Hi everyone,
The thesis is slowly growing to a hundred pages, with one more Case Study about the DRC Congo and a concluding chapter to go. Besides the two theoretical chapters about sanctions and about the natural resource curse, I can finally post the case studies on Liberia and Angola.
In the case of Liberia, conflict started in 1990 when several armed groups stood up against dictator Samuel Doe, who had basically brought the country to scraps in a decade of rule. After 7 years of bloody conflict, Charles Taylor took over government, only to plunge Liberia into more conflict, while enriching himself by making deals with timber companies and diamond smugglers in neighboring Sierra Leone. The case study describes how arms dealers such as Viktor Bout, a Russian national also called the ´Merchant of Death´, and Dutch National Gus van Kouwenhoven were responsible for trading weapons in return for resources and logging concessions.
With regard to the UN sanctions imposed on Taylor´s regime, the case study shows how the arms embargo, commodity sanctions, and financial and travel sanctions were largely ineffective until the turn of the century. Only when expert panels started thoroughly investigating the network of Taylor did the sanctions start working. Sanctions busters were first named and shamed and the assets of criminals such as Bout and van Kouwenhoven were frozen. Taylor and his generals had less and less freedom to travel and to do business until Taylor was agreed to leave Liberia and exile into Nigeria. The negotiations between the UN sanctions committee and the new transitional government led to better regulated timber and diamond markets. Conflict has not returned since 2003.
With regard to Angola, the conflict started out as a post-colonial struggle between two parties, UNITA in eastern Angola and the MPLA in Western Angola. The MPLA took control over the government in 1975, forcing the UNITA rebel movement to find support from abroad, which it eventually found in the US during the cold war. After the cold war, in which the Russians and Cuba had supported the MPLA, UNITA shifted its financial dependence on foreign powers to the production of diamonds, which Eastern Angola has abundantly. UNITA´s leader Jonas Savimbi had created an impressive network of diamond companies, arms smugglers, and African allies to serve as brokers in order to circumvent the arms embargo of 1993 and the diamond embargo of 1998. It was only in 1999, with the publication of the Fowler report, that the UN got a real insight into Savimbi´s network. As a result of intensive monitoring by expert panels and the pressuring of the ´de Beers´ diamond company and the diamond industry in Antwerp, sanctions on UNITA finally started working around 2000. The real effect of the sanctions regime is difficult to establish though, because there are no official data on the revenues of Savimbi´s criminalized network. Furthermore, when Savimbi was shot to death in 2002, the conflict almost immediately ended, leaving us to wonder what the real cause of the end of the conflict was.
In any way, we can conclude that the use of expert panels to monitor sanctions and to pressure member states and other stakeholders into implementing sanctions has had a positive effect. The naming and shaming of sanctions busters in reports is especially effective when applied upon legitimate actors, as they value their status and do not want to be associated with conflict. The effect on arms dealers, smugglers and other illigitimate actors might be a further criminalization in order to circumvent sanctions.
I´ve added 2 links to this post. The first one includes the 2 theoretical chapters and the case study on Liberia. The second link contains the case study on Angola. Please do not cite them, as they have not been officially published and still need plenty of editing. If you have any feedback, feel free to react on the blog.
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