success. Sanctions may also have serious unintended side effects, as became clear during the arms embargo against Yugoslavia which weakened the Croats and Bosnians and not the well-armed Serbs, while the opposite effect was intended. The suffering of the population can be an undesired effect of economic sanctions, as happened in Iraq (see below). Sanctions may also cause new acts of violence. In addition to these difficulties in effectively imposing sanctions, administering and monitoring the implementation processes was another problem for IGOs. The UN bureaucratic machinery at the time proved inadequate for this. ‘In an era of financial constraint at the UN, the Security Council and
its sanctions committees lacked sufficient resources to evaluate and implement sanctions.’ Furthermore, the sanctions committees established to oversee implementation varied in effectiveness according to the degree of ‘politicization of the particular episode, its relative priority for the major powers, and the leadership provided by the committee chairs’ (Cortright and Lopez 2000, 5). In practice improvements in tracing the implementation of sanction regimes were made when the UN began to employ experts and monitoring panels. The first such panel was established to monitor the weapons embargo against Rwanda in 1995, while others were set up for Angola, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. The use of these monitoring panels soon became routine. They were complemented by the creation of investigative panels and the involvement of NGOs, which increasingly began to play roles ‘in exposing those who violate sanctions, and the humanitarian impact that sanctions may have on a population’ (Chesterman and Pouligny 2003, 506). Governments also became creative in better targeting sanctions, such as through the Interlaken Process, set in motion by the Swiss government, with its procedures for refining targeted financial sanctions. In 1999 the German government sponsored a similar initiative to improve the implementation of arms embargoes and travel sanctions (Cortright and Lopez 2000, 5).
