UN prepares for second sanctions report

A UN team which has returned from a mission to assess the humanitarian implications of sanctions on Afghanistan, is preparing its report for submission to the Security Council in June. Its mandate is to identify adverse effects on Afghan civilians, who represent the poorest and most vulnerable people to have been subjected to UN sanctions.

This team has set a precedent in that its brief embraces a mandatory humanitarian monitoring mechanism under the sanctions imposed on Afghanistan. The team’s first report, issued in March, concluded that the humanitarian situation had not been “noticeably and additionally affected” by the new sanctions imposed under Resolution 1333 in January.
While Michael Semple, UN Regional Coordinating Officer for the Central Highlands and a member of the assessment team, said it was too early to draw any conclusions from this second report, he noted: “Given that the Afghan population has had to face the accumulated effects of two decades of war and an unprecedented drought, we should not be expecting sanctions to be responsible for all or most of what’s going on in Afghanistan.”

The stated intention behind the sanctions was to induce compliance from the Taliban to expel Saudi dissident Usama bin Ladin, and to end alleged Taliban support for international terrorism, while avoiding at all costs putting pressure on civilians. “The role of the monitoring mechanism is to find out if this is happening or not, [and] if [it is found that] there are adverse effects on civilians, to report what they are, and to come up with suggestions as to how we can mitigate or remove them,” Semple said.
Mitigation of any such effects is made possible through several humanitarian exemption clauses incorporated by the Security Council into both sanctions resolutions - 1267 and 1333.

The team’s research has two components - an assessment of the vulnerability of the population, and a “causal” analysis, which studies the possible direct and indirect effects of sanctions and reflects the likelihood that the sanctions have led to increased suffering of Afghans.

Semple stressed that the sanctions on Afghanistan were highly limited measures, which did not embrace a comprehensive economic embargo, and it was therefore “unrealistic to expect generalised economic effects”. The new measures imposed under Resolution 1333 include an end to military assistance to the Taliban, an extension of the ban on all international flights other than those exempted, a ban on overseas travel by Taliban officials, and the closure of Taliban missions abroad.

The second component of the assessment - the “causal studies” - was where Semple said the team was doing “the real sanctions work”, which was to trace the effects of the implementation of the measures provided for under the resolution, and to establish whether these effects had or had not led to increased suffering.

Although limited, the sanctions imposed under Resolution 1267 - in particular the ban on assets of members of the Taliban - turned out to be implemented in the form of freezing all public sector assets in Afghanistan. “All state bodies are taken as being under control of the Taliban - including the Afghanistan bank, the assets of which have been frozen,” Semple said. In an earlier report, the team suggested that this measure might be impacting on investment, which could affect the provision of financial services in the country; this was a point the team expected to elaborate on in its June findings. “We have to distinguish the effect of sanctions from the effects of the war, the drought and from other political processes. And the reality of banking services in Afghanistan is that the level of confidence in the banks had clearly dropped during the civil war period.”

One controversy the team faced was over the relationship between sanctions, exchange rates and prices. The March report concluded that the introduction of the latest sanctions had led to the collapse of the national currency, the Afghani, which fell 18 percent against the US dollar. The report noted, however, that for a number of reasons the prices of the main food commodities did not reflect this fall. “So, in hard currency terms, the price of foodstuff in Afghanistan went down [during] the first couple of months of this year.
That’s because the Afghan economy has been extremely successful in using the trade routes and the private sector to bring in food. Now there’s a lot of food coming in from Pakistan and from Central Asia. Whereas a crisis of confidence was revealed in the March report, which could have been expected to lead to temporarily increased food prices - in the event, it didn’t. That’s a good example of where we are engaged in a technical exercise that is not prejudged. The hypothesis was that prices would also rise in response to the exchange rate; the outcome was something different,” Semple said.

The March report also stated clear concerns over the safety of civil aviation, given that Afghanistan’s Ariana Airlines continued to operate domestic flights, although it was banned from operating scheduled international flights. Under the ban, unless Ariana had the prior agreement of the Security Council Sanctions Committee, it could not undertake required maintenance flights outside the country. According to Semple, there had now been “clear acceptance” that maintaining civil aviation safety was a humanitarian issue. As a result, the team had been asked to make simple suggestions as to how Ariana could benefit from existing humanitarian exemptions to be able to carry out its maintenance tasks.

The team is also committed to assessing the impact of the arms embargo. This measure, Semple said, also impacted on the coordination of de-mining efforts being carried out by the UN countrywide. Much of the equipment used in de-mining operations was military equipment, which was outlawed under the embargo. “There are exemptions available whereby the de-mining groups can get permission to supply these things. Through monitoring, we can assess whether these mechanisms are working or not, and whether any problems have been caused for the demining programme by the imposition of sanctions.”

The team’s final report is due to be delivered before the expiry of the sanctions and in time for the Security Council to refer to when deciding on the future of the measures. “Another key feature of Resolution 1333 is that sanctions are not indefinite this time. They don’t just go on for ever if nobody makes a decision. If no decision is taken, the sanctions will automatically come to an end after a year,” Semple said.

The team met a range of sectors in Afghan society, from Taliban officials to the business community, civilians, the displaced, drought-hit farmers and aid workers. The consistent message was that Afghans simply wanted the assessment team to “report the facts”. In a sense, Semple said, the team was not being asked to prejudge the issue.
The consensus among Afghans was that they were reassured that the UN had built a monitoring mechanism into its sanctions regime.