Global Day of Action for Yemen: The UK’s complicity in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis
With Yemen on the verge of implosion and the UK complicit in the crisis, it is our responsibility to act.
Image Source: Almigdad Mojalli/VOA Via Wiki Commons
Among Sufis, there are those who think of heaven and hell not as final destinations in the afterlife but rather as what humans create in their temporal reality. When looking at Yemen, it is hard not to think they have a point. Yemen has 20.1 million people – almost two thirds of its population – in need of food. Nearly 9.2 million children do not have access to safe drinking water. Diseases such as Covid-19 and cholera are rampant - with 1.2 million cases, the cholera outbreak is the largest in recorded history. All of this need not be. Referring to the ongoing civil war in Yemen, the director of the Norwegian refugee council Jan Egeland stated: “Yemenis aren’t falling into starvation. They are being pushed into the abyss by men with guns and power.”
The roots of the current civil war began with anger at the corruption of the former President Ali Abdullah Saleh and the foreign influence of Saudi Arabia. Beginning in an impoverished northern province, this inspired violent and non-violent opposition from a group called the Houthis. When President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi took over in 2012, after the Arab Spring, the Houthis also became disillusioned by the slow transition process and so, in 2014, took over Yemen’s capital, Sana’a. In 2015 Hadi escaped to Saudi Arabia, requesting them to intervene. So, in March 2015, Saudi Arabia formed a military coalition of eight Sunni Arab states to restore Hadi as president and to contain the perceived influence of Iran by defeating the Houthis. This de facto coalition included the U.S. and the UK who gave, and still give, military support. However, what was meant to be a short and swift intervention has transformed into years of bloodshed with an estimated 233,000 deaths - 3,000 of them children.
In this conflict, all sides have committed serious violations of international law. This includes the UK’s allies in the Saudi coalition. In fact, in 2018 the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights declared the coalition responsible for most of the civilian casualties. According to the Yemen Data Project, more than 18,400 civilians have been killed and injured from the air raids conducted by the Saudi-coalition. Almost a third of these airstrikes have hit civilian’s residential homes, hospitals, schools, weddings, food stores, school buses, markets, mosques and water wells. The destruction of infrastructure has helped the spread of cholera and weakened an already strained healthcare system. This has been exacerbated by the restrictive conditions imposed by the coalition on the entry of fuel into areas controlled by the Houthis.
Yet, still the UK continues to support the Saudi coalition through its £16 billion-worth arms sales and other forms of military support. The extent of British involvement was expressed by a former worker of the country’s defense company BAE Systems, who revealed that without British support “in 7 to 14 days there wouldn’t be a jet in the sky.”
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Weapons companies like BAE Systems can sell arms to the coalition because the British government gives export licenses to the items it sells. However, the law prohibits the government from granting a license where there is a clear risk the item “might” be used in a “serious violation of international humanitarian law.” According to Molly Mulready, a former lawyer at the Foreign Office who quit over the UK’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia, the term “might” implies a low threshold. To see if such a threshold is met, the Ministry of Defence maintains a “tracker” that details any incident that could contravene international humanitarian law.
In 2016, the year in which a UN Security Council report described a pattern of “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilians by the coalition, the tracker had listed 114 incidents. Yet, the then-Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson urged the continuation of arms sales saying the “issue is extremely finely balanced.” Perhaps not surprising, coming from the man who joked in a meeting on the humanitarian crisis, “With friends like these, who needs Yemenis?”. In 2017 the number of incidents was up to 318 and by July of last year, the tracker had recorded 516 incidents - that’s 1.5 incidents a week on average. Unfortunately, this may be an underestimation as several lethal airstrikes were ignored. Reviewing this record, Mulready and the former defence attaché to Saudi Arabia, Brigadier John Deverell, wrote in the Spectator: “in our view, the export of those weapons from Britain is demonstrably illegal.”
One would hope such a shameful record would be headline news in the relatively free and democratic UK society. However, in the last two general elections, the state’s complicity in the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis” has received little attention. Polls in 2018 showed that 42 per cent of the British public do not even know that a war exists in Yemen. Therefore, without this coverage, the coalition has comfortably continued to play its part in destroying Yemen – a poor country that is already on the verge of implosion. The recent U.S. designation of the Houthis as a terrorist organisation would block U.S. humanitarian aid from entering the northern part of Yemen where 70 per cent of Yemenis live. The consequences could be monumental. As UN Aid Chief Mark Lowcock writes, this is at a time when “Yemen is on the brink of famine the likes of which have not been seen in 40 years.”
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For many, Yemenis remain dim abstractions from a distant place but they are human beings much like ourselves - who love their homes, their families, a sunny day and who enjoy the simple pleasures of common lives. They are people who have dreams about their future. These are the things that make life worth living and it is this too that has been destroyed.
Being a 9-year-old living in a poor village, Mukhtar dreamt of going to school but this was taken from him with a Saudi coalition airstrike. His brother died and Mukhtar’s injuries led to the amputation of his leg. Now disabled and traumatised, wanting to leave the man-made hell that is Yemen, he dreams of death. One could say a person like Mukhtar, who feels his life has lost all meaning, is dead already. In a sense then, the death toll in Yemen is not in the thousands but may be in the millions.
To allow this to go on would make a mockery of what human life should be. It is because of this, and because we enjoy the relative freedom in British society, that the Global Day of action for Yemen on January 25 is so important. Over 200 organisations around the world, from Bangladesh to the US, have joined in calling for the expansion of humanitarian aid for the people of Yemen and a halting of military support to the Saudi coalition. This year, the London Students for Yemen campaign hosted a webinar with speakers including Molly Mulready and Andrew Feinstein from Shadow Worlds Investigations and who was also an MP under Nelson Mandela. The even was followed by a global online rally for Yemen featuring the U.S. actor Danny Glover, the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and Yemeni activist Dr. Shireen Al-Ademi.
This day of action is two days before the International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates an event in which millions of people felt abandoned as they were methodically exterminated. One way we could show that we have learnt our lessons from that episode of colossal human suffering is to not abandon the people of Yemen. The Global Day of Action provides a perfect opportunity in doing just that.
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