The Saudi genocide in Yemen and UN’s silent approval

Noor Dahri

Middle East Analyst, United Kingdom.

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Millions of people in Yemen are dying in hunger, including children who have been crippled for life. The irony is that world leaders are silent over the Saudi genocide since more than 18 months in Yemen. There is no single resolution passed by the UN Security Council condemning the Saudi relentless attacks against a poor country that never hurt its neighbours. The ongoing conflict in Yemen has devastated millions of people’s lives. Right now, more than half the population doesn’t have enough food. Almost a quarter face starvation. Families are living with no water or electricity.

Yemen now has one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world. More than 14 million people are hungry and around 7 million of them are starving. Due to the Saudi Arabia led- coalition imposed complete blocked around the country. There is no local or international organisation which has permission to deliver a packet of food in the area where people are in need of it.

Unofficial figures of death toll rise over 50,000, the war in which Saudi Arabia killed thousands of Yemenis in the Islamic holy month of Ramadhan but no any single condemnation came forward from the Islamic world leaders, yet they still mourn the Gaza war which started in the month of Ramadhan in 2014. Yemen is the poorest country in the gulf and due to Saudi Arabian led coalition bombing campaign and blockade, entire generation is crippled by hunger. Chief of the World Food Program warned that hunger was increasing by the day, and people have exhausted all their survival strategies. Millions of people cannot survive without external assistance, he said.

Before the war, Yemen relied on the imports of its 90 percent of food, medicine and fuel. The majority came through Hodeida which has been badly damaged by Saudi coalition bombardment. The country is now receiving 30 percent of what it needs, but shipments are stopped by the Saudi led alliance which created chaos and hunger in the entire country. The city of Hodeida where most of the children under five are struggling with hunger, they have been forced to eat grass and sea water. Many of homes in that city are destroyed in Saudi bombing and their residents are living in open reed huts. People are dying because they are not allowed to travel abroad and they have the only option to get out of the war zones but Saudi Coalition has restricted to leave the country.

“The worst affected were babies who were disfigured because their mothers were too weak to breastfeed them and people look like skin on skeletons, A Yemeni resident interviewed by an international newspaper.” In October 2016, Saudi warplanes targeted a Yemeni funeral procession, in which more than 140 innocent people had been mercilessly killed and 525 injured. Later, Saudi government admitted that it happened by mistake. It was not a single target which killed hundreds of innocent people, but there are several military strikes which killed thousands of people. One of the examples of them is of Yemeni Abdullah al-Ibbi, who lost his 27 family members. It was on 14th of November, when Abdullah al-Ibbi sat down for a late-night meal with his two wives, their children and grandchildren. It was then, in an instant, that his world shattered.s

The air strike that hit Abdullah’s home killed 27 members of his family. He survived, but only learnt about their deaths six weeks later when he woke up in a hospital bed. He said: “If I didn’t fear God, I would have committed suicide at that moment,” he recalls. “I would have jumped off a building… but God gave me patience.” Last year, December 2015, Saudi Arabia bombed a coca cola factory in Sanaa city, the capital of Yemen. The factory employed 600 workers before the war, but had to lay off 370 of them after the bombing. Saudi led coalition destroyed completely the economic infrastructure of the country. Not any single factory is working perfectly in the country that generates the economic growth of the poor Middle Eastern country.

Where the International Criminal Court is on this ongoing issue even Human Rights Watch said that the strike at the funeral was an “apparent war crime”. Hundreds of resolutions have been passed against the state of Israel in the UN but not a single resolution has been brought against the genocide of Saudi led Coalition. This is a pure international hypocrisy. The UN had condemned Israel in nearly 65 resolutions and the UN Council had resolved almost more resolutions condemning Israel than on the rest of the world combined and whereas none for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. People are still condemning Israel worldwide for the war crimes that she did not commit in the Gaza war in 2014. The International media is portraying a negative image to its viewers about Israel, but it is yet silent on the genocide in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia has become the godfather of the Middle East, supporter of terrorists and extremist groups across the world, whenever it wishes to stop feeding people and whoever it wants burned them alive by bombarding. Saudi Arabia is deeply involved in proxy wars in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq. Last week, the UK’s foreign secretary Boris Johnson accused Saudi Arabia for abusing Islam for its political benefits and that Saudi Arabia is puppeteer in proxy wars in the Middle East.

Some states recently condemned the UK’s foreign policy towards the kingdom of Saudi Arabia that sold deadly weapons cost 3bn last year. Saudi Arabia used these British and the US weapons in Yemen. Britain has sold £3bn worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia since the start of the war last year, and the Saudi air force flies Euro Fighter Typhoon jets. The Saudi Arab re-elected in UNHRC fourth time. This step is nothing but joke with the humanity that the country which is accused of human right violation against own countrymen and across borders is leading the UNHRC. While serving its third term on the council, Saudi Arabia blocked international inquiries into its human rights abuses, punished Saudi citizens who worked in collaboration with the HRC, and threatened to cut critical UN funding after being called out for violating children’s rights.

Saudi Arabia is using its position on the council to block international efforts to investigate the role of all combatants in Yemen’s devastation. UN officials working under Saudi oversight banned foreign journalists and human rights workers from their flights into and out of Yemen. In June, Saudi Arabia successfully blackmailed the UN into removing the Saudi coalition from a list of violators of children’s rights by threatening to cut UN funding.

Leah Schulz, an advocacy fellow at Americans for Democracy & Human Rights in Bahrain suggested: “It is time for member states to push back against Saudi threats and obstructions and demand greater accountability and transparency from their fellow council members. Otherwise, they risk becoming increasingly complicit in the very violations that HRC was created eradicate.” From my point of view, there only one position remains for the world leaders to fill it with electing Saudi Arabia representative as a UN general secretary because the UN is already under threat of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and is not allowed resolving a single resolution against the devastating situation carried out by the Kingdom in Yemen, but the world still blame that Israel controls the world.

2 Comments on "The Saudi genocide in Yemen and UN’s silent approval"

  1. Saudi ruling the world

  2. I like the openness of what I have just read above. Have you written on Gaza Moslem State or about the Arab Moslems resident in Judea and Samaria?

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