As noted above, sanctions may have unintended but severe effects on innocent third countries or the poor and elderly in target countries. The UN has considered several ways to compensate third countries and protect vulnerable civilians.
Prior to the comprehensive sanctions regime against Iraq that began in 1990, compensation claims by third countries for damage to their economies had not been a major issue. During the previous four decades the only notable claim came from Zambia for losses resulting from sanctions against Rhodesia. Zambia received some increases in foreign aid to compensate for the hardship but far less than the losses incurred. As for South Africa's neighbors, until the mid-1980s none of the major powers was prepared to implement comprehensive economic sanctions, and commerce in the region flourished.
The campaign to isolate Iraq, a major oil producer, was seen by the U.S. and its allies as much more urgent than the campaigns against Rhodesia and South Africa: They pressed vigorously for full and universal adherence to the Security Council mandate, including passing a resolution authorizing "secondary sanctions" against any country that failed to abide by the regime. Twenty-one states from all geographic regions, most of them poor and dependent on oil imports and/or remittances from their nationals working in the Gulf, appealed to the Security Council for financial assistance.*
The West's response to these appeals was mixed. The Gulf Crisis Financial Coordination Group, which the U.S. organized to fund the military campaign, eventually provided assistance to the front-line states, notably Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey. Most others affected did not receive assistance, and at least one, Yemen, was punished by Saudi Arabia and the U.S. for its support of Iraq. The Saudis increased oil production substantially to dampen the price effects of sanctions against Iraq, and the international financial institutions provided some additional compensatory lending.
In the UN Charter, the process for dealing with third-party hardship is modest. 59 "Action with Respect to Threats to the Peace," Chapter VII, Article 50, stipulates
If preventive or enforcement measures against any state are taken by the Security Council, any other state . . . which finds itself confronted with special economic problems arising from the carrying out of those measures, shall have the right to consult the Security Council with regard to a solution to those problems.
The article grants a member the right only to consult with the Security Council, although "special economic problems" is broad enough to cover almost any conceivable grievance that a member might raise. In the Iraq crisis the number of appeals was so large and unprecedented that the Council referred them all to the Iraq Sanctions Committee.
Most sanctions regimes established by the Security Council have special committees to assist member governments to implement the sanctions, to monitor compliance, and to provide the Council with periodic status reports. As these are subsidiary organs of the Council, all fifteen Council members have a representative on each sanctions committee. Decisions are taken by consensus, which means that any member can block action, and all deliberations are held behind closed doors "so that reports of violations can be investigated without states being publicly tarnished as violators." 60 All sanctions committees are served by a staff of around 20 (including about a dozen sanctions specialists) that make up a branch of the Subsidiary Organs Secretariat within the UN Secretariat. The sanctions branch is stretched very thin. Just for Iraq, for example, the branch serviced more than 100 meetings in 1994 and processed over 6,000 requests for sanctions exemptions for consideration by the committee.
Regarding the requests for compensation from the 21 states that claimed injury from the Iraq sanctions, the UN Secretariat lacked the competence, the committee lacked the consensus, and both lacked the authority and the means to take substantive action. The committee took the view that it was not an economic body and merely gathered all the petitions and published them with a standardized statement calling on UN members to provide voluntary assistance. Some aid eventually flowed, but it was based less on need than on the foreign policy priorities of individual donor countries, once again highlighting the disparity between those who control mandatory sanctions decisions and those most burdened by their effects.
In the case of Yugoslavia, seven neighboring countries appealed for help, and Uganda submitted a claim for the loss of a large road construction project that had recently been abandoned. The Security Council followed the Iraq precedent and passed the requests along to the sanctions committee. Again, assistance was widely criticized in the region as inadequate and arbitrary. Article 50, of course, grants a right only to consult with the Security Council as a result of hardship arising from the sanctions and makes no provision for prior planning or "preventive consultations."
The terms of the Chapter VII sanctions are mandatory for UN members, so a state found to be in noncompliance with the regime would have no claim to compensation. The Sanctions Assistance Missions that surrounded the former Yugoslavia closely monitor all cross-border movements, and while they lacked the power to shut off the persistent and extensive smuggling, they have provided the Sanctions Committee with ample reason to question the validity of compensation claims.
Boutros-Ghali has attempted to deal with the rising dissatisfaction among countries directly affected by sanctions and the broad sympathy that this problem has aroused among many UN members. He raised the issue in his 1992 report, An Agenda For Peace, and again in his 1995 Supplement to An Agenda for Peace, urging that the Security Council devise measures involving the international financial institutions to assist countries affected by sanctions regimes. He argued the need for compensation both in terms of fairness under Chapter VII, but also as a safeguard for ensuring long-term compliance with mandatory sanctions. 61 Historically, the World Bank has been reluctant to appear as the handmaiden to UN peacekeeping or other political operations. In the case of requests to help alleviate the impact of sanctions on third parties, bank officials have insisted on making their own determination and to responding -- if at all -- within the framework of existing bilateral agreements. Recently, however, the World Bank's new president, James D. Wolfensohn, has indicated a fresh interest in cooperating more closely with the UN in conflict prevention and reconstruction.
