UN economic sanctions - 16 August 1991

I had to dinner the other evening, a very beautiful young woman with, alas, her husband. I'm sorry, the "alas" I immediately realise was thrown in as a cheap journalistic trick to catch your attention. Her husband is in fact, a splendid chap and an entertaining one. They're in their 40s. I call them my favourite youngsters. She is a remarkable citizen who heads up a society concerned not with general plans to improve the whole of New York City but to do something useful, in her own neighbourhood, for people in several sorts of need. And to do it now. Every day.

She also runs the tenants association in our building, listens with astonishing serenity to the complaints and grievances of, say, 70-odd tenants, tries to have their troubles fixed, successfully ran a rent strike, or boycott., and wound up with the landlord... not exactly eating out of her hand, but willing and able to renovate everything from a leaky roof and a hiccupping lift to a rundown entrance lobby. She ran the strike, or boycott, with tenacity, but without meanness, and when it was over, the standing of this beautiful lady, in the eyes of the tenants, was somewhere between Florence Nightingale and Mother Teresa.

Now, apart from her beauty, though it's difficult to think of any of her qualities apart from her beauty, especially when she's in the room, she's the last person you'd think of as what we used to call a "cause' person, an ideologue. I can't guess what her politics may be. If she's a feminist, I'm sure she's a steady and determined one, but she flaunts none of her beliefs or principles. She simply seems to act on them with quiet, un-showy success. Imagine then the shock, the first time you dine at her apartment, of finding her cooking the beef, the lamb chops, the pot roast, and serving it to her hungry hubby, but eating none of it herself. She is on principle, a vegetarian.

We fell to talking about the seeming indestructibility of Saddam Hussein and that led us on to a growing body of opinions which holds that economic sanctions were not tried long enough, and that the desert war came to inflict suffering close to famine on thousands of innocent children and invalids. The coincidence of this talk with this couple, of sitting in a room with a vegetarian and the leader of a successful boycott, set me to thinking about boycotts in general and in particular, that's to say about national boycotts in the form of sanctions, and personal boycotts, in the form of consumers – you and me – refusing to buy certain products for one humanitarian or political or ecological reason or another.

Sooner or later in the life of every nation and of every human, to boycott or not to boycott pricks the conscience. For myself, I only once became acutely aware of being the object of a boycott, of being made to feel something like a tyrant, or at least the willing subject of one. It was not long after the Second War, 1947, I think, when the British were attempting the impossible: to end their mandate in Palestine, to maintain their ancient friendship with the Arabs, and somehow fulfil the promise of the Balfour Declaration and give the Jews the independent state they wanted. Few diplomats entrusted with this unenviable juggling act could have been less diplomatic, more ruthless in his dealing with the Jews than the British Foreign Secretary, Mr Ernest Bevin.

At any rate, in New York City which has a fair claim to be considered the offshore Jewish capital of the world – it has over two million of the six million Jews in the entire United States – in New York City, Mr Bevin's name was mud. When I went to dinner with friends, and in New York City most of your friends are Jewish, I was told I could have any cocktail, except Scotch, a product of the then detested British.

I noticed at the time but was not dumb enough to mention it, that in homes where Scotch was absolutely verboten, sherry, a product of the detested dictator Franco, was readily available, and so, in houses that hadn't thought it over, was port, product of the detested Salazar. I don't know if this New York City boycott had a measurable depressive effect on the export of Scotch whisky. I doubt it. The Second War had compelled Americans well disposed to the malt, to turn to other forms of firewater, and by 1947 most of them were eager to get back to the original.

But I do remember that an enterprising American distiller, during the latter years of the war, leapt to fill in the gap by producing a mainly barley distillate and calling it on his labels "Scotch-type whisky." This led pretty soon to a court case, in which, I'm happy to say, my wife's uncle successfully defended the Scots against these impostors and the courts ruled that there was no such thing as "Scotch-type" brewed outside Scotland.

