Yemen, children, starvation

Yemen has been something of a football for a hundred years. Poverty-stricken and nowadays on the wrong end of a conflict that is raging across the Middle East and the Arabian Peninsula. The power struggle within Yemen itself is between the Saudi-backed elected government and the Houthi rebels in the north that are backed by Iran. After three years of war, the country is on the brink of famine. As ever those that suffer the most are the weakest and the most vulnerable, and Save the Children International (SCI) has now issued a grim warning. As many as five million children are already experiencing degrees of malnutrition and starvation, and “an entire generation may face death and starvation on an unprecedented scale.”

Organisations such as SCI are not prone to exaggeration, and if it says that a generation could die then a generation could die. It will not just be starvation, there are the bombs and diseases such as cholera taking a cull as well. Key to the relief for Yemen’s children is the port of Hodeida on the Red Sea coast. It is held by the rebels and blockaded by the Saudis and their allies. Pictures of living skeletons, children held together by tissue-thin skin, have emerged. They were taken in the hospital at Abs which is to the north of Hodeida. A trickle of aid makes it through the port but nowhere near enough and even if aid were to suddenly flow there will be millions of children who will have suffered life-changing damage that is irreversible, and for whom any aid is just too late. Food is a weapon of war, starvation the fallout from the bomb that is never heard to explode. And the world? The world stands back, impassive, content and complaisant. 

Published in The Express Tribune, September 21^st, 2018.

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