Oil Sanctions Against the Assads in Syria Can Work

An EU ban on commercial activity by a handful of Syrian oil companies could deprive the Assad regime of the foreign exchange they critically need to fund the repression of protests. If the regime ran out of money to pay its security forces and there was a run on the Syrian pound, loss of business confidence in the Assads would accelerate. Brussels, unusually, is in a position to make a major unilateral contribution and be on the right side of history in the Arab spring.

This is because of the specifics of the Syrian oil industry. Sanctions have developed an awful reputation in recent years, and particularly oil sanctions. They're seen either as ineffective, such as Western divestment from Sudan which merely led to replacement of Canadian and Swedish by Chinese and other Asian oil companies, or as immoral, such as the UN sanctions regime on Iraq responsible for the deaths of half a million children in the 1990s while leaving Saddam Hussein's regime intact.

But in fact, sanctions are, or should be, a case by case policy tool. Can you target the regime without causing unacceptable suffering among the people? And would the people themselves support such sanctions? The answer in the Syrian case to all three questions is yes.

Syria exports about 150,000 barrels a day of a crude oil grade called Soweidie, overwhelmingly to Europe. Not a huge amount by world standards but the money it earns from that accounts for anything between a quarter and a third of the government budget. But, more than that, it represents a slush fund for the Assads - unrestricted income, as opposed to monies coming up through the regular government apparatus, ministries and bureaucracies with thousands of officials involved where, even for a single party dictatorship, appropriation is harder and more visible.


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http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/johnny-west/oil-sanctions-against-the_b_914209.html?ref=tw