It's Time We Saw Economic Sanctions for What They Really Are - War Crimes

By Patrick Cockburn, The Independent

24 January 18

Saddam Hussein and his senior lieutenants were rightly executed for their crimes, but the foreign politicians and officials who were responsible for the sanctions regime that killed so many deserved to stand beside them in the dock

he first pathetic pieces of wreckage from North Korean fishing boats known as “ghost ships” to be found this year are washing up on the coast of northern Japan. These are the storm-battered remains of fragile wooden boats with unreliable engines in which North Korean fishermen go far out to sea in the middle of winter in a desperate search for fish.

Often all that survives is the shattered wooden hull of the boat cast up on the shore, but in some cases the Japanese find the bodies of fishermen who died of hunger and thirst as they drifted across the Sea of Japan. Occasionally, a few famished survivors are alive and explain that their engine failed or they ran out of fuel or they were victims of some other fatal mishap.

The number of “ghost ships” is rising with no fewer than 104 found in 2017, which is more than in any previous year, though the real figure must be higher because many boats will have sunk without trace in the 600 miles of rough sea between North Korea and Japan.

The reason so many fishermen risk and lose their lives is hunger in North Korea where fish is the cheapest form of protein. The government imposes quotas for fishermen that force them to go far out to sea. Part of their catch is then sold on to China for cash, making fish one of the biggest of North Korea’s few export items.

The fact that North Korean fishermen took greater risks and died in greater numbers last year is evidence that international sanctions imposed on North Korea are, in a certain sense, a success: the country is clearly under severe economic pressure. But, as with sanctions elsewhere in the world past and present, the pressure is not on the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who looks particularly plump and well-fed, but on the poor and the powerless.

The record of economic sanctions in forcing political change is dismal, but as a way of reducing a country to poverty and misery it is difficult to beat. UN sanctions were imposed against Iraq from 1990 until 2003. Supposedly, it was directed against Saddam Hussein and his regime, though it did nothing to dislodge or weaken them: on the contrary, the Baathist political elite took advantage of the scarcity of various items to enrich themselves by becoming the sole suppliers. Saddam’s odious elder son Uday made vast profits by controlling the import of cigarettes into Iraq.

The bureaucrats in charge of UN sanctions in Iraq always pretended that they prevented Saddam rebuilding his military strength. This was always a hypocritical lie: the Iraqi army did not fight for him in 1991 at the beginning of sanctions any more than it did when they ended. It was absurd to imagine that dictators like Kim Jong-un or Saddam Hussein would be influenced by the sufferings of their people.

These are very real: I used to visit Iraqi hospitals in the 1990s where the oxygen had run out and there were no tyres for the ambulances. Once, I was pursued across a field in Diyala province north of Baghdad by local farmers holding up dusty X-rays of their children because they thought I might be a visiting foreign doctor.

Saddam Hussein and his senior lieutenants were rightly executed for their crimes, but the foreign politicians and officials who were responsible for the sanctions regime that killed so many deserved to stand beside them in the dock. It is time that the imposition of economic sanctions should be seen as a war crime, since it involves the collective punishment of millions of innocent civilians who die, sicken or are reduced to living off scraps from the garbage dumps.

There is nothing very new in this. Economic sanctions are like a medieval siege but with a modern PR apparatus attached to justify what is being done. A difference is that such sieges used to be directed at starving out a single town or city while now they are aimed at squeezing whole countries into submission.

An attraction for politicians is that sanctions can be sold to the public, though of course not to people at the receiving end, as more humane than military action. There is usually a pretence that foodstuffs and medical equipment are being allowed through freely and no mention is made of the financial and other regulatory obstacles making it impossible to deliver them.

An example of this is the draconian sanctions imposed on Syria by the US and EU which were meant to target President Bashar al-Assad and help remove him from power. They have wholly failed to do this, but a UN internal report leaked in 2016 shows all too convincingly the effect of the embargo in stopping the delivery of aid by international aid agencies. They cannot import the aid despite waivers because banks and commercial companies dare not risk being penalised for having anything to do with Syria. The report quotes a European doctor working in Syria as saying that “the indirect effect of sanctions … makes the import of the medical instruments and other medical supplies immensely difficult, near impossible.”

People should be just as outraged by the impact of this sort of thing as they are by the destruction of hospitals by bombing and artillery fire. But the picture of X-ray or kidney dialysis machines lacking essential spare parts is never going to compete for impact with film of dead and wounded on the front line. And those who die because medical equipment has been disabled by sanctions are likely to do so undramatically and out of sight.

Embargoes are dull and war is exciting. A few failed rocket strikes against Riyadh by the Houthi forces in Yemen was heavily publicised, though no Saudis were killed. Compare this to the scant coverage of the Saudi embargo on Houthi-held Yemen which has helped cause the largest man-made famine in recent history. In addition, there are over one million cholera cases suspected and 2,000 Yemenis have died from the illness according to the World Health Organisation.

PR gambits justifying sanctions are often the same regardless of circumstances. One is to claim that the economic damage caused prevents those who are targeted spending money on guns and terror. President Trump denounces the nuclear deal with Iran on the grounds that it frees up money to finance Iranian foreign ventures, though the cost of these is small and, in Iraq, Iranian activities probably make a profit.

