Death by inches: Sanctions and the destruction of Iraq
by VINAY LAL
Poster on the genocidal impact of sanctiosn at an anti-war demonstration.
Since sanctions have assumed a critical place over the last few years in the foreign policy of the United States and its dutiful allies, with consequences that have often been chilling and ominous, it becomes imperative to understand how sanctions came to be deployed as a blunt instrument of terror and domination in our times. With the formation of the United Nations in 1945, and the resolution taken by member states to attempt to resolve conflicts between themselves through means other than war, sanctions were bound to assume an important place in the international regime of governance. It was in 1959 that Albert Luthuli, then President of the African National Congress, implored the international community to impose comprehensive sanctions against South Africa and so “precipitate the end of the hateful system of apartheid.” Three years later, the General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favor of the economic boycott of South Africa, but as Britain, the United States, West Germany, and Japan, which between them accounted for by far the greater portion of South Africa’s exports and imports, chose to remain indifferent to resolutions expressing the general will of the rest of the world, sanctions against South Africa did not then come into force.
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The Scottish referendum: A desirable dissolution of the union of Great Britain
by VINAY LAL
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”: so William Butler Yeats famously wrote in his much-quoted poem, “The Second Coming”. Some in Britain, contemplating the prospects of the dissolution of the Union of England, Scotland, and Wales, effected in 1707 and modified in the twentieth-century to accommodate the Unionists in Northern Ireland who resisted the idea of an independent Ireland, are warning of the impending anarchy if a majority of Scots should cast a ballot in favor of independence in Thursday’s referendum. The beauty of the ballot, which will ask voters, “Should Scotland be an Independent Country”, and then signal their choice with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’, resides in its simplicity; and it is precisely this simplicity which is no doubt the envy of many around the world—among others, Palestinians, Kurds, Basques, Kashmiris, Nagas, Texans, even some Californians and, if we may constitute such people as a ‘nation’, the gun-toting fanatics of the National Rifle Association in the US—who would certainly like to weigh in on the question of their independence. However, the simplicity of the Scottish referendum resides in other considerations, too: watching developments in Libya, Iraq, and Syria, nor are these the only places where the question of secessionism and new political formations looms large, one admires the Scots for attempting to settle this question through something other than the gun. Malcolm X might have thought the ballot little better than the bullet, and he doubtless had good reasons to do so in a country where in many places the African American could only cast his ballot at the risk of receiving a bullet in his chest, but in today’s politics too little constructive use is made of the ballot. The Scottish referendum, if nothing else, gives one hope that American-style electoral democracy, a furious sound show signifying absolutely nothing except the lifelessness of an American politics that has been consumed in equal measure by money and sheer stupidity, is not the last word in electoral politics.
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