With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders [...]]]>
With Iran seemingly recalcitrant on its nuclear program and the United States unwilling to put up “robust economic, political and strategic incentives that will give Iran’s leaders reason to cooperate,” many proponents of escalating measure hold out hope that the people of Iran to rise up and oust their regime due to ever tightening sanctions and perhaps even an eventual military attack.
While a regime change as a result of military attack is regularly dismissed by people in the know — just ask top Iranian activists what they think — far less attention is given to the viability of tough sanctions leading to a mass uprising.
Remember that the U.S. State Department has admitted its sanctions have expanded to pressuring ordinary Iranians — Jamshid Average, if you will — thus conflating the people with the government of Iran.
Mansourian examines precedents — focusing on the failures of broad-based sanctions against Iraq and targeted ones against Zimbabwe — and contrasts these with the situation in Iran. He shows that even the targeted sanctions will prove counterproductive, because they are crushing Iran’s fragile economy and thereby destroying the middle class that drives the Iranian opposition.
Mansourian writes:
Many years of sanctions coupled with sub-optimal economic policies in Iran has resulted in a weak economy and a fragile middle-class. The latest round of UN, U.S., and EU sanctions on Iran is likely to drive millions into poverty and destitution. As economic opportunities for the growth of a solid middle-class disappear, the young Iranians that have historically been the agents of change in the country will lose their social base. Ironically, then, sanctions may do more to increase the power of the Iranian government and to weaken the domestic opposition movement, to the ostensible detriment of U.S. interests
The Iraq example is especially compelling. In the 1996, Secretary of State Madeline Albright notoriously told a CBS reporter that sanctions were “worth it,” even though a half a million dead Iraqi children had died. Iraq’s infant mortality rose from one in 30 in 1990 to 1 in 8 in 1997. “Worth what?” one might ask, considering that as far as the hawks were concerned Iraq still needed to be invaded.
Note that Mansouraian’s analysis takes for granted the questionable notion, put forward by sanctions-hawks that the Green Movement is anywhere united behind regime change rather than incremental reform.
But sanctions as a means to regime change isn’t the only goal based on questionable premises. Even the notion of sanctions as a means to change Iranian behavior on the nuclear program is unlikely to succeed.
At a conference called “War With Iran?” last month at Columbia University, Prof. Richard Bulliet expressed fear that the U.S. Iran policy may be heading down the same path as Iraq policy — implementing a sanctions regime that can never work, followed by a military attack (video):
After 1991, the U.S. put sanctions on Iraq that could not possibly be satisfied. Iraq could say, ‘Okay, we have completely given up WMD.’ And we would say, ‘We don’t believe you. And the only way we can be sure is to get rid of your regime’ … My worry is that we’re moving a little bit in this direction with Iran, that we are creating a focus on a sanctions regime that it may not be possible for Iran to satisfy the fears of the people who are putting on the sanctions.
Give a read to Andrew Cockburn’s essay on the impact of sanctions on Iraq in July’s London Review of Books. The developments with regards to Iran may well seem eerily similar.
]]>She was a brave little girl, who believed in her right to choose how to live her life. Aged 12, as a minor she remained nameless in the news.
She lived in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the green, misty mountains along the Mozambican border. On weekends, people dressed in flowing white robes, the men bearded, [...]]]>
In Bissau - too young to carry the burden of marriage. Photo: M.Sayagues
She was a brave little girl, who believed in her right to choose how to live her life. Aged 12, as a minor she remained nameless in the news.
She lived in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands, the green, misty mountains along the Mozambican border. On weekends, people dressed in flowing white robes, the men bearded, holding carved wooden canes, gather under the masasa trees. They belong to the Johanne Marange apostolic sect. Peaceful people – with a nasty habit of marrying young girls.
The girl was given as second wife to her older sister’s husband, a pastor in his fifties. She escaped to her uncle’s home but he brought her back. She got a beating, and escaped again. She sought the school teacher and he brought her back. She got another hiding, and escaped again. She went to the police, and they brought her back. Then she hanged herself.
That was in 2001. Her death was just a news blip among violent farm invasions.
Although against the law, child weddings continue in Zimbabwe, and likely on the rise due to poverty, says a new study by Women and Law in Southern Africa. Adults and social institutions still fail to protect girls.
Parents: criminals or ignorant?
Years later I did a story on child marriage in Gabu, in eastern Guinea Bissau. Interviewing parents and chiefs, I heard that misery, coupled with fear of AIDS and out of wedlock pregnancy, drove the practice.
The parents I talked to were ignorant and poor, not evil. They did not know any better. They lived in a failed state that fails to deliver basic services. Just to finish primary school in rural Bissau is a victory.
In April, a Mauritanian mother living near Cadiz, Spain, was sentenced to 17 years in prison for marrying her daughter, then aged 13, to a distant cousin, and forcing her to have sex with him.
The wedding took place in Mauritania in 2005 and the sex in Spain in 2007 when the husband visited his teen wife, who continued living with her parents. He got a 13-year jail sentence, and her illiterate father, 18 months.
The girl’s two younger siblings returned to Mauritania, where protests have unfurled.
Child marriage should be eradicated like smallpox – but is this harsh, family-splitting prison sentence the best solution?
A short stay in prison and extended community service at a Muslim NGO that promotes gender equality would emphasize education over repression.
From another perspective: what mechanisms does Spain have to teach its family laws to its immigrant cheap labour? Driving a car without a licence is not allowed. Work permits could be tied to a quick test: knowing Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, prison sentences for genital cutting and child marriage, and local laws that protect the rights of little girls.
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