Yemen will become “a country of living ghosts” if the war continues unabated, a United Nations official warned, even as President Donald Trump intensified pressure on Saudi Arabia to halt the fighting.
Hoping for a respite, the UN is drawing up plans to provide food, medicines and other emergency assistance to 14 million people in Yemen per month, up from 7-8 million.
Ordinary Yemenis are crushed by the world’s largest humanitarian disaster worsened by famine, preventable diseases and a collapsing economy. Currently, 22 million of Yemen’s 29 million people need some form of humanitarian support to survive.
“The violence must stop now to give Yemen a chance to pull back from the brink. Unless it does, this will become a country of living ghosts, its people reduced to sacks of bones,” Herve Verhoosel, senior spokesperson for the UN World Food Programme (WFP), warned. “Humanitarians can only do so much in the face of relentless bombing and unconscionable war tactics that spare no one.”
“Yemen is the largest hunger crisis in the world. Millions of people are living on the edge of famine and the situation is getting worse by the day,” he said. “The food security crisis is man-made. It is the result of conflict, economic collapse, rising prices, and problems of supply and distribution.”
Clearly, to avert an even more massive humanitarian crisis, Trump will have to do much more than last week’s decision to stop mid-air refueling of warplanes of the Saudi-led coalition on bombing runs over Yemen. The Saudis can overcome this hurdle easily because they reportedly take US help for only 20 percent of in-flight refueling.
As a reprimand for the premeditated murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi operatives in Turkey, Trump gave the Saudi-led allies 30 days (ending on November 29) to stop the fighting and start peace talks on Yemen.
Instead, the Saudi coalition has intensified its assault on the vital Red Sea port of Hodeidah raising fears of a bloodbath to conquer it in defiance of Trump’s call for negotiations with the Houthi rebels controlling the city.
In recent days, Emirati forces allied to Saudi Arabia and using American-supplied weapons have blocked most routes around Hodeidah in an effort to strangle the city and force a surrender. The tactics are similar to those used by Syrian forces to reconquer Aleppo and other Syrian cities earlier this year, bringing near total destruction to each recaptured neighborhood.
Martin Griffith, the UN Special Envoy on Yemen, told the UN Security Council on Friday that he would soon convene parties to the conflict in Yemen for consultations in Sweden to find political solutions. But renewed fighting could derail his plans.
“Events of war can always take peace off the table. We must not let that happen now,” he urged.
UN monitors reported a slight lull last week in the siege of Hodeidah but it could end at any moment. This is the concern that Griffiths voiced to the Security Council when he said, “Let us hope that there will be no acts which prevent the convening of the parties for consultations, in Sweden, in the coming weeks”.
A WFP report due later this month is expected to underline that nearly half of Yemen’s population will have “so little to eat that they are just one step away from starvation”.
Intense fighting in and around Hodeidah has caused major delays to the arrival of humanitarian and commercial cargo. As a result, the price of food in shops has shot up beyond the reach of most people.
Hodeidah receives about 70 percent of imports into Yemen, which depends on imports for nearly all its commercial food requirements. Routes out of the city are vital to supply north and central Yemen with food and other vital necessities.
The price of most basic food items in Yemen has increased by more than 30 percent in just four months and the value of the Yemeni Riyal has halved since July, losing 21 percent in September alone. The currency has lost over 200 percent of its pre-crisis purchasing power.
About 1.2 million government employees have not received their salaries for more than two years and over 500,000 jobs have been lost since the beginning of the conflict. “Waging war through withheld wages is intolerably cruel and unacceptable by any ethical standards,” Verhoosel said.
“The fate of Hodeidah makes a mockery of warring parties’ claims that the lives of civilians are precious. WFP needs safe, immediate and unimpeded access for food and other vital supplies into Hodeidah and everywhere where lives can be saved,” he added. “All harassment of humanitarians, all restrictions on their movements, and all targeting of their facilities must cease.”