Mojo-jojo
Minister (2k+ posts)
The Starvation of Yemen Continues
Posted By Daniel Larison On December 1, 2016 @ 10:45 am In
The terrible conditions created by the war on Yemen continue to worsen [SUP][1][/SUP]:
The humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen is every bit as terrible as any in the world, and it is probably the worst of all in some respects, but because the victims are largely cut off from the outside world their plight remains mostly unknown. Even when it is made known, it tends to be greeted by indifference because the people suffering are perceived to be on the wrong side or because it is an embarrassment to the U.S., Britain, and their client governments.
The starvation of Yemens civilian population is one of the greatest man-made disasters of this century, and it has been brought about in large part by U.S.-backed clients as they pursue a senseless and atrocious war against one of the worlds poorest countries. When the starvation of Yemen occasionally receives some decent coverage, there is barely any mention of the responsibility of the Saudi-led coalition and its Western patrons for helping to create these horrible conditions. The coalition and its Western backers, including the U.S., are not the only ones responsible, but they bear the largest responsibility because they are the ones that have been blockading the country and devastating its infrastructure and ports with bombs, and they were the ones that escalated and prolonged the war for all this time.
Except for a brief surge of attention a few months ago, the war and the U.S. role in enabling it have received very little scrutiny or criticism. The U.S. continues to sustain the Saudi-led war with weapons and fuel despite ample evidence of repeated and sometimes deliberate coalition targeting of civilian sites, and our government could withdraw that support at any time if it wished to do so. Our government does not wish this, but has chosen to continue its indefensible policy of support.
Obama has helped to cause a humanitarian crisis that threatens the lives of tens of millions of people, and he has created countless new enemies for the United States for the sake of reassuring a group of despots. As we begin to consider his legacy, support for the war on Yemen should be ranked as one of his worst and most inexcusable errors.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-starvation-of-yemen-continues-2/
Yemen conflict: UN official accuses world of ignoring crisis
By Fergal KeaneBBC News, Hajjah, northern Yemen7 hours ago
T
The nappies Ibrahim wears are the smallest available but are still too big. With his large eyes and hollowed out face, with ribs which press against his skin, the baby looks as if he is shrinking back into himself.In the hands of the doctor, baby Ibrahim's head seems impossibly small. He cradles the child gently, conscious of his fragility. Everything around him seems improbably large.
It seems perverse to describe a child in this state of as "lucky". But Ibrahim has survived 21 days and doctors are hopeful he will endure. His twin brother died soon after he was born.
His mother, Wafaa Hatem, sits on the bed with her son, stroking his fingers when he cries.
Like three million other Yemenis, the family was displaced by the war. Their daily existence is circumscribed by the challenge of finding food to eat.
Ibrahim's father is a taxi driver but with a collapsing economy he struggles to find customers.
"Sometimes my husband gets work," says Wafaa, "sometimes he can't find any. We eat sometimes, and sometimes we cannot provide anything."
System disintegrating
It is one testimony from a war that has caused child malnutrition rates to jump by 200% in two years.
Fifty per cent of medical facilities no longer function. Some have been bombed by the Saudi-led coalition, others have ground to a halt because there is no funding.
Key roads and bridges are frequently attacked, making the delivery of assistance even more difficult.
Large parts of Yemen have been destroyed by the fighting
The flow of aid is frequently held up by rebels who want to control its distribution. Many civil servants, including those in the health sector, have not been paid in at least four months.
Charities like Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) try to alleviate some of the distress but it is a huge task with such limited resources.
I met the MSF head of mission, Colette Gadenne, at the overburdened al-Jumhouri Hospital in Hajjah, one of the areas worst affected by the conflict.
"There is a system in place - feeding centres, nutritional programmes, but it is very difficult to monitor those programmes, and I fear that many families cannot just afford to even go, to even reach the facility, to be screened and to be admitted in the programme," she said.
"The whole system is really collapsing, hospitals are closing regularly, so it's very frightening to see how this country, which was already affected by poverty and poor governance, is going deeper and deeper every day."
Walk the corridors of the hospital and the war reveals itself.
You see farmers who were on their way to market, shredded by the high explosives and shrapnel of a Saudi air strike; the children emaciated from malnutrition and disease.
