"Sanctions Are a Crime": During Coronavirus Pandemic, Sanctions Against Iran, Venezuela Causing Medical Shortages
Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada
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?
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, social distancing
has become a new phrase. It is unclear how devastating this pandemic will be;
certainly, the experience of the 1918-1920 Spanish Flu hangs heavily, when one
in three people (500 million) contracted the flu and 150 million people died.
If those proportions remain in our time, then 2.5 billion people would contract
the disease and three-quarters of a billion people would die. These numbers are
horrifying.
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.
We are dancing around the main point: 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 US policy, Arreaza told us, has "resulted in difficulties for the
timely acquisition of medicines."
On paper, the unilateral US 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, US President Donald Trump enacted tight
restrictions on Venezuela's ability to access financial markets. Two years
later, the US government blacklisted Venezuela's Central Bank and put a general
embargo on Venezuelan state institutions. If any firm trades with Venezuela's public sector, it could face secondary sanctions. The US 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 US 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 its dangers. 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 Organisation, 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 Organisation 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-"due to flight restrictions"; the UAE sent the equipment via a
military transport plane.
Likewise, Arreaza told us, Venezuela has "received 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 the country 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 US 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. Last week, 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 US 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. 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
inter-state 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 embargoes against over fifty 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 US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was
asked about the half million Iraqi children who died because of US sanctions,
she said that those deaths were "a price worth paying." 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, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
He is the chief editor of LeftWord
Books 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 (The New Press,
2007), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the
Global South (Verso,
2013), The Death of the Nation and the Future of the
Arab Revolution (University
of California Press, 2016) and Red Star Over the Third World (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 towards the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America).
This article was produced by Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute