YEMEN, A RAPIDLY GROWING HUMAN TRAGEDY

Peace remains ever more elusive in the beleaguered nation of Yemen. Talks held in Geneva, Switzerland, last week to seek an end to the sectarian violence in that Arab country foundered miserably. UN Special Envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed traveled to the Geneva talks with what he apparently thought were modest enough objectives: an at least temporary truce and agreement on a seven-point plan for extending peace beyond a ceasefire. But hopes for a cessation of hostilities throughout the Muslim holy month of Ramadan (June 17 to July 17)―let alone for approval by both sides of any sort of agreement―were quickly dashed when negotiators failed even to get the warring sides to meet in the same room.

Instead, Amhed and his team had to meet with the two warring sides―Houthi rebel-led delegates from Sana′a and representatives of Yemeni President-in-exile Abd Radduh Mansur Hadi―in separate rooms, thus carrying out a sort of “shuttle diplomacy” between the two belligerents, but without ever leaving the building. And in the end, there was little to do but admit defeat.

Yemen is swiftly becoming a new human crisis of growing proportions. Indeed, it finds itself―according to the worldwide humanitarian organization, CARE―in the midst of one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises of the present time. Some 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the Saudi-led airstrikes that began there in March of this year. Twenty million people (or 80 percent of the population) are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance. A million people in Yemen have been displaced from their homes. The war has resulted in the blocking of land and sea routes into and out of the country, thus preventing vital food, medical and fuel supplies from reaching its inhabitants. An estimated quarter of a million inhabitants have fled the warring country and sought refuge in Africa and elsewhere. CARE reports that wheat and other staples are in critically short supply and that some 12 million Yemenis are suffering from hunger. Fifteen million are without medical care, since many hospitals have been forced to shut down due to lack of supplies and of vital electrical services.

Seen within a clear perspective, US-backed Saudi airstrikes in Yemen have been a dual failure. First, Houthi rebels, whom the US and Saudi Arabia accuse of being Iranian surrogates in a bitter Arab power struggle, remain in control and their resolve appears to be intact. And second, so-called “collateral damage” has been enormous, killing vastly more civilians than Houthi rebels and destroying their homes and businesses. Prior to the airstrikes, many Yemenis opposed the Houthi rebels and feared the Houthi takeover that drove President Hadi into Saudi exile. But whatever their feelings toward the Houthis might have been prior to the apparently indiscriminate Saudi air raids, Yemenis and pro-Iranian Houthis now seem to share a common enemy: the Saudi-led coalition and its Western backers, since what they have spelled in Yemen is a burgeoning tragedy for Yemen civilians.

Thanks to Western pressure, a UN Security Council resolution is calling for the unrecognized Houthi revolutionary government in Yemen to end its reign and permit the return of former President Hadi. But the provisional head of government, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, has been quoted as saying that this is a ludicrous demand, since the majority of Yemenis now consider Hadi a traitor, who ran out on the country in its hour of need and who is living in luxury-exile in Saudi Arabia while his very allies are bombing and starving civilians in his own nation.

Objective geo-political analysts conclude that the tragic Yemen crisis isn’t, by any means, a civil war. Rather, it is a proxy conflict in a cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and thus, between the United States and those with opposing interests to its own in the Middle East.

Yemen’s self-proclaimed Houthi president agrees. Al-Houthi denies any links between his regime and the Iranian government. He claims that the Western-backed war on Yemen is a baseless invention. Indeed, he has been quoted as saying, basically, that if the Saudis and the West have a bone to pick with Iran, then they should take their war to Iran, and leave Yemen to sort itself out among Yemenis.