Are sanctions fair–and do they work? Representatives from the United States and the 12-member European Union must wrestle with those questions this week as they meet in Geneva to consider a phaseout of the embargo as part of a comprehensive peace plan for the Balkans. A new Franco-German initiative offers to suspend sanctions if the Serbs stop fighting, let humanitarian aid through and turn over a fraction more territory to the Muslims. Sooner or later, Western leaders will also have to re-evaluate the sanctions against Haiti. A controversial new study from Harvard University concludes that the embargo and a cutoff in aid “may have contributed to as many as 1,000 extra child deaths per month,” while causing little harm to the military that ousted the nation’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and prevented his return.
America is searching for new foreignpolicy tools. Economic sanctions are hardly new. But since the United States has become more squeamish about using force, trade embargoes have emerged as a handy, if vexing, approach to crises ranging from Serbia and Haiti to China and Iraq, Sanctions have a decidedly mixed record. They worked in South Africa, helping to bring down apartheid by pummeling the economy and delivering a psychological blow to a country that couldn’t tolerate international isolation. But they haven’t been terribly successful elsewhere. Cuba and North Korea have both survived, if not prospered, through decades of U.S. sanctions. Renegade states have remarkable staying power.
Sanctions against Belgrade represent the world’s first attempt at a high-tech embargo. U.N. observers have been able electronically to trace every truck and ship that tries to enter Serbia back to their points of origin. About 260 international customs officers from 26 countries, linked via an international satellite system to a communications center in Brussels and a U.N. sanctions commission in New York, monitor all overland traffic. Computers track every ship and barge traveling up and down the Danube. The embargo is by no means airtight, and violations frequently occur. Nevertheless, “from an economic perspective, the Serbian sanctions have been the most successful in modern history,” says a senior U.S. official.
The Serbian people are hurting. With hyperinflation approaching 25,000 percent for December, the average Serb has seen his monthly income drop from $500 to $15. Nearly two thirds of the country is now unemployed. The West can’t take all the credit for bankrupting the economy: for two years, President Slobodan Milosevic has done his bit by draining state coffers to finance Serbian offensives in Croatia and Bosnia.
Yet from a political standpoint, sanctions have made only a small dent on Belgrade. Originally imposed by the U.N. Security Council in May 1992 to halt “ethnic cleansing” and ensure the delivery of humanitarian aid, the trade embargo has failed on both counts. Western diplomats imagined a scenario in which Serbian civilians, squeezed by sanctions, would get rid of Milosevic by electoral or other means–or, at least, pressure the Belgrade government to cut its ties with nationalists in Bosnia. Neither event took place. No solid opposition movement emerged. On the contrary, sanctions created support for nationalist causes and encouraged Serbs to unite behind Milosevic, holding the United Nations responsible for its ills. “This government is not guilty; it’s the fault of the West, which allowed Yugoslavia to be destroyed,” says a Belgrade clerk. Defying sanctions is now a patriotic duty. Says a teacher in the Serbian province of Kosovo, “Milosevic really makes us feel good to be Serbs.”
In Haiti, nobody needs persuading that the government is a bad one. But the oil embargo has so crippled the country that most people are incapable of making a living, much less of overthrowing their government. “No one can justify the price the Haitian people are paying for political warfare,” says Dr. Reginald Boulous, director of the Haitian Centers for Development and Health. More than 700,000 people, 10 percent of the population, now depend for food on foreign relief agencies; some report a 30 percent increase in their handouts since the coup two years ago. Lucille St. Dory, a 19-year-old street hawker and mother from Carrefour, is one of those dependents. Each month she picks up 10 pounds of soy-wheat mix and two quarts of cooking oil from the Catholic Relief Services in nearby Merger. In July her daughter died of diarrhea, two days after she was born. “The doctors couldn’t find a vein to give her intravenous; she was too thin,” says St. Dory. “They finally put the needle in her head, but even with that she died.”
It’s hard to pin the blame on sanctions alone. The Harvard report argues that while the 1991 coup triggered the crisis, the international community exacerbated the problem by failing to make adequate provisions to feed and care for the people whom sanctions would hurt most. “We don’t have the institutional mechanisms working out a healthy balance between political and humanitarian goals,” says Lincoln Chen, the study’s team leader.
Last summer it looked as if the embargo had worked; Haiti’s military came to the bargaining table at last. “We were all amazed at how easily sanctions spun the army around,” says a negotiator of the deal to restore Aristide, a plan the junta agreed to in July, then abrogated in October. “But in fact they had no intention of letting Aristide back.” Instead, the military has mounted a new program of political violence against the opposition, killing the country’s justice minister and driving out up to 200,000 people from the capital of Port-au-Prince. “The army has stood up to Clinton and the international community,” says a Haitian businessman. “And they are the ones who blinked.” So, apparently did Robert Malval. At the weekend, the Haitian prime minister, who is a pro-Aristide businessman and enjoys the strong support of Clinton, was considering resigning.
Sanctions against Haiti might work better if the United States leaned on the Dominican Republic to seal its borders. But why punish neighbors, which stand to lose billions of trade dollars in an embargo? That’s the complaint of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria and others Wong the Danube, which claim the clampdown on Serbia has crippled their already shaky economies. Pressure to relieve innocent victims is forcing the West to reconsider sanctions. But lifting them is no easy matter. Not when sanctions serve as a convenient substitute for tougher action.
