Iran sanctions hit the wrong
target By Kaveh L Afrasiabi
The Iran nuclear crisis has now reached a
new threshold with several unintended
consequences, one of which is the potential to
damage the legitimacy of the United Nations. The
more the world powers try to sustain or bolster UN
sanctions on Iran over its nuclear program,
unwittingly the more they undermine not only their
own efforts but also the credibility and
effectiveness of the preeminent world organization
responsible for global peace.
Indeed, this
much is clear by examining the poor logic of
renewed attempts to toughen Iran sanctions on the
part of the UN Security Council's five permanent
members (the US, Britain, France, Russia and
China) plus Germany - the Five plus One - reportedly
agreeing in their latest
meeting in Berlin on Tuesday to a draft new
resolution. This will, while avoiding draconian
economic measures, nonetheless impose new travel
bans, certain "asset freezes" as well as calls for
"vigilance" with respect to the transfer of
"banned material" for sensitive nuclear
activities, and "monitoring" of the sanctions
regime.
Iranian President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad immediately dismissed the sanctions
move. "They should know that such illegal behavior
will be ineffective against the will of the
Iranian people," state television quoted him as
saying.
US Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, meanwhile, said the agreement demonstrated a
firm international consensus on preventing Iran
from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. "We do not
want Iran to become a nuclear weapons power, and
we will continue to hold Iran to its international
obligations," she said.
In March 2007, the
Security Council imposed a second round of
sanctions on Iran for refusing to suspend its
uranium-enrichment program the West fears may be
aimed at making bombs. The penalties included the
freezing of foreign assets of 28 Iranian
individuals and entities.
While the exact
text of the latest draft resolution remains
confidential, its main outline reported to the
world press warrants a healthy pause on two key
questions: will they be effective? And what impact
will they have on the UN system itself in case
they are not?
Unfortunately, until now all
eyes have been focused on the former question,
with little if any consideration given to the
likely negative ramifications of a failed UN
initiative regarding Iran on UN itself. The basic
policy assumptions and political strategy
underlying the current efforts with regard to Iran
at the Security Council need to be re-examined and
recast away from the naive, narrow-focus approach
that has ignored the likely swinging of the
pendulum against the UN and the increasingly
illegitimate Iran sanctions begin to corrode the
legitimacy of the UN machinery, due to the
following:
It is improbable that Iran will comply with
the "unreasonable" UN demand that it halt
uranium-enrichment and reprocessing activities, as
allowed under the the nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty to which Iran is a signatory. In all
likelihood, Iran's defiance, reflected in
Ahmadinejad's latest statement that Iran will
proceed with its activities regardless of the
"illegal pressure" from the outside, will not bend
as a result of the "watered down" sanctions that
lack effective economic teeth and, per the
statement of a European diplomat, simply send a
"symbolic message" to Iran.
The "moderate tightening" of UN sanctions is
more than anything a symbolic face-saving measure
to hold a crumbling coalition together, yet at the
exorbitant cost of accentuating the UN's
ineffectiveness and its "instrumentalization" as
an arm of US foreign policy.
Already, with
both Russia and China taking full advantage of the
new US intelligence report on Iran, confirming
that Iran halted its nuclear weapons program in
2003, the stage has been set for a complete
evaporation of the "grand coalition" built around
the Iran "nuclear threat". Firstly, China's
Sinopec is engaged in a multi-billion dollar
energy deal with Tehran, and then Moscow has
delivered nuclear fuel to the plant it is building
in Iran.
Iran's partial compliance with UN demands,
with respect to cooperation with the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) , renders somewhat
moot the other demands regarding Iran's
"proliferation sensitive" activities. Recalling UN
Resolution 1747 (March 2007) calling on Iran to
"comply with the requirements of the IAEA", and in
light of Iran's steady cooperation with the
agency, including its de facto re-implementation
of the intrusive additional protocol by allowing
the IAEA's "complementary visit" to the "P-2"
centrifuge site, it is a sheer error to argue that
Iran has simply defied the will of the UN. Rather,
Iran has had a studied, measured response,
addressing the legitimate demands of the Security
Council and weeding out the "illegitimate"
demands.
