By Madi Jobarteh
A timely and urgent article by Debashis Chakrabarti exposes a brutal truth that demands nothing less than an emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council. The issue at hand cuts to the core of the international system: the weaponisation of economic sanctions by the west as instruments of mass murder and geopolitical domination.
For more than five decades, the United States and the European Union have unleashed economic sanctions not as tools of peace or justice, but as silent weapons of war. These are not bombs and missiles, but policies that deliberately throttle economies, destroy healthcare systems, cripple food production, and condemn millions to slow death. A study cited in the article estimates over 38 million deaths between 1970 and 2021 due to sanctions-related deprivation, more lives lost than in many major wars combined. This is not “collateral damage.” It is calculated economic violence.
Sanctions are sold to the world under the deceptive banners of “human rights”, “rule of law”, and “defending democracy”. In reality, they are mechanisms of western hegemony designed to punish states that refuse to kneel to US and European geopolitical interests. This is enforced through a sophisticated architecture of coercion based on control of the dollar and euro systems, SWIFT, global finance, technology, and media narratives. It is colonialism by other means.
History offers undeniable evidence.
• Chile (1973): When President Salvador Allende pursued an independent economic path, President Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream,” paving the way for General Pinochet’s US-backed dictatorship. Democracy was not defended, it was assassinated.
• Iran (1953–present): The so-called threat of Iran’s theocracy cannot be understood without acknowledging that Britain and the U.S. overthrew Iran’s democratic leader, Mohammad Mossadegh, to protect oil interests, installing the corrupt Shah whose tyranny sparked the Islamic Revolution. The West did not create democracy in Iran, it destroyed it.
• Cuba (1959–present): After Cubans overthrew the US-backed dictator Batista, Washington imposed a suffocating blockade that lasts to this day, punishing an entire people for daring to seek independence.
• Congo (1960–present): Patrice Lumumba was murdered in a western-backed plot because he sought economic freedom for his people. Mobutu’s 32-year kleptocracy was not an African failure, it was a Western project designed to ensure access to uranium, cobalt, coltan, and gold. Six million Congolese have since died in conflicts rooted in Western-backed resource plunder.
• Iraq (1990–present): US and British sanctions killed half a million Iraqi children; deaths infamously dismissed by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright as “worth it”. The illegal 2003 invasion killed over a million more. Western intervention did not bring democracy, it engineered destruction, sectarianism, and chaos.
These examples expose the hypocrisy of the so-called liberal international order. The post-1945 global system, presented as a defender of peace and human rights, is in truth a continuation of colonial domination dressed in legal language. International law is weaponised against the weak and suspended for the powerful.
The west decides who is a “terrorist”, who is “civilised”, who is sanctioned, and who is allowed to kill with impunity. Iran is sanctioned for allegedly seeking nuclear weapons, while Israel, armed with over 200 nuclear warheads faces no scrutiny. Hamas is labeled terrorist, yet the Israeli army can bomb hospitals, murder children, and starve civilians in Gaza without ever being called what it is: a terrorist force.
This system survives because western political, media, academic, and financial institutions police the global narrative, while many leaders in the Global South remain silent compromised by aid dependency, elite corruption, and geopolitical intimidation.
But silence is complicity.
Chakrabarti’s article is not merely an analysis, it is a wake-up call. The western sanctions regime is a crime against humanity. It is time for the Global South, through the African Union, Arab League, Asean, Brics, Celac, and others to demand a restructuring of global power. A multipolar world is not a slogan; it is a moral and historical necessity.
Until Global South governments, intellectuals, journalists, and citizens gather the courage to challenge Western domination and narrative control, millions more will perish in invisible wars waged through economic asphyxiation. The world must declare: no more deaths in the name of human rights, no more sanctions in the name of peace, no more imperialism masked as morality.
