S5E7 Sanctions: Do they help or harm civilians?
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We want sanctions! We want justice! We want action! We want boycotts!

2025 is looking like the peak year for sanctions, not least because of Trump's willingness to punitively pursue American foreign policy at any cost. They've been rising astronomically since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Now the UK and our allies will begin to impose the sanctions on Russia that we have already prepared.

Russia is the most heavily sanctioned country in the world, with more sanctions than the rest of the top 10 contenders put together. Iran has been tangled in Western and UN sanctions, particularly since the collapse of its nuclear deal. They cannot have a nuclear weapon. It's very simple. If I think that they will have a nuclear weapon, despite what I just said, I think that's going to be very unfortunate for them.

Syria, for some reason, still faces thousands of sanctions despite the fall of the dictator these sanctions were designed to punish. Trump's even sanctioned the International Criminal Court. International condemnation is growing louder after President Donald Trump imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court. Sanctions have become a buzzword for powerful politicians and human rights activists alike. Hold up for a second. What are sanctions?

So, sanctions are one price that governments pay if they step out of line with the international community. They're controls or restrictions placed on individuals or on countries that limit their freedom. For example, freezing assets or imposing trade restrictions. The heaviest sanctions are

are those placed on an entire country's economy. Blanket bans on banks transacting with that country or companies buying and selling certain things from there. I associate sanctions with human rights disputes. So if a dictator violates the rights of his own citizens, others might sanction them, like in Belarus? Yeah, Belarus, it's one of the most heavily sanctioned countries in the world.

The EU, US and UK imposed sanctions a few years ago when President Lukashenko apparently rigged an election and then ruthlessly suppressed the mass protests that followed. The European Union rejects the result of Belarus' disputed presidential election.

Following an emergency video conference, the EU will soon impose sanctions against a substantial number of people responsible for vote rigging and the violent suppression of protests in the ex-Soviet country. I also associate sanctions with pressuring for peace. So when countries like Iran or North Korea have been suspected of developing nuclear weapons, other countries have sanctioned them to pressure them into backing down and reduce their economic ability to continue.

The United Nations has strongly condemned North Korea's fifth and most powerful nuclear test to date, agreeing immediately to draw up significant new sanctions.

Sure. But in truth, there are often secondary or even ulterior motives to these sanctions. This might be simply looking like you're doing something without really doing much, or maybe more sinister, pushing geopolitical agendas under the guise of humanitarian ones, or even looking to undermine an economic rival in the global market. Now, in these instances, the well-being of civilians in sanctioned countries, it's not so much the prize as it is the price.

Okay, give me an example. The most infamous example of sanctions harming civilians would have to be Iraq in the 1990s. US sanctions in Iraq, which on the surface targeted Iraq's apparent weapons of mass destructions and regional behaviour, more likely designed to topple Saddam Hussein's regime...

These both failed to topple Hussein and also became one of the biggest stated grievances driving the rise of al-Qaeda. And meanwhile, though, the toll on civilians was devastating. These sanctions are estimated by UNICEF to have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. The exact numbers have been disputed, but what is not disputed is the fact that they turned a modern oil economy into one of the most impoverished on the planet. In a number of years,

Per capita income dropped to an eighth of what it had been, just as prices of staples like wheat and rice increased several hundredfold in months. The education system, which was really revered and had been funded by oil revenue and had also produced historically high literacy rates among girls as well as boys, collapsed. So one in five children stopped attending school and child labour became prevalent. I'm literally shocked right now. So...

That was largely from sanctions. Yeah. Wow. And the thing is, you know, these lessons, they haven't been learned. A report in 2019 found that as many as 40,000 Venezuelans may have

died as a result of U.S. sanctions, which, by the way, Trump has just increased this week. That's right. The White House just posting on social media here just a short time ago that the president is going to impose what they're calling secondary sanctions on Venezuela, secondary tariffs, I should say, on Venezuela, using the tariffs as if they are a sanction. So what the president is saying here is that because of immigration and legal concerns he has with Venezuela and the way they're negotiating with the United States, any country that does business

with Venezuela will see that 25% tariff kick in. That's an innovative use of the tariff power, to say the least. I have not seen that before. I have to go back and check sort of what the precedents are for that. Venezuelan sanctions are seen by experts as basically murderous. I just genuinely didn't question sanctions in terms of their intentions or values for civilians under Venezuelan

oppressive governments. I genuinely thought sanctions were typically humanitarian and not sanctioning was a form of appeasement, right? Sanctions is the first thing activists call for when foreign rulers break international law. It's such a go-to.