'Blind eye'
Out in the villages, among those too poor to afford the transport to hospital, people approach foreign visitors in the hope that they bring aid.
A boy brought his sick baby sister and crouched in front of us. An old man, not begging but looking at us with hope, had gathered his four hungry grandchildren.
At just nine months old, Asma Ahmed was suffering from malnutrition and jaundic
eAisha Ali, who lost one child to malnutrition five months ago, presented her chronically ill four-month-old daughter Asma. The child's eyes were yellowed from liver problems brought on by malnutrition.
"We need treatment, if you have. What do you have? Any treatment, any medicines? We need anything, we need medicines. If you can give us any, thank you," she pleaded.
Local workers from the Save the Children charity run mobile health clinics in the area but they too are simply overwhelmed by the scale of demand.
The lack of clean water has deepened the crisis with a recent outbreak of cholera. There are countless cases of pneumonia and acute diarrhoea, which are devastating to vulnerable young lives.
Hemedia Hamdi was three years old and suffering from severe malnutrition
Last year, Save the Children said one in three children in Yemen were malnourished
The crisis in Yemen has been overshadowed by the wars in Syria and Iraq. Barely 50% of the funding promised by donors has actually been delivered.
The senior UN official in the country, Jamie McGoldrick, is clearly exasperated at the international response.
"The politics of the situation has overcome the humanity," he says.
"The humanity doesn't work anymore here. The world has turned a blind eye to what's happening in Yemen... right now we are so under-resourced for this crisis, it's extraordinary."
On the waterless, baking plain at Al Manjurah in Hajjah governorate, 17,000 people live in shelters made of tarpaulin, straw and mud.
Mahdi Ali Abdullah exists here with his wife and nine children. "We are scared of the air strikes. We move from one place to another," he tells me.
I struggle to hear his voice. His words make sense. They are formed in proper sentences. But all energy has been drained out of him. Only the war has any vitality left, trampling over the life of the nation.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38220785
Posted By Daniel Larison On December 1, 2016 @ 10:45 am In
The terrible conditions created by the war on Yemen continue to worsen [SUP][1][/SUP]:
Every day children are perishing in rural Yemen, where two-thirds of the nations population lives. Parents are forced to decide between saving their sick children and preventing healthier ones from following the same perilous route.
Cemeteries in this desperately poor and rugged stretch of villages in the northwest contain the bodies of children who have recently died of hunger and preventable diseases. Most are buried in unmarked graves, their deaths unreported to authorities.
The U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen continues to be largely ignored. One reason for this is that the near-famine conditions that exist throughout much of the country and the deaths that result from them are invisible in official accounts of how many have been killed by the war. Many of the wars victims are killed by hunger or preventable disease, and yet the warring parties have caused their deaths all the same. Cemeteries in this desperately poor and rugged stretch of villages in the northwest contain the bodies of children who have recently died of hunger and preventable diseases. Most are buried in unmarked graves, their deaths unreported to authorities.
The humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen is every bit as terrible as any in the world, and it is probably the worst of all in some respects, but because the victims are largely cut off from the outside world their plight remains mostly unknown. Even when it is made known, it tends to be greeted by indifference because the people suffering are perceived to be on the wrong side or because it is an embarrassment to the U.S., Britain, and their client governments.
The starvation of Yemens civilian population is one of the greatest man-made disasters of this century, and it has been brought about in large part by U.S.-backed clients as they pursue a senseless and atrocious war against one of the worlds poorest countries. When the starvation of Yemen occasionally receives some decent coverage, there is barely any mention of the responsibility of the Saudi-led coalition and its Western patrons for helping to create these horrible conditions. The coalition and its Western backers, including the U.S., are not the only ones responsible, but they bear the largest responsibility because they are the ones that have been blockading the country and devastating its infrastructure and ports with bombs, and they were the ones that escalated and prolonged the war for all this time.
Except for a brief surge of attention a few months ago, the war and the U.S. role in enabling it have received very little scrutiny or criticism. The U.S. continues to sustain the Saudi-led war with weapons and fuel despite ample evidence of repeated and sometimes deliberate coalition targeting of civilian sites, and our government could withdraw that support at any time if it wished to do so. Our government does not wish this, but has chosen to continue its indefensible policy of support.