Now as for the argument that the United Nations' economic sanctions would have crippled Saddam Hussein without the need to wage war on him, that's something we can never be sure of. Like saying that Barry Goldwater would have made a fine president. Since he never made it to the White House we shall never know. Sanctions must be as old as trade between nations. We can go back as far as the Bible to see that the denial of a simple primitive necessity, water, timber, could be a cause of war. In our time in this century, sanctions became the League of Nations' first and favourite form of collective punishment. But they didn't stop Italy going into Ethiopia, or Japan going into Manchuria. In the United Nations, a general wish to invoke sanctions as a punishment for aggression has most of the time been paralysed by the veto power which could be used by the power doing the aggressing.

Looking back on the times that we've seen sanctions imposed against one country or another, on China, on Cuba, on South Africa, I can't help recalling a bitter truth first announced, or perhaps I should say publicised, by General Marshall, when he was the Secretary of State. He was talking about the bane of foreign aid, but it applies I think equally to sanctions. You can never be sure that the aid is getting to the people it's intended for or that the sanctions will not be successfully bypassed. As Marshall put it: "The curse of foreign aid is trans-shipment." The ship may be loaded, the manifest in order, the destination plainly marked, but one of several disasters is common. The food, the medical supplies, arrive but are swiped by, as in Ethiopia, the reigning tyranny. With sanctions, the forbidden weapons, goods, medicines, whatever, are delivered to a neutral port, then by prior secret arrangement, re-loaded onto a ship, or train, or plane, for the country that is officially forbidden them. In the desert war, there were very persuasive rumours that many forbidden supplies were getting into Iraq from Jordan.

When we come to the individual, I think of two ways of cushioning the conscience in these matters. One is contributing to a charity, and the other is the personal boycott. I must say that much of the time when I'm writing out a cheque to a favourite charity, I have a misgiving, which once upon a time could be placated. How much of your contribution goes to the intended victim? The blind child, the disabled Vietnam veteran, the cancer institute. And how much to the staff that thinks up the appeals, inhabits the offices, answers the telephones, prints up the forms, posts the envelopes.

Some 20-odd years ago, a now defunct newspaper, the New York World Telegram, performed a public service by publishing once a month a long list of the going charities together with the ratio of expenses to the monies actually turned over to the victims. And they produced some shocking figures. Some of the most prominent charities using more than half their contributions to pay, to employ the staff doing the appeals. That good old paper put several charities, so-called, out of business. We have no such guide today.

Now, the personal boycott, what, in various quarters, is called "being a socially responsible consumer." And, more recently, a "politically correct" consumer. I don't think I know anyone who doesn't have some favourite peeve or scapegoat. I have women friends who will not wear fur. And so many people for so long have protested about the lavish use of pesticides in farming and preservatives in packaged food that this country, like most other Western countries, has a widespread cottage industry in such things as vegetarian pâtés, organic jams, and something I haven't yet dared to try, called "non dairy cheesecake." There are young liberal housewives who won't buy a microwave oven because of the manufacturers' presumed connection with the nuclear power industry.

In this matter of seeing that what you eat, wear, read, use, does not palpably bruise your conscience, there is a man, a champion consumer of almost unimaginable purity. His name is Todd Putnam, he's 29, he lives in Seattle in the far western state of Washington, he is the founder editor of a monthly, The National Boycott News. It is at once a paper of record. Who's not buying what and why? And a guide to noble consumption. Needless to say he's a vegetarian. He will not wear either leather or wool, both involve in their preparation, he believes, cruelty to animals. He scans the papers for hints of poor management or bad labour deals. And in consequence has changed his bank and his brand of beer. He likes Chinese food but is, so to speak, in a pickle. The memory of Tiananmen Square forbids. He also won't use chopsticks or hardwood furniture because of the heedless and endless erosion of the rainforests. Mr Putnam has a tough monkish life of it.

But, to me, the real heroes are not heroes but heroines. They're those young mothers with a concern for ecology – and in this country there are legions of them – young mothers who have chosen to dispense with those blissfully dispensable nappies, diapers. And who bite the bullet and grimly return to the old washables.

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