Nicholas Kristof, New York Times Op-Ed Columnist/BDnews24
He is an 8-year-old boy who is starving and has limbs like sticks, but Yaqoob Walid doesn’t cry or complain. He gazes stolidly ahead, tuning out everything, for in late stages of starvation the human body focuses every calorie simply on keeping the organs functioning.
Yaqoob arrived unconscious at Al Sadaqa Hospital here, weighing just over 30 pounds. He has suffered complications, and doctors say that it is unclear he will survive and that if he does he may suffer permanent brain damage.
Some 85,000 children may have already died here in Yemen, and 12 million more people may be on the brink of starvation, casualties in part of the three-year-old US-backed Saudi war in Yemen. UN officials and aid experts warn that this could become the worst famine the world has seen in a generation.
“The risk of a major catastrophe is very high,” Mark Lowcock, the UN humanitarian chief, told me. “In the worst case, what we have in Yemen now has the potential to be worse than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives.”
Both the Obama and Trump administrations have supported the Saudi war in Yemen with a military partnership, arms sales, intelligence sharing and until recently air-to-air refuelling. The United States is thus complicit in what some human rights experts believe are war crimes.The bottom line: Our tax dollars are going to starve children.I fell in love with Yemen’s beauty and friendliness on my first visit, in 2002, but this enchanting country is now in convulsions. When people hear an airplane today in much of Yemen, they flinch and wonder if they are about to be bombed, and I had interviews interrupted by automatic weapons fire overhead.
After witnessing the human toll and interviewing officials on both sides, including the president of the Houthi rebels who control much of Yemen, I find the US and Saudi role in this conflict to be unconscionable. The Houthis are repressive and untrustworthy, but this is not a reason to bomb and starve Yemeni children.
What is most infuriating is that the hunger is caused not by drought or extreme weather, but by cynical and failed policies in Riyadh and Washington. The starvation does not seem to be an accidental byproduct of war, but rather a weapon in it. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, backed by the United States, are trying to inflict pain to gain leverage over and destabilise the Houthi rebels. The reason: The Houthis are allied with Iran.The governments of Saudi Arabia and the United States don’t want you to see pictures like Yaqoob’s or reflect on the suffering in Yemen. The Saudis impose a partial blockade on Houthi areas, banning commercial flights and barring journalists from special UN planes there. I’ve been trying for more than two years to get through the Saudi blockade, and I finally was able to by tagging onto Lowcock’s UN delegation.
After a major famine, there is always soul-searching about how the world could have allowed this to happen. What’s needed this time is not soul-searching a few years from now, but action today to end the war and prevent a cataclysm.
The problem in Yemen is not so much a shortage of food as it is an economic collapse — GDP has fallen in half since the war started — that has left people unable to afford food.
Yaqoob was especially vulnerable. He is the second of eight children in a poor household with a father who has mental health problems and can’t work steadily. Moreover, the father, like many Yemenis, chews qat — a narcotic leaf that is very widely used in Yemen and offers an easy high. This consumes about $1 a day, reducing the budget available for food. The family sold some land to pay for Yaqoob’s care, so its situation is now even more precarious.
A few rooms down from Yaqoob was Fawaz Abdullah, 18 months old, his skin mottled and discoloured with sores. Fawaz is so malnourished that he has never been able to walk or say more than “Ma” or “Ba.”
Fawaz’s mother, Ruqaya Saleh, explained that life fell apart after her home in the port city of Hodeida was destroyed by a bomb (probably a US one, as many are). Her family fled to Aden, and her husband is struggling to find occasional work as a day labourer.
“I used to be able to buy whatever I wanted, including meat and fish,” she told me. Since fleeing, she said, war-induced poverty has meant that she hasn’t been able to buy a single fish or egg — and that is why Fawaz suffers severe protein deficiency.
“They asked me to buy milk for Fawaz, but we can’t afford it now,” she said.
In some ways, the Houthis have been successful. They have imposed order and crushed al-Qaida and the Islamic State group in the parts of Yemen they control, and in Sanaa I felt secure and didn’t fear kidnapping.
However, the Houthis operate a police state and are hostile to uncovered women, gays and anyone bold enough to criticise them. They recruit child soldiers from the age of about 12 (the Saudi- and US-backed forces wait until boys are about 15), interfere with food aid, and have engaged in torture and attacks on civilians.
Still, the civilian loss of life has overwhelmingly been caused not by the Houthis but by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and America, through both bombings and starvation. It’s ridiculous for the Trump administration to be exploring naming the Houthis a terrorist organisation.