[News] Being a Child in Yemen Is the Stuff of Nightmares

[Anti-Imperialist News]

Being a Child in Yemen Is the Stuff of Nightmares: The Forty-Third 
Newsletter (2021)
View this email in your browser 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=346375b49c&e=d206d0a40d> 


*Being a Child in Yemen Is the Stuff of Nightmares: The Forty-Third 
Newsletter (2021)*


Murad Subay (Yemen), /Fuck War/, 2018.

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social 
Research 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=e2341c7113&e=d206d0a40d>.

In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – along with 
other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – began to bomb 
Yemen. These countries entered a conflict that had been ongoing for at 
least a year as a civil war escalated between the government of 
President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, the Ansar Allah movement of the Zaidi 
Shia, and al-Qaeda. The GCC – led by the Saudi monarchy – wanted to 
prevent any Shia political project, whether aligned with Iran or not, 
from taking power along Saudi Arabia’s border. The attack on Yemen can 
be described, therefore, as an attack by the Sunni monarchs against the 
possibility of what they feared would be a Shia political project coming 
to power on the Arabian Peninsula.

That war has continued, with the Saudis and the Emiratis backed fully by 
the Western countries, who have sold them billions of dollars of weapons 
to use against the impoverished Yemeni people. Saudi Arabia, the richest 
Arab country, has now been at war for the past six and a half years 
without much gain against Yemen, the poorest Arab country. Meanwhile, 
Yemen, which has a population of 30 million, has lost over 250,000 
people to this conflict, half of them to the violence of war and half of 
them to the violence of starvation and disease, including cholera. None 
of the military or political aims of the Saudis and the Emiratis have 
been attained during the course of the war (the UAE withdrew in 2020). 
The only outcome of this war has been devastation for the Yemeni people.

Saba Jallas (illustration) / Mohammed Aziz (photograph), /From Today’s 
Bombing on Sana’a, 7/3/2021 AD, /Yemen, 2021.

Since February 2021, the military forces of Ansar Allah have made a push 
to capture the central town of Marib, which is not only at the epicentre 
of Yemen’s modest oil refining project but is also one of the few parts 
of the country still controlled by President Hadi. Other provinces, such 
as those in the south, are in the hands of al-Qaeda, while breakaway 
factions of the army control the western coastline. The attack on Marib 
has opened the jaws of death even wider, creating in its wake a flood of 
refugees. If Marib falls to Ansar Allah, which is likely, the United 
Nations’ mission to maintain Hadi as the country’s president will fail. 
Ansar Allah will then move to reintegrate the country by making a push 
against al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which remains in 
charge in the Abyan Province; AQAP is now being challenged by the newly 
formed Islamic State in Yemen. Punctual US strikes 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=ad55d4bacc&e=d206d0a40d> 
against AQAP come alongside reliance by the Saudi alliance on AQAP to 
battle Ansar Allah on the ground, including 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=3165906e19&e=d206d0a40d> 
through the use of assassinations to intimidate civilians and advocates 
for peace.

Fouad al-Futaih (Yemen), /Mother and Child/, 1973.

On 19 October, UNICEF spokesperson James Elder briefed 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=79bda528db&e=d206d0a40d> 
the press in Geneva after his return from Yemen. He wrote, ‘The Yemen 
conflict has just hit another shameful milestone: 10,000 children have 
been killed or maimed since fighting started in March 2015. That’s the 
equivalent of four children every day’. Elder’s report is shocking. Of 
the 15 million people (50% of Yemen’s population) who do not have access 
to basic facilities, 8.5 million are children. In August, UNICEF 
Executive Director Henrietta Fore told 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=8f667772fe&e=d206d0a40d> 
the UN General Assembly, ‘Being a child in Yemen is the stuff of 
nightmares’. ‘In Yemen’, Fore said, ‘one child dies every ten minutes 
from preventable causes, including malnutrition and vaccine-preventable 
diseases’.

This, friends, is the cost of war. War is an affliction, hideous in its 
outcomes. Rarely can one turn to history and point a finger at a war 
that was worth the price. Even if a list of such wars could be made, 
Yemen would not figure on it, nor would so many countries which have 
bled for other people’s failures of imagination.

