Misako Chida
At a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on July 18, Indiana Republican Senator Todd Young, a former Marine, called out Saudi Arabia for its role in the ongoing war in Yemen. He described the catastrophe developing in the country, which is one of four nations—along with Southern Sudan, Nigeria, and Somalia—set to collectively lose 20 million people this year to conflict-driven famine.
That’s one-third the death toll of World War II. Yemen's near-famine conditions and attendant cholera outbreak are so dire that it is estimated a child there dies every 10 minutes of preventable disease.
At the hearing, Senator Young talked about root causes of the “four famines,” and held up a photo of a World Food Programme warehouse in Yemen, which was destroyed in 2015. Senator Young asked David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme, to name the country responsible for that airstrike. Beasley said the Saudi-led coalition blockading Yemen had destroyed the warehouse, along with the relief supplies it contained.
The U.N. Security Council has warned that the bombardment of Yemen, by a local coalition marshaled by Saudi Arabia, may amount to war crimes.
A July 2016 Human Rights Watch report documented thirteen civilian structures destroyed by Saudi coalition bombing between March 2015 and February 2016, “including factories, commercial warehouses, a farm, and two power stations. These strikes killed 130 civilians and injured 171 more.” The facilities hit by airstrikes produced, stored, or distributed goods for ordinary people, including food, medicine, and electricity. These were all goods and services in short supply in Yemen even before the war. Collectively, the facilities employed more than 2,500 people; following the attacks, many of the factories ended their production and hundreds of workers lost their livelihoods.
Asked about the Saudi coalition's destruction of four cranes needed to offload relief supplies in Yemen's port city Hodeidah, Beasley explained that the loss of the cranes has vastly impeded his program’s efforts to deliver food and medicines. Senator Young read from Beasley’s June 27 letter to the Saudi government, only the latest of multiple requests, asking that the World Food Program be allowed to deliver replacement cranes. Beasley said the Saudis had provided no reply. In the three weeks since this last letter had been sent, Senator Young noted, more than 3,000 Yemeni children have died of preventable, famine-related causes.
Medea Benjamin, co-founder of the antiwar campaign Code Pink and author of Kingdom of the Unjust: Behind the U.S.-Saudi Connection, attended the “Four Famines” hearing, and later thanked Senator Young on Twitter for rebuking the Saudi government’s imposition of a state of siege plus airstrikes that prevent the delivery of food and medicine to destitute Yemeni civilians:
Just one day later, on July 19, the United Nations Refugee Agency reported that a coalition airstrike in Yemen had killed 20 civilians—including women and children—fleeing violence in their home province. The report claimed more than two million internally displaced Yemenis have "fled elsewhere across Yemen since the beginning of the conflict, but . . . continue to be exposed to danger as the conflict has affected all of Yemen's mainland governorates."
In the past, the White House has provided refueling and targeting assistance to the Saudi-led coalition without congressional authorization. Since October 2016, the United States has doubled the number of jet-refueling maneuvers carried out with Saudi and United Arab Emirate jets. Saudi and UAE jets fly over Yemen, drop bombs until they need to refuel, then fly back to Saudi airspace where U.S. jets perform mid-air refueling operations. The Saudi and UAE jets then circle back to Yemen and resume bombing.
But on July 14, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed two amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act that would potentially end U.S. participation in the Yemeni civil war. Robert Naiman, policy director at Just Foreign Policy, points out that many people don’t know yet about the House vote.
We need to publicize the House vote, and push for a roll call vote on the Davidson-Nolan prohibitions, which would at least curb U.S. support for the Saudi Arabia-led campaign in Yemen's civil war. We must also push the Senate to pass the same provisions as the House.
The year 2017 may be hereafter remembered as the worst famine year in post-World War II history—we have no luxury to reject any tools we might use to stop this from happening.
Billions, perhaps trillions, will be spent to send weapons, weapon systems, fighter jets, ammunition, and military support to the region, fueling new arms races and raising the profits of U.S. weapon makers. But we can choose to stand at the doors of our leaders and of our neighbors, honoring past sacrifices and the innocent lives we were unable to save, as we redouble efforts to stop war makers from constantly gaining the upper hand in our lives.
We will be hard pressed to prevent all of the dying that is set to come this fateful summer in the countries of the Four Famines.
The Turkish writer Nâzim Hikmet Ran wrote a poem in memory of a Japanese child, Sadako Sasaki, who died from radiation sickness after the 1945 atomic bombing of her home city, Hiroshima. In her hospital bed (as the story goes), Sadako occupied her time attempting to fold 1,000 paper cranes, a feat she hoped would earn her the granting of a special wish, that no other child would ever suffer a similar fate. Hand-folded paper cranes have become a symbol for peace throughout the world.
The poem is on my mind, as I think of the malnourished children from the countries of the terrible Four Famines, and from other conflict-torn, U.S.-targeted countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. I think of their months or years of terrible hunger. Their stories may have ended already during the first half of 2017.
“I need no fruit, I need no rice
I need no sweets, nor even bread
I ask for nothing for myself
For I am dead, for I am dead.”
In the poem, Sadako, long beyond saving as she folded paper in her bed, doesn't ask us to erase her own terrible loss, but to achieve the change we can, and to lose no more time in achieving it:
“All that I ask is that for peace
You fight today, you fight today
So that the children of this world
Can live and grow and laugh and play.”
Kathy Kelly (Kathy@vcnv.org) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.