Sanctioned confusion

Given Kim Jong-il's eccentricity and its “Janus” status, I’m hoping that the sanctions imposed by the UN inadvertently resolve this crisis, but it’s not going to be that simple… The word sanction falls in the genre of autoantonyms, contranyms, or antilogies, yes it is true, or in other words - having dual meaning. Derived from the Latin, sancire, its original meaning was 'to make an offense punishable by law', but this developed to mean ‘express permission contained in a law to do something’, or simply authorise. In the world of high pressure international diplomacy and in particular the world of Kim Jong-il, unfortunate misinterpretations are only a slip of the tongue away. This varied etymology also seems to reflect its mixed success and consequences when applied to international relations over the years. Another baffling sanctions question is that no other word seems to rhyme with it....

Prior to 1990, sanctions had only been applied to the former Rhodesia and South Africa. Their use has been expanded since to include Afghanistan, Angola, Ethiopia and Eritrea, Ivory Coast, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Iraq, Liberia, Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia and Sudan. The extent to these sanctions has varied from straightforward arms embargoes in particular for African conflicts to full economic sanctions, such as against Iraq from 1990 to 2003. Sanctions on the whole work, especially when carefully targeted, for example in the South African case when sports, cultural and trade restrictions hurt the white population, upon which apartheid governments relied. Libya is another success with Gaddafi coming in from the cold two years ago. The Iraq example represents the other end of scale, when they contained a dictator’s ambitions but at the cost of crippling an economy and causing nearly a million indirect deaths. The corruption of the UN oil for food programme exposed post Saddam and the apparent preservation of a WMD capability, pre 2003, marked their failure. The lesson drawn from Iraq for North Korea must be that successfully imposing sanctions against authoritarian dictators is exceptionally difficult. Creating enough pressure for a state to submit to international will is hard enough, but when a leader has a paranoid persecution complex, its only going to send him deeper into his bunker.

Solutions? This is far more difficult than Iraq, because a) they have the bomb, b) Kim il-Jong is not predictable and c) there is no current alternative to him. Credible opposition groups do not exist inside or outside North Korea. Realistically direct talks are the only solution here, as sanctions are only going to antagonise the situation further. Although it’s encouraging to see the international community united on this issue, the lack of options isn’t.

http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=2569249&page=1
http://www.nkfreedomhouse.org/resources/north-korea/state-of-affairs/