Sanctions, Syria and the need for solidarity

The following article is based on a talk given at the “Americas Without Sanctions” hybrid meeting. This program was held in-person at the historic Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C., on December 10, 2024 — Human Rights Day. In addition, more than 400 people registered for the Zoom. The program was carried live on WPFW Pacifica radio in the Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Virginia area. It was also live-streamed on @SanctionsKill (Facebook) and is available on YouTube in English and with Spanish translation at: youtube.com/watch?v=Pv2MyLejNfo&t=166s and youtube.com/watch?v=IHRB-1quah0

The SanctionsKill Campaign has focused a great deal of time and energy over many years into exposing this horrific U.S. weapon of mass starvation, disease, hyper-inflation and societal collapse as a weapon of U.S. policy.

As the coordinator of the SanctionsKill Campaign, I’ll be co-chairing tonight’s event on International Human Rights Day with Jill Clark Gollub of the Americas Without Sanctions Committee.

Sanctions, also known as Economic Coercive Measures, are a form of organized violence against a whole population.

There are more than 40 sanctioned countries, totaling one-third of the world’s population. This U.S. weapon is an all-out effort to destabilize and re-colonize the developing world — the Global South. It’s the cause of millions of migrations, a desperate effort to seek relief.

Tonight our focus is on the thousands of U.S. sanctions on Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, the sanctioned countries of the Americas.

But we can’t focus anywhere in the world without first raising our total solidarity with Palestine and the heroic resistance of 14 months – stretching back to more than 76 years.

It is truly an Israeli genocide by every standard of international law, and yet it is a condemnation that is totally disregarded. The war on Gaza, on the West Bank and on Lebanon is totally funded and equipped by the U.S. It continues because U.S. imperialism is in full support of the Zionist crimes. Democrats and Republicans backed these crimes for decades, despite global solidarity of historic proportions.

Long before October 7 [2023,] in the SanctionsKill Campaign we focused on the U.S. and Israeli sanctions on Gaza as a form of all-out war. There were U.S. and Israeli sanctions on Gaza ever since Hamas overwhelmingly won the elections in 2006.

All of Western and Central Asia and North Africa has been ripped apart by U.S. sanctions and constant wars in the past 30-plus years – from Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran, Libya and Yemen to Afghanistan.

The largest number of sanctioned countries are the developing countries of Africa — from Libya and Tunisia in the north to Zimbabwe in the South, from Sudan and South Sudan in the East, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia in the Horn of Africa to Mali, Guinea-Bissau and Liberia in the West and Congo in Central Africa. 

All of these rounds of economic strangulation are an effort to disrupt and re-colonize Africa and Asia by the imperialist powers.

Suddenly this week, we see in gruesome detail the impact of 21 years of U.S. sanctions on Syria, once a prosperous, modern country with zero foreign debt and free health care and free education, including at universities. There was subsidized food, modern infrastructure, paid from the nationalized oil resources. Syria was a breadbasket and strong defender of Palestine for 50 years.

In 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, Washington imposed rounds of sanctions on neighboring Syria. This went unnoticed here. But it caused hyper-inflation and shortages. The salaries of government workers, soldiers, teachers and medical staff were suddenly worthless.

Economic crisis is fertile soil for a well-funded opposition that blames everything on government corruption and never mentions U.S. sanctions. This opposition exploded with U.S. help and funding in 2011 in an uprising called the Arab Spring.

We’ve all seen the same tactics — in Cuba, in Nicaragua, in Venezuela. We’ve seen how U.S.-funded mercenaries can rip a country apart. Tonight we’ll discuss the people-centered measures to counter the sanctions.

Aim of sanctions: to divide, conquer, destroy

Al-Qaida, ISIS and other competing gangs operating without plan, coherent ideology or leadership surged into Syria. All were funded by the U.S. and also by Türkiye, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. They were funded to tear Syria apart. There was wild propaganda, a Western media onslaught. Then by 2014, claiming they were fighting ISIS forces, the U.S. military started bombing Syria, destroying all possible infrastructure.  

The solidarity of Hezbollah, Iran and Russia helped save Syria and at great cost, regain control of Syria’s cities. But one-third of Syria remained under U.S. and Turkish control through contending mercenary gangs. This area was oil- and resource-rich and Syria’s agricultural breadbasket.   

There are U.S. bases in Syria and still in Iraq to this day, along with U.S. trainers and contractors in Jordan. Sanctioned Syria could not gain funds or supplies, even from the United Nations, for reconstruction or emergency relief.

In the years of no heat, little electricity, old weapons, constant bombardment, demoralization can take hold. The lines can collapse. The Syrian Arab Army literally collapsed this week. It is a shock to all forces resisting a U.S. takeover. They could not withstand another offensive of well-trained, newly-equipped mercenaries.

Right now, the U.S. Air Force and the Israeli Air Force are bombing Syria relentlessly. There are hundreds of bombing runs destroying every industrial center, government ministry and communication center. Why? Isn’t the government defeated? Hasn’t the Syrian Arab Army dissolved?

The U.S. and the Zionist forces want to ensure that nothing can be rebuilt. They want to dismember Syria. They want to ensure that no supplies can possibly reach sanctioned and war-torn Lebanon. This is an all-out effort to demoralize and divide the Palestinian resistance. Israeli tanks are on the outskirts of Damascus.

That’s what the corporate media means by “Free Syria.” This is an Israeli-occupied Syria.

This means that we need to escalate our solidarity with Palestine, Syria and Lebanon and with the sanctioned countries of the Americas. The threat is real. The impact of sanctions is cumulative.

We are honored to hear from peoples’ representatives of the sanctioned countries of the Americas on people-centered policies they have developed to counter U.S. sanctions and U.S. destabilizations.

The best way to really begin this program is with our salute to Palestine and to continued resistance. Our response must be to strengthen solidarity with renewed determination.