Millions of people have lost their lives while tens of millions have 
seen their lives destroyed. The blank stare of the person who has seen 
constant death and misery is what remains when the bombs stop falling 
alongside the blank stare of the hungry person whose country struggles 
to deal with the other quiet yet deadly wars of economic sanctions and 
trade disputes. Little good comes of this belligerence for the people 
who are its victims. Powerful countries might move the chess pieces to 
favour themselves and arms dealers might open new bank accounts to 
preserve their money – and so it goes.

Ilham al-Arashi (Yemen), /Nature is Beautiful/, 1990.

The war in Yemen is not only driven by the country’s internal politics; 
it is also largely a result of the terrible regional rivalry between 
Saudi Arabia and Iran. This rivalry appears to be due to the sectarian 
differences between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shia Iran, while in fact the 
rivalry stems from something deeper: monarchical Islamic Saudi Arabia 
cannot tolerate a republican Islamic government in its neighbourhood. 
Saudi Arabia had no problem when Iran was ruled by the Pahlavi Shahs 
(1925-1979). Its animosity grew only after the Iranian Revolution of 
1979, when it became clear that an Islamic republic could be possible on 
the Arabian Peninsula (this was a repeat of the Saudi and 
British-inspired war between 1962 and 1970 against the republic of North 
Yemen).

It is, therefore, a welcome development that high-ranking officials from 
both Iran and Saudi Arabia first met in Baghdad in April of this year 
and then again in September to set the table for a de-escalation of 
tensions. The discussions have already raised the issues of regional 
rivalries in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen – all countries afflicted 
by the problems between Saudi Arabia and Iran. If a grand bargain can be 
reached between Riyadh and Tehran, it could de-escalate several wars in 
the region.

In 1962, Abdullah al-Sallal, a working-class military officer, led a 
nationalist military coup that overthrew the last ruler of the 
Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen. Many sensitive people rushed to staff 
the new government, including the brilliant lawyer and poet Abdullah 
al-Baradouni. Al-Baradouni worked at the radio broadcasting service in 
the capital, Sana’a, from 1962 till his death in 1999, lifting the 
cultural discourse of his country. His /diwan /(‘collection’) of poems 
includes /Madinat Al Ghad’/ (‘/The City of Tomorrow’/), 1968 and /Al 
Safar Ela Ay Ayyam Al Khudr/ (‘/Journey to the Green Days’/), 1979. 
‘From Exile to Exile’ is one of his classic verses:

My country is handed over from one tyrant
to the next, a worse tyrant;
from one prison to another,
from one exile to another.
It is colonised by the observed
invader and the hidden one;
handed over by one beast to two
like an emaciated camel.

In the caverns of its death
my country neither dies
nor recovers. It digs
in the muted graves looking
for its pure origins
for its springtime promise
that slept behind its eyes
for the dream that will come
for the phantom that hid.
It moves from one overwhelming
night to a darker night.

My country grieves
in its own boundaries
and in other people’s land
and even on its own soil
suffers the alienation
of exile.

Abbas al-Junaydi (Yemen), /Adult Education and Workforce/, c. 1970s.

Al-Baradouni’s country grieves in its own boundaries not only for the 
destruction, but also for its ‘springtime promise’, for its lost 
histories. Like Afghanistan 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=c07b5e728f&e=d206d0a40d>, 
Sudan 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=85d58f39fe&e=d206d0a40d>, 
and so many countries across the world, Yemen was once a centre of Left 
possibility, home to the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) 
from 1967 to 1990 in the country’s south. The PDRY emerged out of an 
anti-colonial struggle against the British led by trade unions (Aden 
Trade Union Congress and its charismatic leader Abdullah al-Asnag) and 
Marxist formations (the National Liberation Front), which – after 
internal struggles – merged into the Yemeni Socialist Party in 1978 led 
by President Abdul Fattah Ismail. The PDRY attempted to enact land 
reforms and advance agricultural production, created a national 
education system (which promoted women’s education), built a strong 
medical system (including health centres in the countryside), and pushed 
through the 1974 Family Law that put women’s emancipation at the front 
of its agenda. All of this was destroyed when the PDRY was overthrown as 
part of the unification of Yemen in 1990. That socialist memory remains 
fragile in the corners of the bomb-torn country.

Warmly,

Vijay

Website <www.eltricontinental.org>

Facebook 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=9d8a9297f1&e=d206d0a40d> 


Twitter 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=12cda6393c&e=d206d0a40d> 


Instagram 
<https://leftword.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=6a79324d3b4acfde1e7e546c6&id=4e7b56261f&e=d206d0a40d> 





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20211028/8ad42636/attachment.htm>