Seven Years On The World Must Act To End The War In Yemen
On Tuesday (March 29) a Saudi Arabian-led coalition announced that is would temporarily cease military operations in Yemen following an appeal from the United Nations. It is now more than seven years since the coalition, made up of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, UAE, Qatar, Sudan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Senegal, began its assault against the Iranian-backed Houthi movement in Yemen.
On the eve of that assault, the then US President Barak Obama remarked, “The United States coordinates closely with Saudi Arabia and our GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) partners on issues related to their security and our shared interests.”
He went on to promise U.S. support for the assault on Yemen. In the intervening seven years the US has been good to its word, providing weapons, intelligence and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition.
A dead child every nine minutes
The United Nations estimates that 377,000 people have died as a result of the war to the end of 2021, with 60% dying due to the indirect causes such as a lack of access to water, food and healthcare.
Children make up an ‘overwhelming’ proportion of these deaths, with one child under the age of five dying every nine minutes as a result of the war. A total of 260,000 children are believed to have died to date - the equivalent of three Croke Park size stadiums filled with dead children.
According to the United Nations, 17.4m people in Yemen are suffering food insecurity, with another 1.6m expected to experience ‘emergency levels of hunger’ in the coming months
The UN believes that up to 1,300,000 people will die in Yemen by 2030 if the war is not brought to an immediate permanent end.
To date, the collective global community has catastrophically failed the people of Yemen. Instead of acting to end the conflict, the ‘great powers’ have sought to advance their own selfish political and economic interests in a country that happens to be located in one the most strategically important locations in the world.
Oil and shipping routes
In addition to having significant oil and natural gas reserves of its own, Yemen shares a long northern land border with Saudi Arabia and its vast oil and gas reserves.
Yemen’s coastlines face into the Gulf of Aden to the South and the Red Sea to the West. This means that whoever controls Yemen, and specifically the shipping chokepoint of Bab al-Mandebas, also controls the passage of oil tankers passing from the Persian Gulf through the Suez Canal and onto Europe.
The same shipping route is also critical for the transport of goods between Asia and Europe, goods with an estimated annual value of over one trillion US dollars per year.
Yemen
The battle for control of shipping lanes has long been a point of conflict in the Persian Gulf where Iran controls the strategically important chokepoint of the Strait of Hormuz through which tankers containing crude oil from Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE and the east coast of Saudi Arabia must pass en route to Asia, Oceania and the Americas. Oil that accounts for 30% of the world’s total tanker-transported volume.
The security of these shipping lanes is crucial for oil exports to reach the oil-thirsty economies of the West and the East and for the controlled management of oil prices.
Regional and global rivalries
For decades Iran and Saudi Arabia have competed with each other as regional super-powers in a middle eastern cold war that has turned hot in several proxy wars. And both Iran and Saudi Arabia in turn have served as proxies for the rivalries of the global world powers.
When Yemen was engulfed with political instability from 2011 onward, it was inevitable that both Iran and Saudi Arabia would attempt to exploit the situation to their own advantage. And equally as inevitable that the global powers would line up behind their respective regional ally.
The stage was thus set for Iran to back the rebel Houthi movement, while Saudi Arabia provided support to the regime of the besieged President Hadi. In March 2015, with the Houthi movement gaining control of large swathes of Yemen, Saudi Arabia and its allies launched military attacks inside of Yemen.
Global arms trade
The current ruler of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman was the Defense Minister liaising with the US in the run up to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen.
If the US had any reservations about how the war in Yemen would be waged they were overcome by the need to secure Saudi acquiescence to the Iran nuclear deal, which was being finalised at the same time that the war in Yemen was beginning.
The US supply of lethal weaponry to Saudi Arabia and other members of the coalition stepped up in line with the escalation of operations in Yemen.
The US and its allies have sold military equipment worth billions of euros to Saudi Arabia and other members the coalition that is waging war in Yemen. Photos shows French supplied Saudi Arabian tanks in Yemen
Saudi Arabia, with its coffers overflowing with oil money, is the world’s largest arms importer. During the first five months of the war, the Saudi-led coalition was spending $200,000,000 per day on its war machine. The main sellers of weapons into this conveyor belt of death and destruction were the US (79%), Britain (9%) and France (4%).