At the same time, efforts in the General Assembly to introduce a resolution that would call for the establishment of a trust fund, partly financed through assessed contributions and managed by the Security Council, to compensate on a "nondiscriminatory" basis, have been stymied. These proposals included calls for the establishment of permanent mechanisms for consultation and other forms of support, such as supplying goods and services no longer available from the embargoed state, facilitating favorable commodity purchase agreements, and providing compensatory adjustments of international tariffs.
The major Western powers objected to the proposal on the grounds that it would restrict the freedom of the Security Council to act and would be too expensive for them. In September 1993 the General Assembly adopted a much weaker resolution that invites the Security Council to strengthen its consultative process with states "likely to be affected by the implementation of sanctions" and to consider remedial measures involving international financial institutions such as voluntary funds, additional credit lines, and exports from and investments in affected states. 62
In December 1994 the General Assembly again invited the secretary-general to submit a report on what could be done under Article 50 to alleviate the economic problems confronting states as a result of sanctions under Chapter VII. The secretary-general submitted his report in August 1995, and it became the basis for another five months of intensive negotiations among member states. 63 The resulting General Assembly resolution merely papered over a growing divide between rich and poor nations over the means for determining and paying for the unintended costs of sanctions. 64 The resolution underlined the importance of consultations under Article 50 and invited the Security Council to "consider appropriate ways and means for increasing the effectiveness of its working methods and procedures applied in the consideration of the requests by the affected countries for assistance. . . ." The resolution also requested the secretary-general "within existing resources" to improve support of the Security Council by collecting information and analyzing the impact of sanctions, advising the Council -- at the latter's request -- on response options, compiling information on the amount of international assistance flowing to affected states, and exploring "innovative and practical measures of assistance . . . with relevant institutions and organizations inside and outside the United Nations system." In effect, the issue of third country hardships is moot and is unlikely to resurface again until the Security Council decides to mandate a major new sanctions regime.
In addition to the hardships that sanctions may cause in neighboring states, even more pressing humanitarian and moral issues have been raised by the plight of innocent civilians, especially children and the elderly, in countries that are the targets of comprehensive sanctions. This issue came to prominence during the sanctions campaign against South Africa. As the U.S. and European countries began in the 1980s to apply more comprehensive and effective sanctions, including the refusal of banks either to offer credit or help raise foreign capital, the South African government and business community undertook an international public relations campaign claiming that those most seriously affected by sanctions were the poor and underemployed or unemployed workers. The campaign failed because the South African economy remained relatively robust until the financial crisis of the mid-1980s and, more importantly, because leaders of the exiled African National Congress, as well as credible antiapartheid activists inside South Africa, consistently called for tighter sanctions.
The plight of the innocent in Haiti posed special problems for the U.S. By late 1993 there were news reports that up to 1,000 children a month were dying as a result of the sanctions regime while the ruling military junta and its wealthy allies appeared to be largely unaffected. 65 With Haiti's annual per capita income only $360 before sanctions, media reports that the country's desperately poor were at acute risk gained instant credibility, although the accuracy of these reports was strenuously challenged by U.S. and Canadian officials who were monitoring the impact of sanctions on villages and in urban areas across Haiti. The impact of these news reports on American and international public opinion, however, may have contributed to Washington's willingness to move ahead with more forceful measures. Three years after it began, the crisis was resolved quickly and decisively with military force, economic incentives, and political pressures targeted at those individuals most responsible for the imposition of military rule.
The issue of civilian suffering continues to challenge supporters of Iraqi sanctions, particularly the U.S. and the UK, who appear determined to maintain maximum pressure until Saddam Hussein either leaves or is removed from power. A much discussed study by the UN's own Food and Agriculture Organization quoted estimates by a Harvard School of Public Health researcher that upwards of 560,000 Iraqi children have died as a result of UN economic sanctions since the end of the Gulf War in 1991. The study and many of the subsequent editorials urging the UN to soften the impact of sanctions failed to address the main intervening variable on the issue of child mortality, the Iraqi government's inadequate monitoring of the importation and distribution of humanitarian assistance. 66
Humanitarian exemptions are allowed under most UN sanctions regimes. A major task of UN sanctions committees is to review specific requests to exempt individual shipments of goods to the target state for humanitarian reasons. Each committee receives terms of reference or guidance from the Security Council as to what materials qualify for exemption. The volume of requests in the case of Yugoslavia jumped from 2,000 in 1992 to 18,000 in 1993, and then to 34,000 in 1995. 67 A long-time UN sanctions branch employee estimates that in 1994 the Yugoslavia Sanctions Committee approved goods worth more than $30 billion, while the EU's monitoring agent, SAMCOM, reported that barely 2 percent of the goods reached their approved destination. 68 Obviously, humanitarian waivers have developed into a useful tool for companies that want to circumvent the sanctions. But while the committees have become lax in issuing waivers, most countries lack the means to investigate and prosecute violators, and those countries with substantial trade at stake are unwilling even to try.
Despite these weaknesses, some important lessons are clear about managing the flow of legitimate humanitarian aid, at least in the case of the former Yugoslavia, where comprehensive sanctions and extensive monitoring arrangements were eventually in effect. According to one analyst, the performance of SAM personnel improved dramatically once they were able to work out arrangements with the main nongovernmental relief organizations to seal cargoes as they were loaded on trucks deep in neighboring countries and then to verify upon arrival in the sanctioned area that these "seals" had not been disturbed. 69 Improved cooperation between nongovernmental organizations and the UN may be one of the keys to limiting the unintended suffering caused by sanctions regimes.