Russia invaded Ukraine. All I heard in the news was sanction sanctions. We must sanction Russia. So why have I never heard these reports about the impact of sanctions on civilians? Well, I think you just put your finger on it. That's why, you know, so many people don't question this because there is so rarely coverage in the West about the civilian impact.

impact of sanctions. Sanctions are treated like abstract, moral, intellectual, geopolitical questions for people to debate at the dinner table. I don't know, I think that they indulge our strongly ingrained sense of superior Western civility.

But the key reason we lack perspective is because the voices missing from the debate, from the coverage, from the decision making, like always, are the people most affected. I see why you've brought this to MediaStorm. Yeah. So ordinary people from the countries hit by sanctions are being ignored. I'm

I'm also guessing mostly global south countries, developing countries, civilians. Yeah, completely. And there's another level to that as well, because while harming civilians is often an unintended or secondary consequence of sanctions, in some cases, it's the very point of them. Explain that. Often the idea behind sanctions is to speed up or even initiate the collapse of a foreign oppressive government, or at least a government that the West doesn't like, by devastating the economy,

So much that the people get so depressed and frustrated that they rise up and overthrow the government. What? Like basically getting people to do the dirty work? Yes, starving them so that they have no choice. In theory, governments imposing sanctions would say we're making civilians suffer in the short term so they rise up against their oppressors and don't have to keep suffering in the long term. That's so patronising. Yeah, yeah. The thing is, the lives of civilians in these countries...

are often just that worthless to the leaders discussing these strategies. I'm going to play you a clip from 1996. It's quite historic. It features Madeleine Albright, who was then Clinton's Secretary of State. And she's responding to a journalist asking about the civilian cost of U.S. sanctions on Iraq.

At that time, the estimated child death toll resulting from these sanctions was 500,000. Now that exact figure has been retrospectively deemed unreliable due to Hussein potentially exaggerating the figures. However, this at the time was believed to be the number. And the journalist asks her, 500,000 children, was it worth it? Here's the clip. We have heard that a half a million children have died.

I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? I think this is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it.

That is so messed up. I can't believe I didn't even know this about sanctions. Yeah, I think that logic, you're right, is so messed up. And it's also a lie, like a starved and uneducated population is far less able to save themselves. Right. The thing is, we throw it around in political discussions like it's just an accepted good. Which

Which is easy to get away with if we don't report on the true civilian impacts and centre civilian voices in the debate. Exactly. If we want to understand whether sanctions help or harm civilians, the best people to ask are them.

I live in the most sanctioned country in the world. There are more sanctions here than in North Korea, Syria and Iran, some down. Iraqi farmers say they're struggling to make a living. They blame United Nations sanctions dating back to the era of Saddam Hussein. They should take their hands off our country. Hey, hey, ho, ho, UN sanctions have got to go.

Welcome to MediaStorm, the news podcast that starts with the people who are normally asked last. I'm Matilda Mallinson. And I'm Helena Wadia. This week's MediaStorm. Sanctions. Do they help or harm civilians?

Welcome to the MediaStorm studio. Our guest today is a journalist specialising in US foreign policy and civil liberties at Dropsite News, who has reported across many outlets, including The Intercept and Al Jazeera, and appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC and more. Researching this topic, he has been one of the most consistent voices and reporters on the real-life impact of sanctions on ordinary civilians.

Tuning in from New York, welcome Mutaza Hussain. Thanks for having me. Hi. Now, listeners, you'll also hear voices from other countries affected by sanctions throughout this show who have spoken to MediaStorm before. But yeah, researching this topic, Mutaza, something we found was that all roads lead to your reporting. You are one of the most dogged reporters and sceptical commentators on this topic of sanctions. Why are you so critical?