Many of the other eight countries in the Saudi-led coalition also routinely purchase millions of dollars of arms, munitions and other materials of war from the US and European nations.
War crimes
Since the first days of the war the Saudi-led coalition has engaged in war crimes including the targeting of civilians, residential areas, schools, universities, hospitals, mosques and civilian infrastructures, as well as industrial and agricultural facilities.
Of the nearly 25,000 air raids carried out to date, only 32% have attacked military targets. Attacks on civilian infrastructure has led to the largest cholera outbreak ever recorded by the World Health Organisation.
The Saudi Arabian-led coalition has systematically attacked non-military targets in Yemen for over seven years
The imposition of a Saudi-led blockade of Yemeni ports and airfields has targeted food distribution. Food shortages have in turn, been used as a weapon to collectively punish Yemeni civilians.
The deliberate targeting of food supplies and distribution is in contravention of Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. According to figures releasd by the World Food Programme, over half the country, or 17,400,000 people, do not have enough food. Half of children under five are facing chronic malnutrition.
Saudi Arabia has used both cluster munitions and white phosphorous in scenarios which are outlawed by international treaties. Evidence has also emerged of the routine use of torture and secret prisons by Saudi Arabia and UAE.
And both the Saudi-led coalition and the Iranian-backed Houthi movement have used large numbers of child soldiers throughout the conflict.
Capitalism can only deliver instability and misery
The conflict in Yemen provides yet more evidence of the inherent instability and brutality of the dominant capitalist system. By its very nature capitalism pits the nations of the world in competition with each other for the the planets natural resources, labour and markets - competition which routinely escalates into armed conflict.
Modern capitalism fosters a dysfunctional form of international relations where relations between individual countries are defined by the most cynical and base of motives - by a code that promotes self-interest over mutual benefit - a code that justifies and rewards political and economic opportunism.
Imperialism has long been understood to be the purest form of capitalism, the two are fundamentally intertwined. Future world peace and prosperity is dependent on the complete abolition of this destructive world system.
Baghdad burns in the opening hours of the 2003 US-led attack on Iraq - a war for oil that was justified on the basis of eliminating non-existent weapons of mass destruction
In the case of Yemen, a host of regional and global powers have sought to advance their own individual and collective agendas with a breathtaking indifference to the human suffering that this approach is causing. As has been the case in many other conflicts religious and ethnic differences have been weaponised to advance the political and economic objectives of the protagonists.
The most powerful countries in the world, which should be leading peace efforts in Yemen, have chosen instead to actively support the Saudi-led coalition to wage the most brutal of wars and have financially profited from doing so.
The first steps on the road to permanent peace in Yemen include a long-term ceasefire, the lifting of the blockade and the full cooperation of all parties to allow the UN coordinate the delivery of food, water, medicines and other essential supplies to the beleaguered people of Yemen.
Dublin government has a role to play but won’t
From an Irish perspective the Dublin government could and should use its seat on the United Nations security council to highlight the plight of the Yemeni people and to advocate for an internationally facilitated and overseen peace process in that country.
As flawed as the United Nations might be, it represents humanity’s best opportunity to advance beyond the current model of confrontationist nationalism and towards a model of non-confrontational, mutually-beneficial, internationalism.
A two year term on the security council provides the Dublin government with an increased voice at the UN - a voice that should be used to help Yemen
As a small, neutral European country with no history of colonial conquest, Ireland is well positioned to promote a new model of international diplomacy based upon a set of universal principles including the right to self-determination, peaceful resolution of conflict and mutually beneficially international relations.
The political establishment in Dublin, however, has no intention of working towards such a new model of diplomacy. Instead it seeks to integrate the Twenty-Six Counties further into the US-led imperialist block of nations.
It will take the establishment of a new all-Ireland republic for Ireland to truly assume its place among the nations of the world - for Ireland to build alliances with like-minded neutral and non-aligned nations - for Ireland to become an ally to the people of Yemen and all other people’s that suffer at the hands of imperialist aggression.