They argue that such bleak economic conditions can lead aggrieved citizens to turn to terrorism.
“When realising their horrendous economic life, aggrieved poor people are more likely to support or engage in terrorist activity… (because) the imposition of economic sanctions quickly precipitates the downward fall of the economic welfare of poor people who have to absorb the sharp economic pain (as) sanctions take away the last hope of the poor people”.
Ricard Haas argues that sanctions are blunt instruments that often produce unintended and undesirable consequences because innocents are affected because sanctions harm the population at large and can bring about the undesired effect of bolstering the targetted regime, triggering large scale emigration and retarding the emergency of a middle class and civil society.
Five million Zimbabweans are reported to have left the country to seek greener pastures resulting in massive brain drain.
Richard Hanania says sanctions have massive humanitarian costs and are not only ineffective in achieving the intended objective but they are likely to be counter-productive.
“US sanctions have harmed millions and led to a death count that trumps that of most wars of the last two decades,” Hanania says. “Policymakers’ willful ignorance of the empirical evidence showing that sanctions do not work (except hurting innocent people), and their failure to combine economic coercion with diplomacy, strongly suggests that sanctions are enacted mainly for the sake of domestic political goals rather than to achieve foreign policy objectives”.
Hanania asks, why then does the United States use sanctions so often?
His answer is: “Sanctions are an ‘easy’ option because the death and destruction that they may cause are unlikely to stir large-scale domestic opposition. In addition to the fact that foreigners cannot easily influence American politics, people are subject to psychological barriers that impede a full appreciation of the damages caused by sanctions.”
He argues that while millions are harmed by sanctions, Americans are more concerned about school shootings, terrorism and shark attacks.
“While nationalism and in-group bias ensure that our politics values the lives of Americans more than those of foreigners, immediate and clear harms to those living abroad, such as the bombing of civilians, can occasionally cause a domestic backlash. By contrast, economic sanctions, with harms that are largely hidden, have no hope of stirring up even limited reaction similar to what we see when innocent foreigners are directly killed in American military attacks,” he writes.
“If bombings caused as much economic and humanitarian destruction as sanctions did, the harm would be indisputable and such policies would be widely acknowledged as war crimes.”
Unfortunately, though the Zimbabwean government has tabulated the harm that sanctions have caused over the past 20 years, some Zimbabweans are defending sanctions, agreeing with the United States that they do not hurt the poor but those “targetted” and that the country’s problems are caused by the country’s leaders who are abusing their power and are enriching themselves and their cronies.
They are even buying the ruse that the United Sates has provided US$3.5 billion in aid to Zimbabwe over the past 40 years to cushion the poor when studies by United States academics and experts have shown that out of every dollar that the US says it has given in aid, 99 cents go back to an American corporation.
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