Politics & Power Quote by Omar Bongo

Sanctions are sold as surgical strikes on power; Omar Bongo drags the conversation back to the waiting room, where ordinary people take the hit. The line’s force comes from its unadorned realism: “supposed to be aimed” quietly punctures the moral theater around punitive diplomacy. He’s not arguing that regimes are innocent. He’s arguing that the tool is misdescribed, and that the euphemism (“targeted,” “smart,” “against a regime”) launders consequences that look a lot like collective punishment.

Bongo, a long-serving Central African head of state, is speaking from the vantage point of countries that often experience global governance as something done to them, not with them. That’s why he pairs “Europe” with “the United Nations”: two sources of legitimacy that can feel indistinguishable when their decisions translate into shortages, inflation, and a collapsing informal economy. The subtext is a critique of asymmetry. Sanctioning states get to claim principle; sanctioned societies absorb the risk, while elites frequently reroute money, capture aid, and turn scarcity into control.

The rhetoric is careful. “Usually generally” reads like a politician’s hedging, but it also signals a pattern too familiar to need statistical proof. His real intent is to shift the burden of justification: if sanctions predictably punish millions, then those who impose them should answer for humanitarian fallout, not just geopolitical objectives. It’s an argument about accountability in international morality plays, where the villains are named, but the victims are distributed.