by VIJAY PRASHAD
A study in The Lancet estimates that unilateral sanctions have caused as much death as wars, with an estimated half a million deaths per year.
Dear friends,
Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.
Those who do not live in war zones or in suffocated countries are forced to live life as if there is nothing strange about what is happening around us. When we read about war, it is disconnected from our lives, and many of us want to stop listening to anything about the human misery caused by weapons or by sanctions. The scholasticism of the academic and the hushed tones of the diplomat are silenced as the bomb and the bank wage war against the planet. After authorising the atom bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima (Japan) on 6 August 1945, US President Harry S. Truman announced on the radio: ‘If [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth’.
Truman justified the use of that hideous weapon by deceitfully alleging that Hiroshima was a military base. Yet he failed to mention that his bomb – known as ‘Little Boy’ – killed large numbers of civilians. According to the City of Hiroshima, ‘the exact number of deaths from the atomic bombing is still unknown. Estimates place the number of dead by the end of December 1945, when the acute effects of radiation poisoning had largely subsided, at roughly 140,000’. The total population of Hiroshima at that time was 350,000, meaning that 40% of the city’s population died within five months of the blast. A ‘rain of ruin’ had already befallen them.
The Lancet, one of the most distinguished magazines on health and medicine, published an article by Francisco Rodríguez, Silvio Rendón, and Mark Weisbrot with a very scientific title: ‘Effects of international sanctions on age-specific mortality: a cross-national panel data analysis’. These scholars have studied the impact of sanctions mostly imposed by the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations (UN). While these measures are often called ‘international sanctions’, in reality there is nothing international about them. Most sanctions are conducted outside the realm of the UN Charter, chapter five of which insists that such measures can only be taken through a UN Security Council resolution. This is most often not done, and powerful states – mostly the United States and members of the European Union – institute illegal, unilateral sanctions against countries that exceed the logic of human decency.
According to the Global Sanctions Database, the United States, European Union, and UN have sanctioned 25% of the countries in the world. The United States by itself sanctioned 40% of these countries, sanctions that are unilateral because they do not have the assent of a UN Security Council resolution. In the 1960s, only 8% of the world’s countries were under sanctions. This inflation of sanctions demonstrates that it has become normal for the powerful North Atlantic states to wage wars without having to fire a bullet. As US President Woodrow Wilson said in 1919 at the formation of the League of Nations, sanctions are ‘something more tremendous than war’.
The cruellest formulation of Wilson’s statement was made by Madeleine Albright, then the US ambassador to the UN, regarding the US sanctions against Iraq in the 1990s. A distinguished team of specialists from the Centre for Economic and Social Rights went to Iraq and analysed the data to find that from 1990 to 1996, sanctions had resulted in the ‘excess deaths of over 500,000 children under the age of five. In simple terms, more Iraqi children have died as a result of sanctions than the combined toll of two atomic bombs on Japan and the recent scourge of ethnic cleansing in former Yugoslavia’. On the CBS television programme 60 Minutes, journalist Leslie Stahl asked Albright about this study, saying ‘we have heard that half a million children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima. And you know, is the price worth it?’. This was a sincere question. Albright had the opportunity to say many things: she could have said that she had not yet had time to study the report, or she could have shifted the blame to the policies of Saddam Hussein. Instead, she answered, ‘I think that it is a very hard choice, but the price, we think, the price is worth it’.