In October, UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, said:

“The sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran have had significant effects on the general population, including an escalation in inflation, a rise in commodities and energy costs, an increase in the rate of unemployment and a shortage of necessary items, including medicine.”

It estimated that millions of lives are now at risk.

“Ban said due to the payment problems some medical companies have stopped exporting medicine to Iran, leading to a reported shortage of drugs used to treat various illnesses, including cancer, heart and respiratory conditions and multiple sclerosis.” ¹

The situation appears to be a repeat of the Iraq genocide which took place from 1990 to 2003. (After the sanctions were lifted another genocide, the occupation, took place). The “genocide” description belongs to the UN sanctions administrator, Denis Halliday, who resigned in protest (as did his successor).²

In 1999, the British House of Commons Library confirmed that “most commentators agree that at least 200,000 people of all ages have died” in Iraq as a result of the Anglo-American sanctions. “Some reports place the figure close to one million deaths”.³

The sanctions were a violation of the Geneva Conventions which prohibit collective punishments.⁴ The excuse for decimating Iraq in preparation for the occupation in 2003 was that Iraq’s regime possessed weapons of mass destruction: claims which serious analysts debunked at the time, and claims which later proved false.

In the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal, Foreign Affairs, John Mueller and Karl Mueller wrote: “sanctions may well have been a necessary cause of the deaths of more people in Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of mass destruction throughout history”—and that was written before the sanctions were over.⁵ The only filmmaker to bring some of the tragedy to the attention of the British public was John Pilger.⁶  (See Video Below)

The tragic irony is that the EU-American sanctions on Iran are being imposed under the same pretext: this time, preventing Iran’s development of weapons of mass destruction; and again without a shred of evidence. At the time of writing, none of the authorised UK media have mentioned the Geneva Conventions or reminded readers of the Iraq tragedy.

Today, a repeat of the genocide seems to be on the horizon, as does the media silence. Maziar Bahari, a Newsweek journalist, alleged that he was interviewed “under duress” by Iran’s Press TV. The UK’s broadcasting regulator, Ofcom, ordered Press TV to pay a £100,000 fine, which the company did not pay. Its broadcaster, BskyB, was then ordered to drop Press TV. This means that UK subscribers have even less information on the effect of Iran’s sanctions than they have from the authorised media, which the Ministry of Defence censors with D-Notices.⁷

The UK’s Defence Secretary, Philip Hammond, should be arrested and tried for crimes against humanity. “Hammond says there is clear evidence that existing sanctions are working by harming the Iranian economy.” Knowing this, he informed The Observer 'that there would be “more pain on the streets', predicting 'potentially regime-threatening disruption and dissent … We can definitely make the pain much greater'.”⁸

How would Hammond like “pain” inflicted on him for his illegal retention of nuclear weapons? The International Court of Justice affirmed in 1996 that States should work towards disarmament.⁹ Britain is required to disarm under the conditions of the Non-proliferation Treaty (a point reaffirmed in 2000), which Iran has signed, unlike Britain’s close Middle East ally, Israel.¹⁰

NOTES

1. Michelle Nichols and Louis Charbonneau, “U.N. chief says sanctions on Iran affecting its people”, Reuters, 5 October 2012, and Saeed Kamali Dehghan, “Iran sanctions ‘putting millions of lives at risk’”, Guardian, 17 October, 2012.
   
   
2. Mark Siegal, “Former UN official says sanctions against Iraq amount to ‘genocide’”, Cornell News, 30 September, 1999.
   
   
3. Tim Youngs and Mark Oakes, “Iraq: “Desert Fox” and Policy Developments”, Research Paper 99/13, 10 February, 1999, House of Commons Library, London.
   
   
4. Red Cross, “Practice Relating to Rule 103. Collective Punishments”, no date.
   
   
5. John Mueller and Karl Mueller, “Rethinking Sanctions on Iraq—The Real Weapons of Mass Destruction?”, Foreign Affairs, May-June, 1999.
   
   
6. Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, John Pilger.
   
   
7. David Blair, “Britain bans Iran's Press TV from airwaves”, Telegraph , 20 January, 2012.
   
   
8. Toby Helm and Peter Beaumont, “UK warns Iran of more sanctions pain”, The Observer, 7 October 2012.
   
   
9. Paragraph 98 of the historic 1996 Advisory Opinion reads: “….In the long run, international law, and with it the stability of the international order which it is intended to govern, are bound to suffer from the continuing difference of views with regard to the legal status of weapons as deadly as nuclear weapons. It is consequently important to put an end to this state of affairs: the long-promised complete nuclear disarmament appears to be the most appropriate means of achieving that result.”
   
   
10. The Non-Proliferation Review Treaty Conference 2000 notes the “legally binding commitments by the nuclear-weapon States to nuclear disarmament”.