TEHRAN (FNA)- Yemen is still a failed state on the brink of the Saudi-made humanitarian catastrophe and starvation.
Some 12 million inhabitants are food insecure, with many civilians also lacking access to essential services such as healthcare and clean water. These numbers are expected to rise in 2020, affecting some 60% of the population, according to the United Nations and international aid agencies.
The besieged people are so desperate. They need sustainable food supplies and medicine, and purified water, too. Many are resorting to getting water from lakes, and there’s a risk of cholera, typhoid, or diarrhea. Many women want to sew to bring some value into their homes. But if they’ve got a sewing machine, it’s either broken or they have no way of powering it any more.
Many grandmothers no longer have children, for various reasons – including deaths, illness or abandonment – and are living in dire poverty. People are unable to work because there are no jobs in their shattered markets and communities. There are plenty of elderly people who are completely immobilized, and disabled kids who need special care and attention; wheelchairs, or at least crutches. It’s more a case of what don’t they need, really, than what they need.
The international civil society should mobilize logistics to save Yemen. It’s not just about supplying immediate needs like food and medicine. One thing they should look to do is a root cause analysis, which is essentially Saudi-led war and US-backed occupation and blockade.
A few years ago, Yemen depended on foreign aid to survive. Everything now is dependent on ending the war and blockade, because every disaster or crisis is different. The solution has to be UN-led, and in Yemen, it is to a degree. It is about investing resources in peace and human capital development, planning and programming toward that end goal of rebuilding the war-torn country.
When we talk about aid, we talk about humanitarian actors coming in and in many cases not being very effective. It’s because systematically they have just been treating symptoms, where, if people are hungry, they don’t ask why, they just give food and walk away.
So, the challenge for the world community, and for many organizations, is thinking about what the end status they want to see is, and who they need to work with to make it happen, although that’s a very simplistic way of putting it.
They should have a long-term desire for involvement here, not just from a humanitarian perspective, but a peaceful and development perspective. The plan should be to end the war and design the reconstruction program first and then look at the humanitarian program as the enabler, almost the precursor. In contexts like Yemen, it is ending the war part that is the most challenging.
A failure to capture the present rare chance for peace in Yemen may cost the international community billions of dollars in further humanitarian aid if the current war continues. According to the International Rescue Committee, it is also likely to prolong Yemen’s inability to return to pre-crisis levels of hunger by 20 years just as famine conditions are improving.
The warnings are directed at the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are leading the illegal war on Yemen. There are signs of diplomatic hope in Yemen for the first time since the Saudi war in 2015, including localized ceasefire proposals, prisoner releases and belated progress in implementing the December 2018 deal that brought warring parties together for the first time in two years. But unfortunately, once again the progress has been at stake as the Ansarullah movement sees its commitment to the deal is reciprocated with the Saudi bombing raids.
The world community should take this chance and force the Saudis and their allies to also end their military campaign. The international civil society should also address the imbalance in Western governments’ position on violations of international law in Yemen, and consistently release official statements of condemnation when civilians are killed or civilian infrastructure is destroyed by Western weapons and Western-supported airstrikes.
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