Obama has helped to cause a humanitarian crisis that threatens the lives of tens of millions of people, and he has created countless new enemies for the United States for the sake of reassuring a group of despots. As we begin to consider his legacy, support for the war on Yemen should be ranked as one of his worst and most inexcusable errors.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/the-starvation-of-yemen-continues-2/
Yemen conflict: UN official accuses world of ignoring crisis
By Fergal KeaneBBC News, Hajjah, northern Yemen7 hours ago
Ibrahim Bolgaith was born with severe malnutrition; his twin brother died
The nappies Ibrahim wears are the smallest available but are still too big. With his large eyes and hollowed out face, with ribs which press against his skin, the baby looks as if he is shrinking back into himself.In the hands of the doctor, baby Ibrahim's head seems impossibly small. He cradles the child gently, conscious of his fragility. Everything around him seems improbably large.
It seems perverse to describe a child in this state of as "lucky". But Ibrahim has survived 21 days and doctors are hopeful he will endure. His twin brother died soon after he was born.
His mother, Wafaa Hatem, sits on the bed with her son, stroking his fingers when he cries.
Like three million other Yemenis, the family was displaced by the war. Their daily existence is circumscribed by the challenge of finding food to eat.
Ibrahim's father is a taxi driver but with a collapsing economy he struggles to find customers.
"Sometimes my husband gets work," says Wafaa, "sometimes he can't find any. We eat sometimes, and sometimes we cannot provide anything."
System disintegrating
It is one testimony from a war that has caused child malnutrition rates to jump by 200% in two years.
Fifty per cent of medical facilities no longer function. Some have been bombed by the Saudi-led coalition, others have ground to a halt because there is no funding.
Key roads and bridges are frequently attacked, making the delivery of assistance even more difficult.
Large parts of Yemen have been destroyed by the fighting
Charities like Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) try to alleviate some of the distress but it is a huge task with such limited resources.
"There is a system in place - feeding centres, nutritional programmes, but it is very difficult to monitor those programmes, and I fear that many families cannot just afford to even go, to even reach the facility, to be screened and to be admitted in the programme," she said.
"The whole system is really collapsing, hospitals are closing regularly, so it's very frightening to see how this country, which was already affected by poverty and poor governance, is going deeper and deeper every day."
You see farmers who were on their way to market, shredded by the high explosives and shrapnel of a Saudi air strike; the children emaciated from malnutrition and disease.
'Blind eye'
Out in the villages, among those too poor to afford the transport to hospital, people approach foreign visitors in the hope that they bring aid.
A boy brought his sick baby sister and crouched in front of us. An old man, not begging but looking at us with hope, had gathered his four hungry grandchildren.
At just nine months old, Asma Ahmed was suffering from malnutrition and jaundic
eAisha Ali, who lost one child to malnutrition five months ago, presented her chronically ill four-month-old daughter Asma. The child's eyes were yellowed from liver problems brought on by malnutrition.
"We need treatment, if you have. What do you have? Any treatment, any medicines? We need anything, we need medicines. If you can give us any, thank you," she pleaded.
Local workers from the Save the Children charity run mobile health clinics in the area but they too are simply overwhelmed by the scale of demand.
The lack of clean water has deepened the crisis with a recent outbreak of cholera. There are countless cases of pneumonia and acute diarrhoea, which are devastating to vulnerable young lives.
Hemedia Hamdi was three years old and suffering from severe malnutrition
Last year, Save the Children said one in three children in Yemen were malnourished
The senior UN official in the country, Jamie McGoldrick, is clearly exasperated at the international response.
"The politics of the situation has overcome the humanity," he says.
"The humanity doesn't work anymore here. The world has turned a blind eye to what's happening in Yemen... right now we are so under-resourced for this crisis, it's extraordinary."
On the waterless, baking plain at Al Manjurah in Hajjah governorate, 17,000 people live in shelters made of tarpaulin, straw and mud.
Mahdi Ali Abdullah exists here with his wife and nine children. "We are scared of the air strikes. We move from one place to another," he tells me.
I struggle to hear his voice. His words make sense. They are formed in proper sentences. But all energy has been drained out of him. Only the war has any vitality left, trampling over the life of the nation.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-38220785
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