Sanctions do not work

http://www.mizzima.com/edop/commentary/1685-sanctions-do-not-work.html

by Derek Tonkin
Wednesday, 11 February 2009 10:58

Re: Burma's policy debate: polarisation and paralysis (http://www.mizzima.com/edop/commentary/1673-burmas-policy-debate-polarisation-and-paralysis-.html)

Might I comment on the article by Benedict Rogers in Mizzima posted on Monday, February 9th?

I think most development aid experts would agree that Burma's exclusion from access to IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank funding since 1988 was the principle sanction which the West could apply against Burma, in addition to the cancellation at the same time of virtually all Western aid programs. Sanctions have indeed been in place now for some 20 years. They have been ratcheted up ever since 1996, but I have not noticed any change in the regime's attitude to human rights. In short, they have not been a success. They have made matters worse, not better. The regime is now more recalcitrant, more entrenched and increasingly prone to isolationism.

Almost every Burmese I speak to agrees with me. Dr. Sein Win, recently re-elected as Prime Minister of the government-in-exile, complains in the latest FE Economic Review, "We are concerned that sanctions have not worked," going on to say: "They are a negative energy at a time when our country needs the opposite." Aung Zaw, Chief Editor of The Irrawaddy, reached a similar conclusion in the wake of Professor Gambari's latest mission: "Let's be frank: UN diplomacy has failed. But so have the sanctions." I agree with Dr. Sein Win and Aung Zaw on this, if not on many other issues.



The latest EU sanctions haven't worked either. There are some 200,000 sawmills in China alone and many thousands in Thailand willing to take every log of Burmese timber previously sent to the EU. China also gladly takes all the jade and all the precious metals. Rubies have become a rarity, and prices were rising until the global credit crunch came. The only people to suffer have been the people, notably the 1,200 or more family businesses named and targeted by the EU (including eight gem merchants in Pakokku!), some of whom I know to be supporters of the NLD and most of whom I am sure have tremendous love and respect for Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. So what on earth is the EU doing targeting them? Meanwhile, the International Trade Union Confederation in Brussels is rightly complaining that Burmese woodworkers and furniture makers forced to find work outside Burma are now being exploited in Thailand. It is Thai entrepreneurs who now get the "added value" from the processing of Burmese timber at the expense of many pro-NLD Burmese entrepreneurs and through the exploitation of migrant Burmese workers. So I cannot agree with Benedict Rogers that these latest EU sanctions are of any serious consequence. Indeed, they have once again been shown to be counterproductive. I don't think it would now make the slightest difference if the EU were to impose a total economic and financial embargo on Burma. The plain fact is that Burma doesn't need the West any more. We have forfeited our influence.

Rogers says that "some of the most naive critics of sanctions propose lifting them now." The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee suggested in 2007 that the Government should look at the UK/EU sanctions policy against Burma "with a view to deciding whether it is worth continuing with it." The Committee included individuals of wide experience in government and business - a former Chief Executive of TESCO, a former Deputy Governor of the Bank of England, a biographer of the economist Keynes, a former Chairman of the Financial Services Authority, an Indian-born business magnate, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, a former Adjutant-General in the British Army and even two former Chancellors of the Exchequer, Normal Lamont and Nigel Lawson. I don't think they would take kindly to being called "naive", with hints that they must be supporters of the military regime.

Rogers also lambastes the UK Department for International Development (DfID) for supposedly opposing an increase in aid. This is unfair. The officials concerned (and their Ministers) were primarily opposed to the transfer of resources from inside Burma to the border area, where less than five percent of those in need can be reached. Their concerns, I suspect, had something to do with the pro-Karen lobby anxious to build up financial support at the border in order to maintain the insurgency. It was never articulated in quite this way, but I have little doubt that this was what the battle was all about. In the end, DfID compromised with an increase in aid, pro rata, both inside Burma and on the border. UK bilateral aid to Burma, in the wake of Cyclone Nargis, is now higher than from any other country.

As regards the Burma Campaign UK (BCUK) document "Pro-Aid, Pro-Sanctions, Pro-Engagement", it is not a practical guide to action. It places impossible conditions on the delivery of aid, for if agencies were to attempt to meet the criteria set out, they would be expelled from Burma forthwith. As the former Chairman of a refugee charity conducting support programs in such difficult countries as the Sudan, Afghanistan, Iran, Uganda, Cambodia, Vietnam and Pakistan, I know from my own experience that from the start you may be dealing with incompetent, corrupt, devious and hostile regimes. But in order to get aid to the people you need to wage a constant battle with the local authorities, making the odd concession here and there, but not on issues of principle. No International NGO worth its salt would take the slightest notice of the BCUK recommendations because they are politically motivated and impossible to realize, which is why some might suspect that the aim is to stop the delivery of aid altogether, not to facilitate it.

BCUK in any case is not a charitable organization, lacking any experience in the implementation of aid programs. Thus agencies like Save The Children, CARE and Christian Aid are unlikely to take kindly to BCUK admonitions for programs to be "transparent, accountable and independently monitored" when that is the very basis of each and every operating charity I have ever known, and without which no funding would ever be available. As for being "Pro-Engagement", all the BCUK paper recommends is diplomatic engagement on the basis primarily of the Havel-Tutu Report, which recommended a binding Resolution based on Article 41 sanctions in the UN Security Council. This did not appeal to any of the 15 members of the Council, none of whom has ever mentioned the Havel-Tutu Report in any UN forum – Committee, General Assembly or Security Council – at any time. In other words, the extremist "Pro-Engagement" solutions recommended by the BCUK have found no takers among the 192 members of the UN.

The debate on sanctions is bedeviled because there is no common database on which to start discussion. The US and the EU have declined to issue any public analysis of their effectiveness to date, quite simply because they have clearly not been effective, and no government is publicly willing to admit that their policies were mistaken. But it is important that different views be aired, especially when they are diametrically opposed. It is only through thesis and antithesis, as Marx argued, that an eventual synthesis can be reached.

(The author is Chairman of Network Myanmar, former Chairman of Ockenden International, from 1991-2003, and served as British Ambassador to Thailand from1986-1989)