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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element" dir="ltr"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/18/why-sanctions-during-a-pandemic-are-cruel/">https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/18/why-sanctions-during-a-pandemic-are-cruel/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Why Sanctions During a Pandemic are
Cruel</h1>
<span class="post_author_intro">by</span> <span
class="post_author" itemprop="author"><a
href="https://www.counterpunch.org/author/vipra9492/"
rel="nofollow">Vijay Prashad – Paolo Estrada - March 18,
2020</a></span></div>
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<p>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.</p>
<p>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?</p>
<p><b>Medical Shortages</b></p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>Breaking the Embargo</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://twitter.com/cahamelmann/status/1233348062136938497">put
it</a>—“due to flight restrictions”; the UAE sent the
equipment via a military transport plane.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><b>End the Sanctions</b></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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
href="https://fair.org/extra/we-think-the-price-is-worth-it/">a
price worth paying</a>. 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.</p>
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<div>
<p><em><b>Vijay Prashad</b> is an Indian historian,
editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and
chief correspondent at <a
href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/">Globetrotter</a>,
a project of the Independent Media Institute. He
is the chief editor of <a
href="https://tinyurl.com/y976jlvu">LeftWord
Books</a> and the director of Tricontinental:
Institute for Social Research. He has written more
than twenty books, including <a
href="https://smile.amazon.com/Darker-Nations-Peoples-History-Third/dp/1595583424/?tag=alternorg08-20">The
Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third
World</a> (The New Press, 2007), <a
href="https://smile.amazon.com/Poorer-Nations-Possible-History-Global/dp/1781681589/?tag=alternorg08-20">The
Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global
South</a> (Verso, 2013), <a
href="https://smile.amazon.com/Death-Nation-Future-Arab-Revolution/dp/0520293266/?tag=alternorg08-20">The
Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab
Revolution</a> (University of California Press,
2016) and <a
href="https://smile.amazon.com/Red-Star-Over-Third-World-ebook/dp/B0799NP7DD/?tag=alternorg08-20">Red
Star Over the Third World</a> (LeftWord, 2017).</em></p>
<p><em><b>Paola Estrada</b> 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).</em></p>
<p><i>This article was produced by <a
href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/globetrotter/">Globetrotter</a>,
a project of the Independent Media Institute.</i></p>
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