Politics of sanctions

Reason Wafawarova on Thursday
The European Union, Britain and other Western countries have been softening their stance on the sanctions regime they unilaterally imposed on Zimbabwe at the beginning of the 21st century, but the United States is not showing any signs of change of policy. President Obama recently stated that the US was once again renewing its sanctions regime for another year on the repeated grounds that Zimbabwe “continues to pose an extraordinary threat to US foreign policy”. Many people have questioned the logic of Washington’s reasoning, and Zanu-PF has dismissed the US position as “irrational”.

Well, economically or militarily, it is grossly absurd to even imagine Zimbabwe could be a threat to the US, let alone “an extraordinary” one. But the US is not scared of Zimbabwe. It is scared of the consequences of a domino effect, and the only threat Zimbabwe poses to the US is being a good example of how poor people across the world should free themselves.

The quakes of Zimbabwean politics are beginning to shake the foundations of rainbow South Africa right now, and that is the extraordinary threat Barack Obama is talking about.

Sanctions are the political tool that stands between diplomacy and guns, the midway between negotiations and soldiers.

They begin where diplomacy ends, and often they come soon after the futility of diplomatic dress down, like they came after the demonisation of Zimbabwe’s land reform programme failed to halt the land revolution.

Economic sanctions are a third option used when military intervention is deemed to be either inappropriate or impossible. They are a default policy option which, according to Simon Chesterman and Beatrice Pouligmy, “reflect the seriousness of the problem rather than the seriousness of engaging with it”.

In other words sanctions are often more of a propaganda tool designed to illustrate the political view of those opposed to the perceived problem than they are a solution to the problem itself.

It is a lot easier to get sanctions adopted than it is to get them to achieve their declared intentions. Koffi Annan put it this way, “Getting sanctions right has (often) been a less compelling goal than getting sanctions adopted.”

The sanctions against Zimbabwe were a result of Western unanimity over shared resistance to the land reform programme, but obviously the West did not get the sanctions right in many ways, not least in achieving the regime change agenda they so wished to happen.

There are numerous write-ups on the debate on whether or not sanctions work, on what sanctions are intended to achieve, and if sanctions-imposers really want them to work the way they declare through their public utterances.

Whether sanctions are declared or imposed through individual countries, regional bodies, or through the United Nations, there is always a political context to every sanctions regime.

Sanctions are often the channel through which the intentions of key political actors are expressed, and more than anything else the sanctions imposed on Zimbabwe by the Western coalition were an expression of the intentions of the United Kingdom, only internationalised for purposes of creating a sense of international legitimacy, something that only attracted the solidarity of Botswana, with the rest of the progressive world outside the West either totally opposed or disinterested. But even Botswana is cozying up to Harare in the aftermath of the demise of the MDC-T.

It is important to note that from the formation of the United Nations in 1945 up to 1990, the UN Security Council only imposed mandatory sanctions twice, first on Rhodesia from 1966 to 1979, and then on South Africa from 1977 to 1994, the former being a general economic embargo, and the later largely an arms embargo.

After the collapse of the USSR in 1989, we had what George A Lopez described as the “Sanctions Decade.” Iraq, Yugoslavia, Somalia, Libya, Haiti, Angola (UNITA), Rwanda, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan, Eretria, and Ethiopia were all subjected to mandatory UN Security Council sanctions within about five years.

The declared goals of the sanctions ranged from reversing territorial aggression, restoring democratic leadership, promoting human rights, deterring terrorism, promoting disarmament or bringing warring parties to peace negotiations.

Cortright and Lopez make a compelling argument that there is no impeccable evidence to suggest that sanctions have ever in their own right achieved their declared goals, and this includes unilaterally declared sanctions like the US sanctions on Nicaragua or Cuba.

After close to 60 years of devastating economic sanctions on Cuba, the US has not achieved any of its declared goals, and now the White House is engaging Cuba to find a diplomatic face saving way of ending the sanctions, which from the onset had no specific design, no clear implementation strategy, and no time frames – just jingoistic rhetoric against communism.

With Iraq, Yugoslavia and Haiti, the failure of sanctions as a leverage political tool was followed by military intervention, something Boris Johnson suggests must have been done in the case of Zimbabwe, specifically because the issue involved the “kith and kin” of British people.

For Libya it was sanctions, which were initially interpreted to have worked, as Gaddafi made drastic changes to his domestic policies, significantly buddying up with the West, but after the much hailed success story, Libya was plunged into chaos after the UN Security Council sanctioned military intervention in 2011, of course at the behest of France and other Western countries. They had never really forgiven Gaddafi, and at his weakest moment they attacked and slaughtered him.

In the case of Zimbabwe the UK and the EU have significantly moved from sanctions to diplomacy, with the EU leading the way through a $270 million aid package, and the UK sending its international development secretary to Zimbabwe recently. The US has not shown any signs of departure from its sanctions law against Zimbabwe, ZDERA, and as it is, Washington still holds that sanctions will help install a compliant regime in Zimbabwe one day, or so it seems.

All hope in sanctions being an effective regime change tool vanished for the West with the 2013 Zimbabwe elections, a political event that drastically restored the political supremacy of Zanu-PF, leading to frustration-inspired infighting within the opposition MDC-T, and drowning the giving spirit of Western regime change funders, officially styled as the pro-democracy movement.