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, when I was growing up, one of the big issues in the news at the time, when I was very young, I would say, was the issue of sanctions on Iraq. Those sanctions destroyed Iraq. And some estimates say hundreds of thousands of children were killed by the sanctions as well, too. It was one particular example. And I recall reading this and being horrified at the time, even when I was quite young. It's basically a form of warfare.

And it can be just as violent as any other form of warfare, even more so and more indiscriminate. But we tend to think of it as somehow softer. It really isn't. And the experience of Iraq has now been replicated in other countries as well, too. So I think that that's what originally piqued my interest in the subject and got me to look into it further. I think for me as well, I've been affected by violence.

hearing human stories from people who've been directly affected that I haven't read about growing up and reading about it in the media. For example, a person I know well, a Syrian refugee in the UK, tried to send pretty much most of his savings to a cousin in need in Egypt.

And because the transaction went through a currency exchange, it went through the US channels. This is pretty standard. And when it went through the US channels, it was seized for some loose connection they had decided to the US.

big wide world of terrorist activities. The money is gone. He was given basically no information, no route to attempt to claim it back. And this made me really wonder about the power imbalance. I wonder if there's a case that it could even help countries like the US as they sort of have a gatekeeping role in financial transactions in the world stage. It's a fantastic point. I've had the same experience dealing with people in different parts of the world whose countries are sanctioned and

And it makes life impossible. It makes life very, very difficult. That's actually also a very radicalizing experience, seeing the inequalities and access to basic financial mechanisms. When you can't use your bank, you can't send a wire transfer, your life can become impossible very quickly. Not for any personal thing that they did, but because of these very arbitrary and opaque rules that cannot be challenged and that are put in place for different political reasons, it's

So, you know, I'll give you an example. I got really into Bitcoin some years ago and not because of the financial speculation aspect, because specifically what you're referring to, that I needed to pay people I know for work, you know, colleagues and journalists in war zones of Syria, Afghanistan, things like that, to remunerate them for the work they did for us.

But it was impossible to pay them. We couldn't pay them because they could not even understand the legal scrutiny that's taking place against them or every single person in the country just by virtue of living there. You know, to this very day, I have this problem. How do you pay people who are in sanctioned countries? Yeah, and the inequality is very obvious in the situation. And while it's hurting civilians, there's also the question of how effective it is at actually hurting the people it's trying to hurt. You shared a report recently on...

showing certain Iranian crude exports to China had remained stable despite US sanctions. And you wrote, due to overuse globally, the sanctions regime gets weaker every year. What did you mean by that? Yeah, the reason I said it's getting weaker, it's twofold.

First of all, there's so many sanctioned countries now that they have their own little world separately now. When you sanction Russia and Iran and many, many other places, they start doing business with each other and they start building their own financial payment mechanisms effectively. If the global economy that's sanctioned starts to look almost as big as the unsanctioned economy, then you've created just another parallel economy which could be self-sustaining on its own. That's what's been going on for a very, very long time.

Thank you. Let's turn now to the mainstream media and its continuous failures to humanise debates about sanctions.

In 2022, Venezuelan journalist Ricardo Vaz published a scathing piece arguing that Western news outlets obscured the fatal impact of US sanctions. He cited language still used across the mainstream, like saying Washington had sanctioned the government rather than sanctioned the people of Venezuela, despite them experiencing the largest economic depression in the history of the Western Hemisphere and one of the biggest ongoing exoduses.

So Vaz, he also lists articles that quote White House representatives saying things like the unilateral lifting of sanctions on Venezuela is not going to improve the lives of Venezuelans and then failing to ask

a single Venezuelan what they think. Here is the closing statement in his article. He says, with their calibrated efforts to conceal the consequences of sanctions, Western journalists have in fact made thousands and thousands of Venezuelan victims invisible to the public. It is they who deserve to be sanctioned. How would you categorize Western mainstream media coverage and debate around sanctions? Is it fair to say that

civilian voices are sidelined in Western coverage of sanctions? At least in the US, there's incuriosity and a lack of awareness people have about this whole sanctions regime. It's a very elite-driven enterprise. So where it does get reported sometimes, yeah, it's kind of reported as matter-of-factly. Well, you know, several more entities...

