photo credit: The New York Times
Since September, 2014, Yemen has been in an eviscerating civil war. The war, which began between Yemeni President Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi’s government, and the Houthi—a group of Shia rebels— with involvement from regional hegemons and rivals, like Saudi Arabia and Iran, and other countries, has resulted in a devastating humanitarian crisis for the Yemeni people. Almost seven years later, there is little hope for the civilians affected.
Yemen’s conflict began in 2011, when speculation that President Saleh was seeking constitutional amendments to change the presidential term from five years to seven, reached the public. The change would allow for his presidency to last just enough time for his son to reach the presidential age requirement of forty. The news sparked pro-democracy protests across the country.
In January 2011, thousands of protesters gathered in Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and other cities to call for Saleh’s resignation. Protesters chanted pro-democracy slogans and condemned poverty and government corruption. In response, Saleh made economic concessions to his citizens. Relief included an increase in government employee salaries, and reductions on income taxes. Yemen’s citizens were already in extreme poverty, living off two dollars a day.
The United Nations (UN) reports that the Yemeni economy has lost ninety billion in USD in economic output, and that 600,000 people have lost their jobs throughout the war.
In February 2011, in response to the demonstrations, Saleh vowed not to run for reelection and that his son would not succeed him. Yemeni citizens heard the same promise in 2006, so his words did little to placate protesters. The same month, tens of thousands of Yemeni university students led a sit-on protest on Sanaa University’s campus, promising to stay until Saleh resigned.
The response from the Saleh government was violent. By March, Yemeni civilians were dying at the hands of their military. The increase in violent attacks on protesters dwindled support for Saleh from inside the government. On March 18, 2011, loyalists to the president opened fire on Sanaa protesters. The shooting resulted in at least fifty deaths, which led dozens of government officials to resign from office. Negotiations between Saleh and the opposition went on for months, as did civilian casualties due to protests.
Finally, on November 23, 2011, President Saleh signed a transfer of power to Vice President Hadi in exchange for immunity. After thirty-three years, Yemen’s authoritarian president was out of office.
The beginning of Hadi’s presidency was met with attacks by jihadists, seperatist movements in the south that took advantage of the country’s instability, the continued loyalty of his security personal to Saleh, food insecurity and unemployment.
To make tensions worse, Hadi’s government lifted fuel subsidies in 2014, causing an increase in prices. The Houthis— formally known as Ansar Allah (partisans of god and is also a tribal group) organized mass protests to demand lower prices. When negotiations between the two parties failed, the Houthis infiltrated Yemen’s capital city of Sanaa and overtook the presidential palace in January 2015. The coup forced Hadi to resign.
In March, Houthis attempted to overtake the entire country, forcing Hadi to flee to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia, and eight other majority Sunni states, feared that the Houthis had military support from Shias and Iran. In response, the Saudi’s, who are rivals of the Iranians, created a Saudi-led coalition to counter the Shias, and the countries initiated an air campaign (with weapons supplied by The United States) which restored Hadi’s government. In 2015, he rescinded his resignation.
Hadi’s government has been based in the port city of Aden for the past six years, but the president himself remains based in Saudi Arabia. The government struggles to provide basic services and security for their people, and their authority is challenged by the seperatist Southern Transitional Council (STC). The STC wants independence for the South of Yemen—from both the Houthis and Saudi-led coalition—which existed from 1967 until 1990 when it joined the north.
Coalition troops were able to drive Houthis and their allies out of most of the south. However, their forces in the north-west and Sanaa still remain.
The Houthi and Saleh alliance ended in 2017 when Saleh was killed trying to flee Sanaa after he allegedly changed alliances. In 2018, coalition groups now joined by Saleh loyalists, launched a defensive campaign to recapture Hudaydah from the Houthis. The port city is a lifeline for millions of Yemenis at risk of famine.
Six months later, both parties agreed to a cease fire. The agreement called for the Houthis to redeploy their troops from Hudaydah, create a prisoner exchange system and address the deteriorating situation in the city of Taiz, which has been besieged by Houthis since 2015. Hundreds of prisoners have been released, but the forces have not been fully deployed, and the seige in Taiz continues.
In 2018, the STC, with assistance from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was able to oust Hadi loyalists backed by the Saudi-led coalition, from Aden and surrounding regions. The STC accused president Hadi of links to islamists and for mismanagement. The fighting ended in 2019 with intervenance from Saudi Arabia, a few months after UAE announced their withdrawal from Yemen.
In an attempt to ease tensions, Hadi’s government created the Riyadh Agreement, which offered STC a role in the government in exchange for withdrawal of its forces from Aden, and for their integration into Hadi’s military and security forces. However, the deal has not been implemented.
Unfortunately, terrorist groups al-Queda and the Islamic State group have taken advantage of the civil war to cause deadly attacks and seize territory in the south of Yemen.
Dr. Blaney, a history teacher here at Fieldston, believes that civil wars are harder to resolve. He says that “I think the difficult part for civil wars in general is really the human cost of them. Civil wars tend to be, in general, more brutal than conventional wars, because you’re not fighting just over say territory or over resources, you’re fighting for the deepest foundations of your identity or often, social and ethnic grievances. In this case, that have been around for generations, so that makes people pretty emotional—they have so much more invested in that.”
Dr. Blaney believes that the hardest part of ending the war comes down to whether or not it is possible for both sides to reunite. “You see lots of wartime atrocities in things like civil wars because it’s about rights. Which side gets to decide what society looks like, and again, that’s really essential stuff. It’s not just who’s the leader? It’s how do we think of ourselves? I think that the reconciliation part is the really tricky part of it. It’s one thing to get a ceasefire; it’s one thing to sort of agree and say, ‘okay we’re going to try and mitigate,’ but it’s really the reconciliation of saying can we find a way to [reconcile when] we have these sort of two deadly opposed ways of looking at things, or again, ethnic tensions that go back quite far. How do we get past that?”
Blaney brought up the ceasefire in Northern Ireland. The country has what he calls a peace wall that separates Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. Even so, Dr. Blaney believes that “the potential for violence to break out is there, even though the paramilitary groups have largely decommissioned their weapons or surrendered their weapons; it’s always still there…and that’s without there being any serious violence in let’s say 15 or 20 years.”
A large difference between Yemen and past historical conflicts is what Dr. Blaney describes as “living memory.” In Yemen, he says that “People still have living memories of all the stuff that happened before. It’s hard to let that go if somebody was part of, let’s say either a group you saw as a threat or an oppressor group, killed family members and friends of yours. It’s hard to say, ‘okay, let’s put that aside and move on.’ Especially, if you think that the agreement is going to leave that other group with its influence largely intact, because you’re not gonna feel safe.”
If reconciliation between Hadi’s government and the Houthis is not possible, maybe the solution to the war may be to separate the country. Dr. Blaney, while uncertain of the likelihood, thinks it is a possibility, “I’d have to dig more to give you a more confident answer, but often that is seen as what needs to be done. Again, it’s something that you often see: Sudan and South Sudan: Northern Ireland being not part of the Republic of Ireland: two state solution instead of a single Israel that guarantees the rights of all of its citizens to the fullest extent. So, it’s not something that’s uncommon for people to say, ‘well look, if we can’t get them to trust each other and that it’s just going to cause conflict, then we need to separate them out. That could be it.”
Dr. Blaney believes that a ceasefire is more probable than a permanent solution. At the same time, he realizes that the solution is not so black and white: “When we intellectualize the issue, we miss out on the raw human emotion that’s built into this.” When he reflects about his young daughter, he starts to understand the resistance to reunification: “If there was something going on and there was some group that targeted me, and in the end the result of that something happened to my daughter—I don’t think I’d ever forgive. Ever. I wouldn’t be able to see past it, so how can I expect anybody else to do the same? But at the same time, you have to find solutions; hence the problem.”
The war has annihilated Yemeni cities and citizens. The humanitarian impacts are detrimental. In December 2020, the United Nations reported that the conflict has resulted in 233,000 deaths; 131,000 of which are from indirect causes like lack of food, health services and infrastructure. The UN predicted that by the end of 2021, the death toll would rise to 377,000, and it did. According to the United Nations Development Programme, 70% of those deaths were from children under five years old.
Human Rights Watch reported that from March 2015 to March 2020, the Saudi-led coalition initiated between 20,625 and 58,487 airstrikes. One third of which hit civilian objects including: hospitals, residential homes, schools, food stores, weddings, farms, markets, school buses, etc.
A major concern is famine. Unfortunately, 50,000 Yemenis are already experiencing famine-like conditions, while five million others are on the brink of starvation. The UN reports that around two million children under the age of five are malnourished, and 400,000 of them are at risk of death without treatment.
Despite the overwhelming need for medical assistance, only half of Yemen’s 3,500 medical facilities are fully functional, but twenty percent of districts have no doctors. Proximity to functioning hospitals means little when twenty million Yemenis do not have access to sufficient health care.
The war has worsened an already dire situation for public institutions that oversee healthcare, water and sanitation. On top of Yemen’s long list of crises, the country is experiencing the largest cholera outbreak ever reported. Almost three million cases have been reported, alongside the 40,000 related deaths. The outbreak is little of a surprise considering one out of two people do not have access to safe water, including ten million children.
