[News] Why Sanctions During a Pandemic are Cruel

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/18/why-sanctions-during-a-pandemic-are-cruel/ 



  Why Sanctions During a Pandemic are Cruel

by Vijay Prashad – Paolo Estrada - March 18, 2020 
<https://www.counterpunch.org/author/vipra9492/>
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Swiftly moves the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), dashing across 
continents, skipping over oceans, terrifying populations in every 
country. The numbers of those infected rises, as do the numbers of those 
who have died. Hands are being washed, tests are being done, and social 
distance has become a new phrase. It is unclear how devastating this 
pandemic will be.

In the midst of a pandemic, one would expect that all countries would 
collaborate in every way to mitigate the spread of the virus and its 
impact on human society. One would expect that a humanitarian crisis of 
this magnitude would provide the opportunity to suspend or end all 
inhumane economic sanctions and political blockades against certain 
countries. The main point here is this: Is this not the time for the 
imperialist bloc, led by the United States of America, to end the 
sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, and a series of other countries?

*Medical Shortages*

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza told us recently that the 
“illegal and unilateral coercive measures that the United States has 
imposed on Venezuela are a form of collective punishment.” The use of 
the phrase “collective punishment” is significant; under the 1949 Geneva 
Conventions, any policy that inflicts damage on an entire population is 
a war crime. The U.S. policy, Arreaza told us, has “resulted in 
difficulties for the timely acquisition of medicines.”

On paper, the unilateral U.S. sanctions say that medical supplies are 
exempt. But this is an illusion. Neither Venezuela nor Iran can easily 
buy medical supplies, nor can they easily transport it into their 
countries, nor can they use them in their largely public sector health 
systems. The embargo against these countries—in this time of COVID-19—is 
not only a war crime by the standards of the Geneva Conventions (1949) 
but is a crime against humanity as defined by the United Nations 
International Law Commission (1947).

In 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump enacted tight restrictions on 
Venezuela’s ability to access financial markets; two years later, the 
U.S. government blacklisted Venezuela’s Central Bank and put a general 
embargo against the Venezuelan state institutions. If any firm trades 
with Venezuela’s public sector, it could face secondary sanctions. The 
U.S. Congress passed the Countering America’s Adversaries Through 
Sanctions Act (CAATSA) in 2017, which tightened sanctions against Iran, 
Russia, and North Korea. The next year, Trump imposed a raft of new 
sanctions against Iran which suffocated Iran’s economy. Once more, 
access to the world banking system and threats to companies that traded 
with Iran made it almost impossible for Iran to do business with the world.

In particular, the U.S. government made it clear that any business with 
the public sector of Iran and Venezuela was forbidden. The health 
infrastructure that provides for the mass of the populations in both 
Iran and Venezuela is run by the State, which means it faces 
disproportionate difficulty in accessing equipment and supplies, 
including testing kits and medicines.

*Breaking the Embargo*

Arreaza, the Venezuelan foreign minister, told us that his government is 
alert to the dangers of COVID-19 with a health infrastructure that has 
been affected by the sanctions. Vice President Delcy Rodríguez is 
leading a presidential commission to manage whatever resources are 
available. “We are breaking the blockade,” Arreaza said, “through the 
World Health Organization, through which we have obtained medicine and 
the tests to detect the illness.” The WHO, despite its own crisis of 
funds, has played a key role in both Venezuela and Iran.

Nonetheless, the WHO faces its own challenges with sanctions, 
particularly when it comes to transportation. These harsh sanctions 
forced transportation companies to reconsider servicing both Iran and 
Venezuela. Some airlines stopped flying there; many shipping companies 
decided not to anger Washington. When the World Health Organization 
tried to get testing kits for COVID-19 from the United Arab Emirates 
(UAE) into Iran, it faced difficulty—as the WHO’s Christoph Hamelmann 
put it <https://twitter.com/cahamelmann/status/1233348062136938497>—“due 
to flight restrictions”; the UAE sent the equipment via a military 
transport plane.