With a depleted and broke opposition, a fatigued donor community and a hopeless and splintered opposition leadership, foreign policy experts in the EU and the UK have been pushing for restoration of relations with the Zanu-PF Government, and this campaign that was started by Belgium has been slowly but surely gaining momentum, with Zanu-PF’s Patrick Chinamasa showing passionate enthusiasm for the thawing of relations.

Australia, New Zealand and Canada essentially run on an “us too” policy when it comes to international affairs, largely mimicking US/EU positions, and this has been the case with the Zimbabwe sanctions. Australia only updates its sanctions policy after both the EU and the US, and its adjustments are as predictable as the rising of the sun.

There are fewer consensuses on the utility of sanctions than there is on the shared political consensus of imposing them. Most of the EU members were never convinced that sanctioning Zimbabwe would reverse the land reform programme, or that the sanctions would remarkably influence the course of political events in the country. What they shared was the political will to help the UK fight its diplomatic war with Zimbabwe, more to safeguard the legacy of Western solidarity than to achieve any pragmatic goals.

Economic sanctions have always been controversial, especially in the post-Cold War era.

Like it was with the Iraq humanitarian crisis, the Zimbabwean humanitarian crisis has led many analysts to question the effectiveness of sanctions.

Just like with the Iraq case, there is split opinion on whether sanctions are responsible for the economic crisis in Zimbabwe, or it is the domestic policies that are directly responsible.

While it is next to impossible to convince anyone with a sane mind that economic sanctions on Zimbabwe have not had a direct economic effect on the country, it is also a plausible argument to say that the reality of sanctions has sometimes been exaggerated or used as an excuse for lazy thinking and ineptness by some Zimbabwean politicians.

Economic sanctions had no direct causal effect to the egregious corruption exposed by the Zanu-PF Government itself towards the end of 2013 – the salary scandal in public owned companies, the raw patronage publicly bragged about by Temba Mliswa, implicating his uncle Didymus Mutasa, or the insurance scandal at Air Zimbabwe, the malfeasance at the ZBC, among many other examples.

Economic sanctions are designed to compel compliance, to push for a particular world order as defined by the US and its Western allies.

They are implemented to achieve political goals and most of the time they are always covered in the velvety nobility of humanitarianism, like the impressive rhetoric that says Zimbabwe sanctions are in place to promote human rights, to bring democracy, or to restore the rule of law and so on and so forth.

While some sanctions are put in place to contain conflicts or to express international opinion, others are simply an expression of bilateral or inter-state outrage over diverse policies.

Good examples of this include the 2001 Zimbabwe sanctions, specifically effected to express Western outrage over the dispossessing of land from white commercial farmers, who had colonialism to thank for their entitlement to that land.

Another good example could be the EU sanctions on Austria after the election of Jorg Haider, or the 2006 Western sanctions on Palestine after the popular election of Hamas.

The US and Israel found this kind of democracy egregiously abhorrent, and as such a legitimate cause for sanctions against Palestine.

Consensus over sanctions stems from various reasons, among them solidarity and alliances, economic interests, imperial interests, and shared hegemony values.

As we have seen with the Zimbabwe sanctions, there are always problems when it comes to evaluation of sanctions, and this is precisely why the EU and the US are moving in different directions. There is no unanimity on how to modify the sanctions, and certainly there will not be consensus on how best to lift them.

After the 1994 Haiti mandatory general sanctions, there has been a shift towards this new phenomenon of “targeted” or “smart” sanctions.

Not many people, even among the sanction imposers will waste time believing that there is anything smart or targeted about such sanctions as imposed on Zimbabwe. The disguising of sanctions as “restrictive measures” is a laughable matter in academia, and it frankly warrants no debate. The only visible target in regards to sanctions on Zimbabwe is the country itself, through its general population.

This kind of lexicon is adopted more as a response to international outrage over the humanitarian crisis caused in Iraq and Haiti, and the truth of the matter is that it has since become politically unfashionable to impose blanket mandatory sanctions on weaker states, and that is why it is politically expedient to refer to Zimbabwe sanctions as “targeted,” or “restrictive measures.” Needless to say, the UN Security Council has on four occasions rejected the idea of UN imposed mandatory sanctions on Zimbabwe. The idea makes no sense.

The language of smart or targeted sanctions does not meaningfully change the context and nature of sanctions. Rather the language sanitises the message around these sanctions, much as it is meant to help mobilise public opinion in support of the sanctions themselves.

While ZDERA is an explicit sanctions law against Zimbabwe, the more than 40 companies that the EU used to describe as targeted by its sanctions regime were essentially about all in terms of the backbone of the country’s economy. Add to that the blockade of international credit lines, and you have a full package of economic sanctions.

As Nkosazana Dhlamini Zuma once said, it is impossible to sanction a country’s government without sanctioning its people, and this has been the folly of the so-called targeted or smart sanctions rhetoric.

One hopes the current re-engagement efforts between Zimbabwe and its Western adversaries will yield positive results for the country, marking the beginning of the much-desired economic growth.

Zimbabwe we are one and together we will overcome. It is homeland or death!

Reason Wafawarova is a political writer based in Sydney, Australia.