c. 1998 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ Things are”appallingly bad”in Iraq, says Dale Bishop, Middle East secretary for the United Church of Christ and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).
And while Bishop said he has no way of confirming the commonly used _ but also disputed _ figures from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization that more than 1 million Iraqis, including 560,000 children below the age of 5, have died as a result of the comprehensive embargo imposed after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, he said”the evidence is abundant of starvation, malnutrition and death from lack of medicine.” The situation is now so dreadful that Bishop, a key participant in articulating the National Council of Churches’ position initially arguing for sanctions rather than military action against Iraq, now thinks”we walked into a trap of our own making.”I did not want the military action,”Bishop said.”But the sanctions are worse. If we had killed a million poor, elderly, very young and ill people in the war, we’d be branded war criminals. Yet that’s the effect of the sanctions.” Yet, even as economic sanctions have achieved full employment as a favored instrument of U.S. foreign policy, especially since the end of the Cold War, some religious leaders and groups are having second thoughts about both the effectiveness and morality of economic warfare.
In particular, two high profile cases of sanctions _ against Iraq and against Cuba _ are prompting reassessment and opposition by U.S. church leaders.
However, others, especially conservative faith-based advocacy groups such as the Family Research Council, are embracing the use of economic punishment as a way of dealing with regimes they believe persecute Christians. These groups have their own high-profile case _ China _ as a focal point.
The United States has imposed some sort of economic sanctions 61 times during 1993-1996, according to the State Department. The United Nations Security Council, which employed full sanctions only against Rhodesia during the Cold War, has in the last decade authorized sanctions against Cambodia, Haiti, Iraq, Libya, Serbia, Somalia and Sudan.
The attraction of sanctions is obvious. They offer an alternative to war as a way of dealing with regimes that threaten their neighbors _ as in the case of Iraq _ or abuse its citizens _ Burma now _ or create weapons unacceptable to the international community _ North Korea in the 1990s.
They were an important part of the mechanisms that eventually ended apartheid in South Africa. In that case, sanctions had the widespread support of churches. Sanctions have also helped push Serbia toward the Dayton accords, and they remain an important element in the uneasy truce in the former Yugoslavia.”Sanctions have typically been regarded by churches as a peaceful and nonviolent alternative to war,”according to the World Council of Churches.
At the same time, sanctions are increasingly criticized as an inadequate tool. They were ineffective during the 1970s and ’80s in more than 80 percent of the cases studied by the Institute for International Economics and have been a savagely blunt weapon when used in their most comprehensive form in places like Iraq and Haiti.”Experience has revealed that sanctions may contribute to violence, widespread suffering and the escalation of conflict,”the WCC acknowledges in a recent policy statement on the issue.”Thus, they must be understood as a morally mixed and ambiguous strategy.” For church leaders, it does not help that they are virtually always applied by industrialized nations against so-called Third World nations.
Reports of terrible suffering in Iraq have greatly intensified the debate within the churches. In January, as the most recent U.S-Iraq crisis began to unfold, 54 American Roman Catholic bishops wrote President Clinton to express their”profound moral concerns about the U.S. led sanctions against the people of Iraq”and called for the lifting of sanctions against the Iraqi people.
The Presbyterian Church (USA) General Assembly last June lamented that the Iraqi”poor have been swept away in the torrent of deprivation.” Iraq is the most dramatic current example of the growing concern about the impact of sanctions. But the call by Pope John Paul II during his recent visit to Cuba for an end to the U.S. embargo of Fidel Castro’s regime has been the most visible.
During his trip, John Paul lamented”the effect of economic embargoes, which are always deplored, because they hurt the most needy.” On Friday (March 20), the Clinton administration, in response to pressure exerted by the pope, announced a slight easing of restrictions against Cuba to make it easier for humanitarian aid to flow from the United States to Cuba’s churches.
Going against the tide of opposing sanctions, supporters of the Freedom from Religious Persecution Act _ sponsored by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep Frank Wolf, R-Va., and now being debated in Congress, are calling for, among other things, the use of sanctions to punish those who violate religious freedoms within their countries.
But Gerald Powers, a foreign affairs adviser to the U.S. Catholic Conference, said the sanctions in the current version of the much-revised bill are”more modest and targeted in their application against countries engaged in egregious religious persecution.” Powers said the Catholic bishops follow a case-by-case procedure in deciding whether to support sanctions, applying some of the same moral criteria they do in”just war”evaluations: Is it a last resort? Does the good outweigh the evil? Is the cause moral?
Something of the same process is under way in churches associated with the National Council of Churches and the National Association of Evangelicals.
In fact, a religious community sobered and challenged by the toll in Iraq is likely to look more seriously at sanctions in general, although none has condemned them totally. The dilemma is how to combat great evil without harming the innocent.
DEA END RNS
