Iraq, Sanctions and Security: A Critique

Abstract

Women’s pain and death blurs the distinction between war and peace. Women are disproportionately starved, attacked physically, emotionally and psychologically, and killed during both war and peace. This paper focuses on the sanctions imposed against Iraq by the United Nations Security Council (“Se- curity Council”) in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 and the on-going purported threat posed to international peace and security by the Iraqi regime. Intended as a humane alternative to war, the sanctions have nonetheless lead to such high levels of death and suffering, particularly among women and children, that commentators have labeled them “genocide,” a “medieval military siege,” and “a humanitarian disaster comparable to the worst catastrophes of the past decades.”

Not surprisingly, critics of the Security Council have turned a plethora of human rights and humanitarian instruments against the sanctions regime. Feminist legal scholarship as well as scholarship from criminology, political science, sociology, peace studies and other disciplines help reveal that the definition of security that informs the Security Council and Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter makes certain policy options in relation to Iraq appear natural and necessary, while rendering others more obscure.

This paper argues that a re-definition of “security” under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter is needed. Feminists have already spearheaded a redefinition of seemingly unassailable and steadfast legal terms such as “genocide” and “torture” so that they better reflect the experiences generated by the interactions of race, gender and other constituents of identity with international law. The term “security” must be unpacked and redefined in the same way. This re-interpretive task remains a crucial but unfinished part of thinking about women’s relationship to war.

Keywords: Iraq, sanctions, security council, international peace and security