in an ex-country were sanctioned. But there won't really be any analysis of what this means for people practically in that country. When you sanction the central bank of a country, what does that mean exactly? For the average person there, that could mean horrifying levels of inflation suddenly. Their whole life savings could be wiped out in a night. The country may not be able to import medicine. It makes life very, very difficult and very, very painful for many people. But that angle is not

very manifest, reported more boldly in a matter-of-fact way. And maybe if it was reported, people still wouldn't care. I don't know. But the thing is, it should be there for the record. Mataza, what is the impact of these voices of civilians being sidelined? How can we learn from the past if we don't listen to them? That's a good question. I feel like we're not learning from the past. We're kind of repeating the same errors before. And something I've realized is something kind of chilling and daunting is

But for a lot of people and policymakers, the purpose actually is to hurt the population. The goal they're actually seeking, whether they say it or not, is that they want to cause so much harm to the population that they just snap and they overthrow the government. They're not actually aimed at affecting a change in policy. That's why I find them to be more indefensible in many ways. They're trying to just destroy these populations, literally using economic warfare.

They want to inflict maximum harm or maximum pressure on the population, not necessarily for any obtainable goal, like maybe just to hurt them, but if they decide to collapse society and overthrow the government, start a civil war, things like that, then great. That's a great outcome. So it's a very sinister, sinister kind of system, people picking lines. Let's now look at some of the current sanctioned stories appearing in our headlines. Firstly, WPB.

We'll take an example where civilians are calling on the international community to stop sanctioning their government, Syria.

In December, Syrian revolutionaries toppled the country's dictator Bashar al-Assad, who had waged a bloody war against his people for over a decade, indiscriminately bombing the oldest populated cities in the world, disappearing, torturing and murdering Syrians at whim, using chemical weapons against them and causing the world's biggest refugee crisis.

His repression was the main stated cause for the majority of international sanctions against Syria, which targeted the military, tech and financial sectors, as well as individual members of government. Firstly, did these sanctions help topple Assad in your view, Muteza? No. So I wouldn't say the sanctions necessarily are what caused the government to collapse. I think they helped weaken the government such that, you know, the soldiers didn't want to fight. They hadn't been paid in a long time.

on the government side, it definitely had an impact in my opinion. But the government fell for many, many reasons. And even if it was aimed at the government, it did impact ordinary people as well too. Yeah, you know, I was there about a month and a half ago. I've never seen a country with that level of devastation economically. People don't have anything in Syria. They don't have an

enough food, they don't have electricity, they don't have basics of life. It was a middle-class society economically prior to the war. It's not all because of sanctions. It's also because of corruption and the impact of the war itself. But sanctions are a very primary part of it, to be honest. But the issue is now, the government has fallen, and the sanctions were there in theory to be

because of the human rights abuses of the government. But now the government, which did those acts, is gone. And the people who ostensibly were being protected by the sanctions, the Syrian people, they are still sanctioned now. Which doesn't make a lot of sense morally. That's a great question. People have a question very, very strongly. And I think ultimately now the sanctions are becoming a form of leverage, whereas, well, you know, we sanction Assad, but we're going to keep them on until...

You give us X, Y and Z and then maybe we'll take them off. And, you know, those sanctions are still impacting people. They're impacting the victims of Assad, even though they were in theory aimed at Assad himself. He's not even there anymore. Thank you for explaining that. The next example we want to look at is an example of

where civilians are calling for sanctions from the international community, but against a different government that is abusing them. We spoke to a Ukrainian campaigner calling for wide-sweeping sanctions against Russian forces.

fossil fuels. She comes from a grassroots group called Razan We Stand, which argues that anything less than full sanctions amounts to helping fund Putin's war in Ukraine and funding a lot of money. Here's what Ilona Alexioum from Razan We Stand told us about why they are calling for even more sanctions against Russia.

Most of our team members are Ukrainian, including me, and we know the actual cost of the fossil fuel business. Everyone has lost something in this war. We have seen the pain and destruction, witnessed family being broken and watched children dying.

that's awful. Since the start of full-scale invasion Russia earned over 800 billion euro from fossil fuel exports. Money which continue finance like bombs, missiles, drones which killing our people, our friends, our family. No.

It's not okay. And despite of this, Western governments continue to allow these billions to keep flowing into Russia's war chest. That's why we are fighting against the fossil fuel evil to ensure that no one else experiences the same suffering and that our children are safe.

