UN rapporteur: US sanctions on Venezuela are ‘blunt’ way to engineer regime change, causing blanket starvation
US
sanctions against Venezuela are like “going into microsurgery with
a kitchen knife” and are holding an entire population hostage, the
UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive
measures told The Grayzone.
by
Michael Selby-Green
Part
3 - Sanctions as Washington’s replacement for military intervention
On 28
January US secretary of state Mike Pompeo defended the measures
implemented against PDVSA. He said: “These new sanctions do not
target the innocent people of Venezuela and will not prohibit
humanitarian assistance including the provision of medicine and
medical devices, which are desperately needed after years of economic
destruction under Maduro’s rule.”
“The
United States will continue to take concrete and forceful action
against those who oppose the peaceful restoration of democracy in
Venezuela.”
UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet has also criticised
the Venezuelan government.
In a
statement to the Human Rights Council on March 20, she condemned the
“dramatically” deteriorating economic and social rights in
the country and highlighted reported abuses and alleged killings by
pro-government security forces which she said her office is
investigating.
The next
day, National Security Adviser John Bolton warned that the toughest
sanctions were yet to come, writing on Twitter: “Unless Maduro’s
usurpation ends, he and his cronies will be strangled financially.
The window is closing.”
Erich
Ferrari, a lawyer and founder of a Washington DC-based law firm
specializing in US economic sanctions, told The Grayzone that
an idea has developed in Washington among some decision makers that
the US can get whatever it wants by applying sanctions.
Ferrari
believes the US has moved from using sanctions as a tool to achieve
focused policy objectives to making them a strategy in their own
right replacing military intervention.
“Sanctions
used to be a tool to gain leverage as part of a boarder diplomatic
strategy. Now sanctions are the strategy,” he said. “I
think they view it as: ‘We have a larger political problem with
Venezuela, these are some of the bad things Venezuela are doing to
justify our sanctions.’”
“The
American appetite for military intervention has thankfully gone down
and this is seen as replacement to that. It’s still violence. It’s
not physical violence, it’s economic violence that we’re
perpetrating against others who we believe to be acting contrary to
our interests.”
Ferrari
said sanctions are easier to sell to the US public because few people
understand them, and soldiers don’t need to be sent to fight when
the US financial system and the dollar can be leveraged instead.
Jazairy
has appealed to the United States for the sanctions to be lifted and
for Venezuelans to be allowed to resolve the crisis internally, he
told The Grayzone.
The UN
special rapporteur successfully helped negotiate an end to US
economic sanctions against Sudan on October 6, 2017. He applauded the
United States for that decision and called on leaders to take similar
action again with Venezuela.
“This
is a recognition by the United Nations, that those sanctions that are
not approved by the Security Council have an adverse impact,”
he said.
The UN
official called for the effects of the sanctions to be closely
monitored in the meantime, so they can be quickly reversed if the
situation in Venezuela starts “exploding.”
When
lives are threatened by food and medicine shortages, the difference
between life and death can be a matter of hours and days rather then
months, he said.
“We
[special rapporteurs] are all independent,” Jazairy continued.
“We don’t have an axe to grind in politics, and we just think
of defending the people.”
“International
humanitarian law says that it’s a crime to take a population
hostage. Why are these people taken hostage? Solve the problem
between political leaders, but don’t take innocent individuals as
pawns in this political game that’s going on in Venezuela.”
***
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