Death by embargo unanimously adopted a resolution
Libyan government surrender to the American and British judicial suspected of being responsible for the explosion which destroyed a
PanAm aircraft above the Scottish village of Lockerbie on December
ON January 21, 1992, the United
Nations Security Council implicitly demanding that the authorities two of its citizens
21, 1988.
SALAH JABER
T HIS resolution — a scarcely
veiled extradition order, addressed to a state which has signed no extradition treaty of any kind with the two countries concerned -constitutes a complete innovation from a legal point of view. Specialists in international law, like Ruth Wedgwood, a professor at Yale University quoted in the Washington Post', have not failed to comment on this novelty.
The infringement of international legality would, however, not merit attention were it not for the fact that, in the framework of the "new world order", Security Council resolutions have ceased to be pious wishes. They can now have murderous consequences, as shown by the fashion in which the UN mandate against Iraq was interpreted just one year ago.
It is nonetheless true, paradoxically, that the relation of world forces allows the United States government at present to economize on such devastating military interventions, which create as well as solve problems for it, as is shown by the current debate on the balance-sheet of the Gulf War.
In fact, one of the numerous objectives of "Operation Desert Storm", present in its most spectacular aspect, was precisely to reinforce by example the United States' powers of dissuasion towards the rest of the world. Washington now has a more convincing arsenal of coercive measures than ever, and direct military action is only the weapon of last resort, reserved for emergency cases.
The other means, requiring longer to take effect but very much less costly and risky, is the recourse to "sanctions" — which are to military aggression what strangulation is to the use of firearms.
US-imposed embargoes are today sure of being effectively implemented, the case of Cuba being the best example of this.
The three-decade long blockade inflicted on the rebel island by Washington has been reinvigorated and is proving more tragically effective than ever, more so even than in the early days when the Cuban economy was still an adjunct of its larger neighbor. This change is above all due to the collapse of the former "fraternal socialist countries" which doomed largely to failure any strategy of encirclement decreed by the imperialist powers.
Iraq has also been subjected to this method of coercion: an embargo was decreed against Baghdad in August 1990, a little after the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein's army. Until the end of that year, there was a lively polemic in between the partisans of "sanctions" and the supporters of military force, the principal, if not the only, argument of the latter being the need to race against time.
The current claims that Baghdad was on the point of acquiring nuclear weapons are intended to justify a posteriori the apocalyptic aggression against Iraq, and the subsequent terrible loss of human life.
Sanctions were not, however, as many naive people believed, a "peaceful" substitute for war, and they are still less so today. They are not an alternative to armed force, which they complement as gradual measures belonging to the same arsenal, managed by the same hegemonic imperialism. Seen from a certain angle, the military assault on Iraq could even appear as a way of violently and rapidly improving the embargo's efficiency, the military devastation of Iraq greatly amplifying the impact of the embargo.
It is children who suffer the most: a survey carried out by a team based at Harvard University has noted that nearly one third of Iraqi infants are now suffering from malnutrition; the number of chil-
UNITED NATIONS dren who have died because of the embargo, combined with the economic and infrastructural effects of the war, has been estimated at between 50,000 and 100,000.3
These children are being killed to bring to heel a Saddam Hussein who, with good reason, rejects the Security Council decisions seeking to put Iraq under economic tutelage and impose compulsory deductions from its oil revenues to pay reparations to the rich state of Kuwait.4 "War reparations" thus become a pretext for reducing a recalcitrant state to vassalage, by means of economic strangulation. S
The sanctions weapon is still less "humanitarian" than the deluge of steel and fire that was "Desert Storm". If the "smart" bombs could effectively discriminate between military objectives and the civilian environment, strangulation by embargo affects, first and foremost if not exclusively, civilians, and particularly young children.
After Cuba and Iraq, Libya is today in the imperialist sights. The Security Coun cil resolution is only the prelude to another which will impose measures of economic coercion, if Tripoli does not toe the line. North Korea is also being targeted. Any state, in the south or the east, which places itself outside the "new world order", is promised the same vigorous treatment. We must react. * 1. The resolution also called on the government in Tripoli to "cooperate" with the French authorities in the investigation into the explosion of a DC-10 owned by the UTA company over Niger on September 19, 1989. 2. International Herald Tribune, January 22, 1992. 3. See, among many others, the Guardian (New York) of January 15, 1992 and the New Statesman & Society (London) of January 17, 1992. 4. See IV 204. See also André Gunder Frank et al., Bush Imperator, éditions La Brèche, Paris, 1991. 5. See the appeal of the Intemational Executive Com- 3 mittee of the Fourth International, published in /V 221.