What do you think of existing Western sanctions against Russia? Do they go far enough? The European Union, United Kingdom and US have taken steps to restrict Russian fossil fuel exports, but these measures are fragmented and inconsistent.

For example, only 25 vessels from Russia's massive Shadow Fleet are sanctioned by all four major jurisdictions? Leaving hundreds of ships free to move Putin's oil and gas around the world? If we are serious about stopping Putin, we need: I write coordinated sanctions that leave no room for evasion.

What would you say to people who worry that sanctions are a form of collective punishment and ultimately harm civilians more than they harm malicious regimes? This is false narratives that Putin and his allies love to promote.

Sanctions are not collective punishment, they are a necessary tool to cut off the resources that fool war and protect innocent lives. Also, fossil fuels not only finance wars, they also drive climate collapse. Our fight is not just for Ukraine, it's for a world where fossil fuel sanctions accelerate the global shift to clean energy, which benefits all nations by reducing climate risk and securing energy independence.

Mataza, Ilana denied these sanctions would amount to collective punishment. Would you challenge that? And if so, how do you balance victims of war calling for us to stop funding aggressive governments with concerns about collectively punishing all Russians?

Yeah, that's a great point. So, you know, we've been talking a lot about broad, you know, countrywide sanctions and so forth. You know, I would say that not all sanctions are inappropriate. Some of them actually can play a constructive role, particularly sanctions which are targeted at specific elites, which are involved in human rights abuses and so forth. I think that what sanctions, when they can become inappropriate, is when they are sectoral sanctions, sanctioning entire communities.

sector of a country's economy, that inevitably does collectively punish people. You know, the situation in Ukraine is horrible, and Ukrainians have been victims of the situation. I don't blame them at all for wanting sanctions on, you know, their oppressor. But I think I find that in many, many cases, when you do these broad, broad sanctions, it doesn't really have the impact that people are hoping for. What usually happens is that the sanctions come on,

The elites who have access to resources and connections ordinary people don't, they continue operating as they were. They find a workaround. It's the people who are below that, they don't really have any way of getting around it. So you often find perversely that the sanctions end up solidifying the hold on power of the very people you're trying to weaken. For the most part, the Russian government's been very effective at resisting the sanctions. I think when they sanctioned Russia,

That was a turning point, actually, because you're sanctioning a gigantic part of the global economy. Maybe at that point, you're going too far, because if the global economy that's sanctioned starts to look almost as big as the unsanctioned economy, then you've created just another parallel economy, which could be self-sustaining on its own. And yet you've seen Russians build closer relationships with China, Iran, many African countries, since they lost, at least for now, this access to a U.S. or Western market. So I think that

Maybe they tried to collectively punish the population, but they haven't really clearly achieved that there. I think that they've been able to get by relatively well. We had an example there of Ukrainians calling for sanctions on Russia. But we've also spoken to civilians from other countries who are calling for sanctions within their own country.

In Georgia, protests have raged for over 100 days against the government under Tbilisi, whose Georgia Dream Party is blamed by people for democratic backsliding and cuddling up to Moscow. At the time that the protests first broke out, MediaStorm covered them as protesters were being beaten, detained, tortured. We are on the verge of dictatorship from authoritarianism.

It is the gang against the people. It is the man in the police uniforms against the youth of Georgia. It is the oligarch with his ruling party who captured the Republic of Georgia. And here I'm citing the State Department. Back then, we spoke to Georgian journalist Tata Cikviladze, who reiterated to us this week why she and other citizens believe sanctioning wealthy political elites would help their cause.

Wealthy elite sanctioning would definitely help the entire country if they would sanction the oligarchy of Anishinaabe. That would definitely help. Like if endless protest of 117 days doesn't help the government and oligarchy of Anishinaabe himself to change his mind about selecting new elections, maybe that will be a little bit of a threat for him.

Another example, albeit on a smaller scale, is Israel, where a small but significant minority is calling for international sanctions against specific leaders they see as damaging democracy and driving human rights atrocities.

