“THE HUMANITY OF YEMEN”

How Washington and its allies seek to cover up their interference and responsibilities in the humanitarian crisis in Yemen by twisting the meaning of words and deeds

 

By Ali Al Najafi

For too long, attempts have been made to disguise the reality of certain situations through contrived and deliberate descriptions with clearly biased purposes. We saw it with Iraq between 1990 to 2003 with the victimization of the Shiites to justify a military intervention against the Sunni government of Saddam, or the hateful generalization that since 2001 extended to all Muslims in the world when they were associated with "Islamic terrorism" thereby justifying the interventions, torture and murders. That was a historical scoundrel that tried to hide the sinister intelligence devices that we would see with the farces of “Al Qaeda” with Sunni confessional orientation (Takfirism and Wahhabism exported by Saudi Arabia) that ended up being consecrated with the final hoax of the "Islamic State".

In 2010 and after months of a preliminary process of preparation, NATO (like Washington's mask) together with its Arab allies of the petromonarchies (Saudi Arabia and Qatar), carried out a vast operation of agitation and creation of chaos over the entire world. North Africa and that they wanted to recreate in Syria with a version that the western media showed as “popular uprisings” and that they euphemistically christened the “Arab Spring”. Although they still insist on that prefabricated story, it was very clear that this was not such a thing and proof of this is the current situation in Libya.

When Saudi Arabia launched its aggression on Yemen in February 2015 neither Washington nor the UN made any recrimination for this clearly illegal action that violates the sovereignty of a member state provided for in Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. This silence? The clear existing interest in this catastrophe being carried out but (as has been the custom) hidden under the veils of political ambiguity and informational deception. There is undoubtedly a Manichean vision of what is happening there and even worse, in the case of the US, it is known that it has gradually taken part in these actions that since then have caused the death and misfortune of thousands of Yemenis.

As part of that intervention, Washington secretly deployed its “proxies” resources made up of groups of mercenaries and elements of ISIS trying to establish a counter-insurgency (dirty war) dynamic against the Yemeni resistance that has been a failure.

The arguments to allow this true violation of international law and especially of international humanitarian law are varied, but they focus especially on the supposed influence of Iran on the Shiite Houthis and on the political position of open resistance that they have adopted against the attempts of Saudi invasion and its coalition of mercenaries backed by the USA and Israel. As you can see, when it served to show the Shiites as oppressed they demonized the Sunnis and in Yemen this is seen in reverse.

Despite the military superiority and strategic collaboration that CENTCOM lends to the Saudi initiative, the resistance presented by the Yemenis (especially the Houthis) has been such that their efforts are currently stalled in a disastrous impasse. In an attempt to weaken this resistance, the attackers reiterate the use of the same stealthy and inhumane tactics that focus on collective punishment to generate despair and chaos that by degrading the quality of life of civilians weakens the will of the combatants.

The aberrations that have been seen in this aggression are countless and inconceivable. As in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, there is not the slightest respect for the lives of civilians who are often the target of Saudi air strikes and the Emiratis who have used bombs with depleted Uranium and nuclear tactical devices on Sana'a provided by those actors. (Although they have tried to deny it)

But to the destruction by bombs and weapons is added the misery that has been silently being created and exacerbated by the inhumane blockades of food, basic necessities and medicines promoted by political pressure from Washington and its Western allies that are (in addition to instigated by Zionist pressure groups) shamefully supported by Riyadh and its Gulf allies. The situation to which the Arab country is being subjected is so inhumane that to the thousands of displaced already existing is added a situation of famine in process that has already caused the death of thousands of children and that cannot be hidden from world opinion and all this, due to a trade blockade promoted from Washington and supported by the financial sectors that control the market. As Ayman Gharaibeh, UNHCR Representative said “The world cannot let Yemen fall into an abyss.”

This has been one of the weapons that Washington has used in the past to subdue the countries that resisted its intervention. The thirteen-year embargo against Iraq, in addition to the plundering of financial resources (by freezing bank accounts abroad) caused such a state of misery that it pushed back the life expectancy of its inhabitants to bygone times. A specific example was seen in the invasion of 2003 when the British frustrated by not being able to take the southern city of Basra due to the bitter resistance, bombed food stores and cut off drinking water to create despair in the population that made the task of defenders. As Kissinger put it “Control the oil and you control nations. Control the food and you control the towns”.

In Afghanistan it was not possible to use the same strategy as there the armed resistance is more organized and complex, fostered by a multi-ethnic human composition spread over a wide and irregular terrain. This did not prevent the CIA and its colleagues from deploying the “ISIS” ruse to try to counter the influence of the Taliban. In Syria we are seeing how the USA, in addition to its illegal intervention on the ground, tries to strangle its economy through trade sanctions and product blockades that seek the same purpose as in Yemen.

Washington has justified the implementation of these inhumane measures by accusing the Houthi resistance of being a terrorist organization linked to Iran, a terminology used over the years in a partial and tendentious way that led to the aberrations of Guantánamo and hundreds of concentration camps of the CIA around the world.

And this was propitiated throughout the Trump administration, an isolationist who cut off several of the businesses linked to the internationalists who, through military intervention, seek to create zones of perpetual chaos that justify the armed presence of the United States. The exception is understood as a part of its pro-Israeli policy of strengthening the defense of the state by degrading its most bitter enemies in the region. For now, the arrival of Biden and his corresponding advisers for the Middle East does not mean that it stops this policy of humanitarian extortion.

So dire is the situation among the civilian population that the same United Nations representative Martin Griffiths called on the US to review its determination to label the Houthi resistance as “terrorists.” A similar appeal was made by the Director of the World Food Program David Beasley, focusing on the suffering caused by these policies on the mass of the population aimed at obtaining a clearly extortionate consent.

Undoubtedly, beyond the domestic demonstrations of the structural problems that infect American democracy and that affect the lives, liberties and equal treatment of all its citizens, there is in the aspect of how its political and military representatives see the rest of the world, the explanation of a notable disregard for the human life of others based on a supposed belief of moral and political superiority that authorizes them to unleash wars and create chaos in the name of a democracy that they themselves do not practice; without a doubt, it is the irreverent behavior of a criminal elite of global reach.