Wednesday, October 10, 2018

“Once we control them, we will feed them.”

While the US and UK back their Coalition allies unfailingly in their wider political and strategic objectives, the two major Arab actors in the Coalition, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, have different economic priorities in the war. That of Saudi Arabia is oil wealth, including preventing a united Yemen’s use of its own oil revenues, and developing a new pipeline through Yemen to the Indian Ocean.

While that of the Emirates is control over seaports, for trade, tourism and fish wealth. The attack on al-Hudayda explicitly aims to complete the economic war militarily. That the immense suffering of Yemen’s people has still not brought surrender by those in Sanʿaʾ does not give credibility to the tactic of further hunger and disease. 

A senior Saudi Arabian diplomat responded to a question about threatened starvation in Yemen: “Once we control them, we will feed them.”

Yemen entered the war highly dependent on food imports. Such food insecurity was the product of the country’s incorporation since 1968 into the wider regional oil economy and the gradual adoption of economic and social policies that devalued local grain production, encouraged rural male labour out-migration, and marginalized women’s rights and family planning. 

The Tihama region in Yemen, the onetime breadbasket of the country, is now an area where:

• 43% of people go hungry every night 
• coping means: less food (89%) and of lower quality (72%); no education for children (61%); exhausting all one’s savings and stocks (50%) 
• land under cultivation has decreased by 51% 
• crop yields per hectare have declined between 20-61% 
• the production of fruits and vegetables has been wiped out as has the livestock population. 

Today conditions for farmers of Tihama are surely far more dire than in June 2017 when the study was done. 

If one places the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war, there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanʿaʾ. As described above, from the autumn of 2016, economic war has compounded physical destruction to create a mass failure in basic livelihoods.

 Deliberate destruction of family farming and artisanal fishing is a war crime. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the United Kingdom and France are signatories to the 1977 Protocol I additional to the Geneva Conventions, which gives the fullest statement in International Humanitarian Law on the protection of objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population.

Commentary on the Yemen war often notes the complicity of the top-three arms-sellers (the US, the UK and France) in war crimes arising from the bombing campaign. Moreover, it may mention their role in protecting the Coalition partners diplomatically. Yet their support for economic war – the major cause of starvation – is scarcely recognized. Were that support acknowledged – support necessary for Saudi interception of ships already cleared by UN Verification and Inspection – perhaps it would render appeals to these powers for humanitarian aid ring hollow.

https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Strategies%20of%20Coalition%20in%20Yemen%20War.pdf

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