Majed Alwishaliy
May 1, 2019
In four years of aggression against Yemen, what has been produced? An humanitarian crisis for the Yemeni people:
The United Nations says nearly 100 civilians are killed or injured every week. Air strikes have killed or wounded 37 children a month in the past 12 months. According to Save the Children, air strikes were the leading cause of war-related deaths and injuries.
About 10 million people, representing more than a third of Yemenis, do not have enough to eat.
Some 85,000 children under the age of five may have died of severe hunger since 2015, and about 2 million Yemenis are malnourished, of whom 360,000 are severely malnourished
About 24 million people, representing about 80% of the population, need some form of humanitarian assistance
Nearly 18 million Yemenis lack access to clean water. The war and difficult humanitarian conditions have left more than 190,000 people fleeing to neighboring countries
There are also about 2 million children in Yemen out of school, and about 1.2 million people have been reported to have been diagnosed with cholera since 2017, more than 2,500 have died.
These are the disastrous consequences suffered by the people of Yemen. This is what the regimes of the Saudi and American aggression wanted: to break all the components of life and livelihood of the Yemeni people; to remain poor and humiliated in front of the machine of daily killing, bombing, destruction and starvation and forced dependency on the forces of arrogance and colonialism.
This state of affairs legitimizes our persistent call, for years, against the Saudis and their unjust rule over the people of the Arabian Peninsula. They no longer deserve the patronage of Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina, shaking hands with killers in Tel Aviv and Washington, and killing Muslims in Yemen and before that in Syria and Iraq.
Those in power in the Saudi Arabia Kingdom have been shown, by the murders of Sheikh Nimr and Jamal Khashoggi and hundreds of others, as unworthy of ruling the Islamic holy sites in any way.
Human Rights Watch has reported that the charges against Saudi detainees are linked to their human rights activities, and Saudi prosecutors’ accusations against female activists are the consequences of peaceful protests in Saudi Arabia.
Even their own controversies have become bothersome to them and expose a dark side to public opinion against them.
Despite the clarity of the political and legal vision of international and regional organizations, especially regarding the illegitimacy of the Saudi alliance and its actions contrary to international laws, the American, British, and Israeli international regime constantly turns a blind eye to all these inhumane crimes. Alas, public opinion is thus only concerned with superficial matters and partial details relating to humanity.
An official statement to the British newspaper Daily Mail, said: “What we have revealed of child recruitment and the possible involvement of British troops in the war in Yemen has provoked great reactions.”
According to the Guardian, “The British Secretary of State for Asia is investigating the British forces training children to fight in Yemen and pointing out that children represent 40% of the soldiers of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen.”
And as a result of the continuing international reactions, the German government has extended the ban on arms exports to Saudi Arabia for six months.
As for the desire of the Saudi regime to process nuclear fuel as a first step toward possession of nuclear weapons, Democrat Senator Robert Menendez and Republican Senator Marco Rubio, in a letter to the Department of Energy, protested support for Saudi Arabia to develop their capacity for producing nuclear fuel.
“Washington should not provide technology and nuclear information to Saudi Arabia; they are well aware of the seriousness of the development of these matters on the regional scene and that their results will be negative and influential in the region.”
The equation today is clear in the Yemeni political situation because all the figures point us to a humanitarian disaster fabricated by imperialist and colonial regimes, who have made the Saudi and the Emirate regimes tools of chaos, wars and side conflicts that ultimately serve the existence of the Israeli entity.
Nevertheless, the Yemeni resistance is still present in its steadfastness in and building of a new equation for deterrence to confront the criminal killing machine against the people of Yemen.
We call upon our comrades in the West to oppose their governments’ support of the neo-colonial Saudi coalition through weapons sales, military exchanges, and economic and logistical support. We also urge you to oppose the Saudi coalition’s narrative of the situation. We encourage you read more on the aggression and delve into the history of the crisis not through a sectarian lens, but as a struggle of popular resistance against imperialist-allied aggressors.
Editor’s note:
For more information and to join actions aimed at ending US involvement, we suggest the Code Pink website where there is a petition directed at Congress to override Trump’s veto and to support the next, even stronger, legislation–H.R.643 in the House and S.3652 in the Senate–to end the war in Yemen.
To donate for aid to the Yemeni people, go to Yemen Aid
Majed Alwishaliy is a Yemeni journalist studying in Beirut. This article was first published in Al-Mayadeen and translated into English by Julia Kassem.