Iran, one of the countries worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic, began to slowly reopen its economy yesterday by easing travel restrictions and reopening businesses. This decision, made against the wishes of the Iranian COVID task force, is another example of how the Iranian government has ignored warnings and bungled the containment of the virus.
However, it’s important to contextualize the rapid spread of the disease within Iran, as well as the government’s decision to reopen its economy this quickly. Economic sanctions placed on Iran by the US make a concerted anti-virus response nearly impossible.
While US diplomats have said on numerous occasions that medical equipment and humanitarian aid are exempt from sanctions, the structure of the sanctions themselves makes importing nearly any good a serious challenge.
By sanctioning nearly all of the country’s banks, there are a severely limited number of financial institutions that are legally allowed to facilitate international transactions (exempt banks are typically too small to work with large orders, a serious issue when a need for mass quantities of medical equipment exists).
According to Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former Treasury Department sanctions official, the new sanctions imposed by the Trump administration in 2018 have targeted banks that “used to facilitate food, medicine and medical imports.”
While a lengthy list of medical supplies are banned from being imported into Iran, the Trump administration shortened the list of companies allowed to import exempt items this March (as well as the total dollar amount that can be imported), as the coronavirus had already begun taking its toll.
The result of these actions is that the Iranian economy is sapped of medical resources when they’re needed most. Medical workers in Iran have already named the sanctions as the principal reason for a lack of resources, and a Human Rights Watch report states that “redoubled US sanctions, whether intentional or not, pose a serious threat to Iranians’ right to health and access to essential medicines – and has almost certainly contributed to documented shortages.”
That report also detailed how vital imports are to the Iranian medical health system. It writes: “A third of the medications produced in Iran are actually dependent on imported materials… According to the head of the Medical Equipment office in the Ministry of Health, 70 percent of the country’s medical equipment is imported.”
The report concludes by noting that “current economic sanctions, despite the humanitarian exemptions, are causing unnecessary suffering to Iranian citizens afflicted with a range of diseases and medical conditions.” The fact that citizens, rather than the Iranian economy writ large or wealthy Iranian power brokers, are feeling the pain of the sanctions, is an important point.
It has been reiterated time and time again in the context of US-imposed sanctions, dating back at least thirty years, that policies that impose “collective punishment” (i.e. attacks on a population, rather than a government or military) are illegal under international human rights law.
Yet just two months ago, Mike Pompeo happily claimed that, “things are much worse for the Iranian people, and we are convinced that will lead the Iranian people to rise up and change the behavior of the regime.”
Given that the Iranian people’s lives being “much worse” is considered a desirable outcome by the Secretary of State, why would the US ease sanctions in the face of the COVID-19 outbreak?
The new sanctions have been bitterly condemned by a diverse array of actors exactly because of its effect on the Iranian population. UN commissioner for human rights Michelle Bachelet stressed that “the populations in these countries are in no way responsible for the policies being targeted by sanctions, and to varying degrees have already been living in a precarious situation for prolonged periods.”
UN Secretary General Guterres encouraged “the waiving of sanctions imposed on countries to ensure access to food, essential health supplies, and COVID-19 medical support… Let us remember that we are only as strong as the weakest health system in our interconnected world.” Human Rights Watch head Kenneth Roth stated that the sanctions are “compounding Iranians’ misery by depriving them of access to the critical medical resources they urgently need.”
The EU foreign policy chief said that the European Union would do what it can to help supply the Iranians with medical aid, and Britain is said to be privately pressing the Trump administration to ease sanctions.
There is no reason to believe that any of these pleas will be heeded. Just after the new sanctions were put into effect in 2018, the International Court of Justice ruled that the United States must remove “any impediments arising from the measures” relating to medicine, food, and humanitarian aid.
Rather than doing so, Secretary Pompeo charged that the court had “failed to recognize its lack of jurisdiction” and was peddling Iranian propaganda.
Given this, it should come as no surprise that the Trump administration responded to the international calls to ease sanctions in the face of the outbreak by actually tightening them few weeks ago.
As of this writing, the current death toll of the coronavirus in Iran stands at 5,209. A US military strike on Iran that killed even 1% of this would likely mean war between the two nations; if even 1% of the coronavirus death toll can be attributed to US sanctions, why should ordinary Iranians not view US sanctions as an act of hostility?
The US won’t help Iran contain the virus because the virus is currently assisting in advancing a key US foreign policy aim: making life worse for ordinary Iranians.
Image credit: Debra Sweet