“I feel my friend’s pain and my pain. I don’t feel anything else.”
These are the words of 12 year Yemeni boy Khaled, one of the few survivors of the Aug. 9 bombing of a school bus taking school children to a picnic. Yemen is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be a child today. It is one of the most dangerous places in the world to be, period.
Yemen has been embroiled in conflict since 2015, with civilians and civilian infrastructure being systematically targeted by a Saudi-led coalition receiving various types of assistance from the United States. Yemen is also on the brink of war-induced famine. The UN has already designated Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Now, 14 million people are facing “an imminent and great big famine … bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives,” according to top UN aid chief Mark Lowcock.
The “F” word (famine), much like the “G” word (genocide), is not used lightly by the international community, requiring that a high threshold be met before a crisis is designated as such. Only two crises have been designated famines in the last twenty years: Somalia and South Sudan. So, this is not just rhetoric. Yemen is very much on the brink of catastrophe.
Saudi Arabia’s role in this scourge on Yemeni civilians — as well as Washington’s complicity — has been known for quite some time, and Congress has been trying to push back against it, with no avail. America has continued to provide in-air fueling, targeting assistance, and billions of dollars worth of munitions to the Saudis, even categorizing their systematic attacks on civilians — including the bombing of a school bus this August, resulting in the death of 40 children — as justifiable collateral damage by a regime making a concerted effort to minimize civilian casualties. The U.S.’s hands are not clean; but thus far, Washington’s powerful symbiosis with Riyadh, based on weapons and oil, has proven more important than the senseless killings of innocent civilians, in contravention of international law. So, this begs the question: How far is the Trump Administration willing to go before it takes an active role in ending this brutal war?
The torture, killing, and dismemberment of Saudi citizen and US permanent resident Jamal Khashoggi, a longtime Saudi critic and journalist for the Washington Post, has galvanized the world against Saudi Arabia right as the U.N. is saying a perfect storm of war and famine is about to engulf Yemen. Khashoggi’s disappearance and the cover-up that followed have sparked international outrage, shining a light on the Saudi regime like the ongoing Yemen civil war hasn’t been able to do. While it is disheartening to know that the death of one could resonate more with the world than the years-long starvation and annihilation of Yemeni citizens, the fact that governments are willing to forego economic opportunities in order to take a stand against Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salmen is a positive step towards some level of accountability. Civilians and the infrastructure on which their survival depends continue to be targeted and killed systematically as the noose of famine tightens around their necks and they are manipulated as pawns by Saudi-led and Houthi forces alike.
Saudi Arabia and its coalition of mostly Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, has been bombing Yemen since March 2015 after the Houthi rebels swept across the country and toppled the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Saudi air raids have repeatedly struck civilian targets during the war. The aforementioned school bus was hit with a laser-guided MK 82 bomb manufactured by US contractor Lockheed Martin and supplied by the US as part of last year’s arms deal with Riyadh. Nearly one-third of the 16,000 air raids carried out on Yemen since March 2015 have struck non-military sites, including weddings, funerals, hospitals, food silos, radio stations, and water and electricity plants. The Saudi-UAE coalition has denied deliberately targeting civilians, despite admitting to some targeting errors. But, new research shows these “errors” were likely planned all along, not run-of-the-mill collateral damage. A World Peace Foundation report by Martha Mundy found Saudi’s targeting to be precise and strategic, aimed at destroying food production and transportation facilities, including irrigation projects and government offices that support food production. Along the coast, Saudis have bombed all of the fishing facilities, resulting in a 50% decline in fish supply and sales, all designed to starve the population into submission.
The Saudi coalition was placed on the UN’s blacklist of child rights violators, but the United States continues to vouch for its ally and facilitate its war crimes and crimes against humanity by providing various forms of assistance.
All told, 16,000 Yemeni civilians have been killed or wounded since March 2015, mostly by coalition air strikes made possible, at least in part, with America’s consistent support. Famine requires that the thresholds of severe insecurity, acute malnutrition, and mortality be breached simultaneously, making it very rare in the modern world. But Yemen is precipitously close to this perfect storm, especially since a cholera outbreak affecting hundreds of thousands of people has resurfaced as fighting and starvation have intensified. As civilian infrastructure is surgically destroyed and the port city of Hodeydah continues to be the epicenter of fighting — effectively cutting off all of Yemen from food supplies and aid — the civilian population is essentially being corralled in preparation for slaughter.
With Saudi Arabia in the spotlight because of the Khashoggi barbarism and its symbolic attack on the liberal ideals for which he stood, the United States must step up and leverage this opportunity to end the war in Yemen. Because Saudi Arabia depends on the U.S. and U.S. contractors for intelligence and logistics, Washington’s role in the war is a powerful bargaining chip. Riyadh also wants to remain in America’s good graces, making it sensitive to U.S. criticism. The U.S. has done nothing to challenge the prince’s past bad behavior, including launching an economic blockade against Qatar, freezing trade relations with Canada, and detaining the Lebanese prime minister. But America’s silence now, while the whole world is watching and Congress’s protests are growing louder, will only increase the Trump Administration’s complicity in these mass atrocities.
Washington should make its military assistance for the war conditional. It must take the lead in brokering a ceasefire, including an absolute ban on bombing civilian infrastructure, and opening negotiations among critical stakeholders. Because Yemen is more “a region of mini-states at varying degrees of war with one another” than a unified, sovereign state, a variety of local actors must be included in the peace process for it to have any chance of success. These peace efforts must be accompanied by the lifting of all blockades and a large-scale infusion of humanitarian aid. This is the only way to prevent widespread famine and disentangle the United States from its growing complicity in the Saudi-led coalition’s crimes.