The UNSC and the Case of Yemen

In October of 2017, the United States announced sanctions on Yemeni individuals and companies in attempts to oppose the moves of Islamic State. The US asserted that these sanctions were a way of “aggressively targeting radical extremists in Yemen and the surrounding region who pose a direct threat to the security of the United States, Yemen, and the international community”. Despite the apparent altruistic and paternalistic motives for these sanctions, there are, of course, unintended consequences, and concerns have been raised by humanitarian aid workers “about the human costs of sanctions”, most evident in the famine that has been affecting Yemen since 2016. Although the Yemeni Civil War, which broke out in 2015, is inarguably the major contributor to the ongoing famine in Yemen, the 2017 US sanctions also share some responsibility. Alongside increasing tensions between the US and Yemen, it is not surprising that many are perceiving this hunger crisis to be a greater symptom of the collapse of Yemen’s economy, and the cause of this economic collapse to be due to the effects of economic sanctions. In a column in The New York Times published in September of 2018, it was stated that the US “is helping to kill, maim and starve Yemeni children. At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine caused not by crop failures but by our actions and those of our allies” namely Saudi Arabia. This clearly dictates the role of the US in the Yemeni famine, and firmly establishes economic sanctions as both a political tool and a weapon in the ongoing war in Yemen.

Yet this is not an isolated case; one only has to look to Iraq and the economic sanctions placed on them by the UNSC, to see that sanctions have been previously, and will continuously be recognised as wholly damaging and debilitating to vulnerable populations, especially children. Crossette explains that “As many as 576,000 Iraqi children may have died since the end of the Persian Gulf war because of economic sanctions imposed by the Security Council” clearly demonstrating the devastating effects sanctions are capable of imparting. Evidently, the UN has condemned both the Iraqi economic sanctions, and named the Yemen famine as “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” illuminating the growing disparities between the aims of the UN’s humanitarian arm - which “offers palliatives for the alleviation of suffering” - and the motives of it’s Security Council - which “is intent on continuing sanctions”. Thus, contradictions and discrepancies not just between the UN and the UNSC, but also with the UNSC itself are becoming more and more apparent, as it’s threats against “countries who use sanctions and hunger as weapons of war” are starting to ring false in the wake of the UNSC’s own use and approval of economic sanctions. It seems hypocrisy is an ominous and growing presence within the UNSC, and within the United States’ own foreign policy too. In their own fight against terror threats the US have contributed to the suffering and starvation of millions - not just in Yemen - and thus the hypocrisy of powerful international actors becomes evident once again.

To understand why sanctions are enforced then, when it seems they have consistently caused more suffering than reconciliation, it is necessary to look at the effectiveness of sanctions as both a political tool and a weapon of warfare. With regard to the spatial model of bargaining in international crises, Morgan and Schwebach conclude that sanctions will not work in many cases and that “there is little evidence indicating that sanctions alone have been effective in past instances”. They assert that the conditions under which sanctions are issued are essential when regarding their outcomes and the notion of their success.

However, although they recognise that the theory does suggest that certain conditions dictate the effectiveness of sanctions, they conclude that “the impact of sanctions, on average, should be negligible over the population of cases”, reaffirming that “there appears to be no benefit in applying sanctions generally”. It seems that sanctions have become little more than power-plays; political statements; harmless in the eyes of the powerful forces like the US and UNSC, but devastating in terms of the real-life, and long-term consequences they impose onto millions of vulnerable people. 

In this sense, can the detrimental and devastating effects of the sanctions placed upon Yemen really be justified in terms of their effectiveness against the reduction of Islamic State forces in the country? It seems that even political scientists who argue in favour of sanctions “agree that sanctions are unlikely to bring about major policy shifts in a target nation” and yet the US has not yet lifted the sanctions they issued in 2017, despite their contributions to the disastrous and destructive nature of the Yemeni famine.