Four years of hell: to crush Yemen’s independence, US-Saudi war created world’s worst humanitarian crisis
On
the fourth anniversary of the US-Saudi war on Yemen, the Middle
East’s poorest nation suffers from the worst humanitarian
catastrophe on Earth. But the Houthi movement — and Yemeni people —
remain unbroken.
by
Ben Norton
Part
3 - Real-life dystopia in Yemen
The
human cost of the damage this US-Saudi war has exacted is difficult
to quantify.
A report
published by United Nations Office for the Coordination of
Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on March 21 offers just a glimpse into
the havoc. Although clinical, it paints a vivid portrait of the
gruesome toll.
More
than 4,800 civilians were killed or injured in 2018, an average of 93
civilian casualties per week — 30 percent killed or injured in
their own homes. Airstrikes were responsible for just over half of
the civilian casualties.
Many
thousands of families have been displaced by the bombing. “Most
live in open spaces and public buildings,” OCHA reported.
“These
horrific incidents show that innocent civilians including children
continue to pay the price for a conflict in which they have no say,”
local aid workers said.
“Yemen’s
economic and social fabric is disintegrating,” the report
added. Yemen’s entire GDP has shrunk by a staggering 39 percent
since 2014.
Even
more shocking are the poverty rates. Since fighting began in 2014,
poverty in Yemen has increased by 33 percent. OCHA estimates that 52
percent of the entire country is living in poverty in 2019.
Before
the US-Saudi military intervention began in March 2015, the average
Yemeni lived on US $4.5 per day. A year into the war, in 2016, the
livelihood of the average Yemeni was cut by more than half, to just
US $1.8 per day. This was compounded by an unemployment rate of over
60 percent.
Even
those with jobs are not doing much better. Hundreds of thousands of
teachers, medical workers, and government officials have gone years
without receiving a paycheck.
A
cataclysmic cholera outbreak has also returned to Yemen. The World
Health Organization (WHO) documented 108,889 suspected cases of
cholera, and 190 deaths, between January 1 and March 17.
Approximately one-third of the victims are Yemeni children under age
5.
The
US-Saudi coalition has indirectly resorted to biological warfare in
Yemen. In 2017, Yemen suffered from one of the worst cholera
outbreaks in modern history, with more than 1 million cases
documented by WHO between April and December.
Cholera
is an entirely preventable disease. But US-Saudi bombing utterly
destroyed Yemen’s health infrastructure, leaving the civilian
population defenseless against diseases that have been eradicated in
almost every other country.
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