Some 200 Israelis living in the UK have urged the UK government to sanction Israel's finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, and national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gavir. So again, very targeted sanctions. We spoke to Danielle Bett, a Scottish-Israeli woman representing Yashad, a UK-based organisation calling for political resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

There is a huge difference between collective sanctions on the state or the people of Israel and targeted sanctions against extremists and individuals. For example, sanctions that are targeting violent settlers or extremist ministers. They make a distinction between Israel proper and the average Israeli and between people who are exacerbating the conflict and the problems.

And I think it makes it clear to Israelis that they aren't being punished for their identity or even for their opinions. But those who are being sanctioned are specific people who are causing harm.

Another thing that we've seen is that when sanctions are announced abroad against extremist settlers, for example, it often brings about a really constructive debate within Israeli society on an issue which is unfortunately often not very widely reported on, such as settler violence, such as the occupation. And I think that's been really helpful as well.

On the other hand, when it comes to collective blanket sanctions against Israel, they can cause harm. It's true that it's a legitimate form of non-violent action, but that doesn't necessarily make it helpful or effective.

Collective punishment against Israel isn't constructive in my opinion. It also is often harmful to the institutions and the people working to fight for peace, justice and equality on this land. So I think it's really important to make a distinction between sanctioning harmful people and bodies and sanctioning Israel as a collective.

Mataza, what do you think? Is there a way to protect civilians while using sanctions smartly? I think so. I think so. I think those measures that you refer to, they're a more appropriate means of using sanctions in a targeted way, a focused way to impact specifically elite decision makers. It's very rare to see people calling for these broad, poor country sanctions on their own country.

Targeting specific corrupt officials, I think that's a good way of splitting the difference. I'll give you an example. In Pakistan, covered a lot in the last couple of years, there's a military dictatorship at the moment. People are calling for the head generals to be sanctioned because a lot of them have the wealth in London and New York and places like this. If they did that, that would be devastating for them. It's not impacting the country. It's impacting them on a very personal level. And they may have to change their own approach and their policies.

just so they can maintain their own well-being. So I think that's good. I think that's not morally objectionable in any way. And the only thing I object to is the wholesale sanctioning of civilians, because first, I think it's immoral, but also I think it's ineffective in achieving these goals. And that, I mean, that is, just to be clear for listeners, that is something that is still very, very common. It's what we're seeing in Venezuela. It's what we're seeing in Iran. And we're seeing it to an extent in Yemen, some of the poorest countries in the world. Yeah.

So, yeah, thank you for specifying, I suppose, which sanctions we should be problematizing more. To close, I wonder if there are solutions that you might advocate besides sanctions. You know, when we see a foreign government commit atrocities against its people or breach peace terms and activists want to mobilize their governments to care and do something about

What should we be calling for if it's not at least wholesale sanctions against that country? Yeah, you could sanction the trade of certain...

items which are relevant to the situation, the arms trade, for instance, sanctioning certain companies which are involved in facilitating the behavior that people find objectionable, individuals, as I mentioned earlier, sanctioning them. The thing is, you could call for sanctioning the whole country. You just said people, when they do that, they should understand the moral implications. I don't think people understand this at all time. And maybe if they did, they wouldn't ask for that or they'd ask for something else. Because first of all, the sanctions definitely impact a lot of innocent people.

you know, it's something which is kind of called for casually at times. So it's a very serious and grave thing. Do a little more research on what you're trying to accomplish and how you're trying to get there and target your activism around that. That'll accomplish two things. First of all, you'll minimize the collateral damage. Secondly, you're more likely to get support from people inside the country. So that's kind of where I think about it in this way is both

more moral and also more effective in achieving certain policy outcomes. I'd maybe just add to that as well, like listen to what civilians in those countries are saying, listen to what protesters in those countries are saying, because they will probably have thought about what solutions from the international community would help them most. Yeah. Mattel Zayasane, thank you so much for joining us on MediaStorm. Tell us where can listeners follow you and do you have anything you would like to plug?

Yeah, just please follow our work on DropSideNews.com. And, you know, you can see myself and Jeremy Scahill and Ryan Grimm and many former colleagues of The Intercept. Please do subscribe and then please to check us out and do a podcast. And I'm the host up there as well, too. So, yeah, please check out DropSideNews and looking forward to seeing you all over there.

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