Sanctions are just as much a collective punishment as area bombing in East Aleppo, Raqqa and Mosul. They may even kill more people than the bombs and shells because they go on for years and their effect is cumulative. The death of so many North Korean fishermen in their unseaworthy wooden craft is one side effect of sanctions but not atypical of their toxic impact. As usual, they are hitting the wrong target and they are not succeeding against Kim Jong-un any more than they did against Saddam Hussein.

ALSO SEE: Fantasy Novelist Ursula Le Guin,
Who Explored Resistance and Change, Dies at Age 88

Ursula K. Le Guin and the Three Obstacles

By Laura Miller, Slate

24 January 18

What the science-fiction writer still has to overcome to be recognized as the titan she was.

rsula K. Le Guin’s long journey to the status of literary titan is not quite complete, despite the author’s death on Monday at the age of 88. It will take the world a little while yet to reckon with how much she accomplished and how much it means to us. Indeed, part of Le Guin’s greatness lay in her ability to crack open the shells we didn’t even realize had confined us, loosing us into a larger world filled with wild new possibilities.

Le Guin, like any protagonist in a folk tale, had to overcome three obstacles along the way: the prejudices harbored against genre, gender, and geography. “I published as a genre writer when genre was not literature,” she told the New York Times, although debate still rages on in some backward quarters over genre fiction’s literary merit. She turned to writing science fiction and fantasy after her attempts at realism met with little success, and there she discovered an exceptionally engaged and intelligent readership. As a woman, however, she didn’t always find her perspective appreciated or even understood in the male-dominated science-fiction community. In 1971, she was asked to blurb an anthology of “the most innovative, thought-provoking, speculative fiction ever,” by an editor who somehow failed to notice that he had not included a single female. In a celebrated letter, Le Guin declined, dismissing the anthology not just for this omission, but for its tone, “which is so self-contentedly, exclusively male, like a club, or a locker room. … Gentlemen, I just don’t belong here.”

Lastly, and often underestimated, is Le Guin’s identity as a Californian—or to be more precise, a daughter of the Pacific Rim. A writer of her powers might have been noticed by the literary establishment if she had been hanging around New York, or even Cambridge, but she was off on the other edge of the continent, and looking in the opposite direction, toward the unexpected and the unmeasured. As the daughter of two anthropologists—her father, Alfred Kroeber, who studied under Franz Boas, received the first doctorate in the discipline awarded by Columbia University and founded the anthropology department at the University of California at Berkeley—she grew up aware of the infinite variety in what she once described as “the different things people do and the different ways they do them.” Her father worked with Ishi, a man thought to be the last member of the Yahi people of California, and her mother, Theodora Kroeber, wrote Ishi in Two Worlds, a biography of this lonely figure. Before young Ursula were countless examples of many ways that people choose, or are forced, to live.

She took everything that might have hindered a lesser spirit and made it into a strength. As part of the New Wave in science fiction in the 1960s and ’70s, she and writers like Samuel R. Delany, J. G. Ballard, and Philip K. Dick brought sophisticated prose style and contemporary political and sexual questions into a genre that had often felt artless and blunt.* Science-fiction writers often describe their work as being more about ideas than characters or language, but Le Guin, with feminist novels like 1969’s The Left Hand of Darkness, showed how much further ideas could be taken, how a story could demolish beliefs about identity that had previously been taken for granted. In that novel, a human ambassador to another planet negotiates with an alien race that has no fixed gender, assuming male or female characteristics temporarily during a monthly fertile period. He’s compelled to think about what a self can be once gender has been subtracted as a fixed identity. Her 1974 novel The Dispossessed, viewed by some as her masterpiece, juxtaposes three political systems—capitalist, socialist, anarcho-syndicalist—allowing their relative strengths and weaknesses to play out.

But possibly Le Guin’s most influential works of all were the Earthsea series, absorbed into the imaginations of countless young readers, some of whom went on to become novelists themselves: David Mitchell, N.K. Jemisin, and Neil Gaiman are just a few. Infused with Le Guin’s enthusiasm for Taoism, the series, which begins with A Wizard of Earthsea (1975), abandons the Medieval European motifs and frameworks that undergirded the fantasy genre at that time. Her characters inhabit a universe that defies the simplistic division of forces into good and evil. They are brown-skinned and black-haired, although Le Guin doesn’t make a big deal of this—partly because she wanted to lure fans of Eurocentric fantasy into identifying with someone different, but partly because that’s just how the inhabitants of the Earthsea archipelago looked. The series featured dragons who possessed a culture of their own—nothing interested Le Guin more than how cultures shape and reflect us—and an academy for wizardry long before Hogwarts was a glimmer in Jo Rowling’s eye. But to read the Earthsea books as a young person is to be offered glimpses of the depths that much conventional fantasy skirts.

To the end, Le Guin challenged easy habits and preconceptions. Her last novel, Lavina (2008), is a radical, and profoundly beautiful, act of empathy with a woman (the Latin princess who marries Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid) who finds meaning in tradition, duty, and “the old, local, earth-deep religion” her people have observed for centuries. Rather than confining her, Lavinia can feel these rites and customs “enlarging the scope of my soul and mind”—liberating her “from the narrowness of the single self.”

When the recognition Le Guin had earned finally began to be paid to her, she did not waste the opportunity. Presented at the 2014 National Book Awards ceremony with an award celebrating her distinguished contribution to American letters, she delivered a carefully honed speech, nodding to the “writers of the imagination” who had been “excluded from literature for so long” and protesting the encroachment of consumerism on art. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings,” she said. She knew this because she did it herself.