Due to the conflict, the UN reports that 24.1 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, with 14 million in desperate need and 12 million of which are children. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported in 2019 that fifty percent of Yemeni children had irreversible stunted growth due to the famine.
De facto land, sea and air blockades from coalition forces have stopped the flow of food and medicine, and the ongoing fuel crisis continues to drive up the prices of essential products. Millions are suffering as Houthi and Yemeni forces deny the UN and aid agencies unlimited access to civilians. The Houthi have imposed hundreds of regulations and implemented delays to avoid approving aid projects; they are preventing aid assessments to identify people’s needs and are attempting to control any aid monitoring that occurs.
The negligence of humanitarian aid is astounding and extremely frustrating. What could possibly be the reason for allowing people to starve? Dr. Blaney put the answer bluntly. He says that it is for “Driving out unwanted populations.” It is a “more extreme form of xenophobia,” but it is part of a process. “The process,” says Dr. Blaney, is to “make life so uncomfortable that they leave, and that’s the endgame; drive the people off the land. If you’re starving, you’re not gonna stay there, especially if you have kids. It’s just another form of warfare.”
Every act taken or not taken is a strategy; everything that was or was not done was for a reason. The same goes for the lack of humanitarian aid in Yemen. Dr. Blaney states that “Wars breed inhumanity. When you value an ideal over humans, whether it be a religious goal, a secular goal, an ethnic national goal, when you view that as more important than individual human life, it always leads to great acts of inhumanity.”
In the end, the winning party can spin the narrative. The picture would be that those who died were martyrs and not denied lifesaving care. Dr. Blaney explains that the conflict is now “something that is meant to stay in place for generations,” so, individual lives do not matter. He says that “what matters is that the ideal lives on. Let’s just say they win, the Houthis win, they’re not gonna frame it as, ‘we stabbed them in the back, or we abandoned them.’ They’re gonna say, ‘they were martyrs to the cause.’ Which again is horrific; these are real people.”
Dr. Blaney’s heart breaks as he watches the war progress. He says his daughter has changed his outlook on humanitarian issues, “For me, when I see things like that, it touches me in a raw way that previously it didn’t when it was just me and I could intellectualize out. I had more flexibility in terms of how I could respond to things. So, when I see that, it’s almost emotionally unbearable to see people like that knowing there are people just like me who just want the best for their kids.”
The UN continues to call the crisis in Yemen the “worst humanitarian crisis in the world.” This is a statement that sparks controversy. It brings up debates over if we can really measure and compare the suffering of human beings across the world. If so, what is the criteria? Is it based on the scale of the conflict, meaning the number of human beings affected? Dr. Blaney disagrees with the UN’s labeling, stating “I’m not sure I can believe in hierarchies of suffering here. Is it worse than what’s going on in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, is it worse than what’s going in Xinjiang for the Uyghurs?”
Dr. Blaney suggests that the reasoning behind the statement is so that the world pays attention. He says that “You have to almost use the strongest language possible to get people to pay attention. I’m not saying that that strong language is unwarranted. What’s going on there is horrible, but I just always feel a little uncomfortable.” It makes him uneasy to believe that “the suffering of some are more than others.” He is not sure that outlook is a healthy one.
All parties involved in the conflict have been accused of committing war crimes and/or violations of international humanitarian law. Houthi forces have become notorious for using land mines; specifically anti-personnel landmines, which are a violation of international humanitarian law. The use of mines worsens food security and prevents aid workers from arriving at communities in need. In 2019, landmines killed 498 civilians; a 23% increase from the year prior. The UN has also accused the group of knowingly attacking civilian forces, which is another violation of international law. Some attacks have been on hospitals from the non-profit organization, Doctors Without Borders.
Among the alleged war crimes committed by all parites are torture, arbitary arrests and forced disappearances. The UN group of Eminent International and Regional Experts on Yemen reported in 2020 revealed the horror that all parties recruit child soldiers. Yemeni boys are sent to Saudi Arabia for military training and then deployed back to Yemen to fight the Houthi, while young girls are recruited for spying, to recruit others, guards and medics.
Dr. Blaney believes that all parties will “absolutely not” be held accountable for their crimes. The possibility is slim to none, because “you will never get them to the bargaining table,” he said. If anything, Dr. Blaney believes that it would incentivize more violence.
After six years, the world has watched tens of millions of Yemenis suffer. Hopefully, humanitarian aid will reach them soon, the war will end, and the country can begin to heal.
