The hell of Yemen and the ambitions of Iran
by Dr Campbell Campbell-Jack, TCW:
WE all know of Yemen, but we don’t know about it. The magnitude of the suffering in what David Beasley, executive director of the UN World Food Program, describes as ‘the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since the UN came into existence’ is so great that we cannot see beyond the pain. The suffering of Yemen provides its own blinkers to our understanding of what lies behind the horror.
More than 4million children are in danger of death through starvation, disease and hunger. Save the Children estimates that 85,000 under-fives have starved to death, an average of 77 a day since 2015. The civil war has claimed 57,000 lives, 14million are at risk of famine due to the fighting and blockade, and 10,000 new cholera cases are reported each week.
All we know from the mainstream media is that some people called Houthis are rebelling against the government of Yemen and that Saudi Arabia is bombing them, with the help of the UK and USA, and causing untold misery, especially amongst the children.
The present strife is nothing new. Yemen has been almost continuously an area of conflict since before its 1960s civil war. Though North and South Yemen unified in 1990, the antagonisms persisted under 22 years of kleptocratic rule by Ali Abdullah Saleh, who came to power in 1999 with 96.2 per cent of the vote.
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