Likewise, Arreaza told us, Venezuela has “received the solidarity from 
governments of countries such as China and Cuba.” This is a key issue. 
China, despite its own challenges from COVID-19, has been supplying 
testing kits and medical equipment to Iran and to Venezuela; it was 
China’s vigorous reaction to the virus that has now slowed down its 
spread within China itself. In late February, a team from the Red Cross 
Society of China arrived in Tehran to exchange information with the 
Iranian Red Cross and with WHO officials; China also donated testing 
kits and supplies. The sanctions, Chinese officials told us, should be 
of no consequence during a humanitarian crisis such as this; they are 
not going to honor them.

Meanwhile, the Iranians developed an app to help their population during 
the COVID-19 outbreak; Google decided to remove it from its app store, a 
consequence of the U.S. sanctions.

*End the Sanctions*

Yolimar Mejías Escorcha, an industrial engineer, tells us that the 
sanctions regime has put a lot of pressure on everyday life in 
Venezuela. She says that the government “continues to make an effort to 
ensure that people who most need it get health care, education, and 
food.” The opposition has tried to say that the crisis is a consequence 
of the government’s inefficiency rather than a result of the imperialist 
blockade on Venezuela. On March 6, she tells us, a new campaign was 
launched in the country called “Sanctions Are a Crime.” She hopes that 
this campaign will explain clearly to people why there are shortages in 
her country—the sanctions being the core reason.

In 2019, a group of countries met at the United Nations in New York to 
discuss the U.S. unilateral sanctions that violated the UN Charter. The 
intent was to work through the Non-Aligned Movement to create a formal 
group that would respond to these sanctions. Venezuela’s Foreign 
Minister Arreaza told us that Venezuela supports this initiative but 
also the declaration of principles drafted by Iran against unilateralism 
and the Russian formal complaint about denial of visas for officials to 
visit the UN building in New York. “We hope to resume meetings this year 
once the difficulties presented by COVID-19 are overcome,” he said. They 
want to meet again, Arreaza said, to “advance joint, concrete actions.”

What Arreaza told us are initiatives at the interstate level. At the 
same time, there are ongoing initiatives led by popular movements and 
political organizations. In November 2019, an anti-imperialist 
solidarity meeting was held in Havana, Cuba, with representatives from 
86 countries. At this meeting, it was decided that attention must be 
focused on the inhumane use of power in our time; a call was sent out to 
hold a week of anti-imperialist struggle between May 25 and May 31. The 
aim of the week is to alert the world’s public about imperialism and—in 
this context—about the murderous sanctions regime driven by the United 
States, more murderous in this time of COVID-19.

The question that a week of activities such as this poses is quite 
simple: What kind of moral fiber holds together an international system 
where a handful of countries can act in a way that goes against all the 
highest aspirations of humanity? When the United States continues its 
embargos against more than 50 countries—but mostly against Cuba, Iran, 
and Venezuela—when there is a global pandemic afoot, what does this say 
about the nature of power and authority in our world? Sensitive people 
should be offended by such behavior, its mean-spiritedness evident in 
the unnatural deaths that it provokes. When the U.S. Secretary of State 
Madeleine Albright was asked about the half-million Iraqi children who 
died because of U.S. sanctions, she said that those deaths were a price 
worth paying <https://fair.org/extra/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/>. 
They were certainly not a price that the Iraqis wanted to pay, nor now 
the Iranians or the Venezuelans, or indeed the majority of humankind. We 
march in May against this desiccated worldview; we march for humanity.

/*Vijay Prashad* is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a 
writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter 
<https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/>, a project of the 
Independent Media Institute. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books 
<https://tinyurl.com/y976jlvu> and the director of Tricontinental: 
Institute for Social Research. He has written more than twenty books, 
including The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World 
<https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20> 
(The New Press, 2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the 
Global South 
<https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20> 
(Verso, 2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab 
Revolution 
<https://smile.amazon.com/Death-Nation-Future-Arab-Revolution/dp/0520293266/?tag=alternorg08-20> 
(University of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World 
<https://smile.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Third-World-ebook/dp/B0799NP7DD/?tag=alternorg08-20> 
(LeftWord, 2017)./

/*Paola Estrada* is in the Secretariat of the International Peoples 
Assembly and is a member of the Brazilian chapter of ALBA Movements 
(Continental Coordination of Social Movements toward the Bolivarian 
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America)./

/This article was produced by Globetrotter 
<https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/>, a project of the 
Independent Media Institute./

-- 
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