As a sign of Iran's serious
intention for steady cooperation with the IAEA,
Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili,
addressing the Foreign Affairs Committee of the
European Union, pledged Iran's commitment for
cooperation with Europe and stated that "Iran has
gone beyond its international obligations" with
respect to the IAEA. This belies earlier Western
media hype that compared to his predecessor, Ali
Larijani, Jalili would represent a new level of
belligerency on Iran's part.
The latest draft UN resolution's provisions
for "travel bans" simply lack a sound strategic
design, rigorous monitoring and enforcement
mechanism and will likely fail to generate
international cooperation and compliance. Thus,
instead of ostracizing Iran, such UN initiatives
will likely backfire on the UN and diminish its
standing, particularly among the majority of the
world's population who belong to the Non-Aligned
Movement (NAM), given NAM's solid support of
Iran's nuclear rights.
Problems and
prospects Historically, when the UN has
imposed travel sanctions, its efforts have been
systematically impeded by the lack of
institutional capacity to enforce those "focused"
sanctions, often as a part of broader sanctions,
as was the case with Libya that was also hit with
an "aviation sanction". According to a UN finding
in 1998, "The list of reported violations of the
flight ban on Libya is long." In another case, a
travel ban on Angolan rebel leaders was broken as
they traveled to many countries, mainly because of
exceptions in the resolution that allowed for
"travel to promote the peace process". Similarly,
Resolution 1747, while providing a short list of
several scientists and heads of Iran's
Revolutionary Guards Corps as intended targets for
a travel ban, [1] nonetheless opens a loophole by
stating "except when such travel is for activities
directly related to items in certain
sub-paragraphs. One such exemption deals with
religious pilgrimage, another deals with Iran's
non-proliferation sensitive nuclear activities.
Thus, as with past UN experiences, the
travel sanctions on "targeted individuals" in Iran
faces familiar problems, above and beyond the
question of their legitimacy and fairness. There
is a lack of sound synergy with other efforts to
resolve the dispute, given the likely possibility
that further sanctions on Iran will hamper
Iran-IAEA cooperation. There is always the
availability of false passports and travel
documents and the challenges of effective customs
and border monitoring, particularly by Iran's
neighbors [2] . Then there is a lack of incentives
for cooperation by other states, especially those
which are critical of the US-led sanctions on Iran
and which agree with Iran that these measures have
the character of "psychological warfare".
It is noteworthy that the US's unilateral
sanctions do not simply complement the UN
sanctions, as is usually claimed by US pundits. In
fact, given the US's pressure on foreign banks to
stop issuing letters of credit for trade with Iran
and other such pressures exceeding the limits of
UN sanctions, the latter are trumped by the US
sanctions to some extent, raising the question of
their legality from the prism of international
law.
The proposed travel sanction also
faces the hurdle of coming up with an accurate
list of targeted individuals to transmit
effectively to appropriate authorities in
countries throughout the world. Since the present
list omits political leaders and decision-makers,
the question arises as to the grounds on which
poor scientists who simply follow orders should be
penalized, and their freedom to travel curtailed.
Another pertinent question is whether it
would not be better to save the UN from another
embarrassing failure, harming its global
legitimacy, by avoiding such rash moves that have
absolutely no chance of success and will simply
perpetuate the image of an ineffective world
organization.
The answer is a resolute
yes, all the more reason for the UN to return
Iran's nuclear dossier to the IAEA, in light of
the IAEA's near conclusion of giving Iran a clean
bill of health, and the US's own spy agency's
admission that Iran is not presently involved in
the nuclear proliferation business.
Notes 1. See Security
Council release. 2. It has
been noted that "if one or two countries violate a
travel ban, especially if they are neighboring of
the targeted regime, the ability to enforce the
travel restrictions will be compromised". Quoted
in Design and Implementation of Arms Embargoes and
Travel and Aviation Related Sanctions (Bonn
International Center For Conversion, 2007).
Kaveh L Afrasiabi, PhD, is the
author of After Khomeini: New Directions in
Iran's Foreign Policy (Westview Press) and
co-author of "Negotiating Iran's Nuclear
Populism", Brown Journal of World Affairs, Volume
XII, Issue 2, Summer 2005, with Mustafa Kibaroglu.
He also wrote "Keeping Iran's nuclear potential
latent", Harvard International Review, and is
author of Iran's Nuclear
Program: Debating Facts Versus Fiction.
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