There’s a disaster much worse than Texas. But no one talks about it. By Jonathan Freedland
Yemen. In July the UN
determined that it was “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”. If you think it’s hard to
get westerners interested in flood victims in Nepal, just try talking about Yemen.
The scale of the
suffering in the Arab world’s poorest country is clear. Since it became the
site of a proxy war in March 2015, 10,000 people have been killed, with 7
million made homeless. The UN is especially anxious about cholera, which has
already killed 2,000 people and infected more than 540,000. It threatens to
become an epidemic. That’s no surprise, given that sewage plants have been
among the infrastructure bombed from the sky. The Saudi-led coalition has kept
Sana’a airport closed, which means food and medicines cannot get in and the
sick cannot get out for treatment. Pictures of gaunt children, listless babies
and starving mothers recall the worst of Africa’s famines – but this disaster
is entirely human-made.
Nor is this a remote
story utterly unconnected to us. On the contrary, the Saudi government is armed
to the hilt with weapons supplied by the UK and the US: £3.3bn worth of British firepower in the first year of this
vicious war alone. And yet Yemen has barely registered in the western
consciousness, let alone stirred the western conscience. Of course, there are
all the usual factors explaining public indifference to horrible events far,
far away. But there is one that is relatively new.
Before 2003, whenever word
came of some distant catastrophe that posed no threat to our own safety, a discussion
soon followed on what “we” should do about it. The two sides would take up
their positions: the “something must be done” brigade pitted against those who
argue that, however awful things are, it is none of our business and we will
only make matters worse. Sometimes the latter camp would prevail – think
of Douglas Hurd and mid-1990s Bosnia; sometimes, the former:
witness Tony
Blair and Kosovo.
After Iraq, that
changed. Thanks to the invasion, as well as the bloodshed and mayhem in
Afghanistan and Libya, the argument is now settled – and the
non-interventionists won. The test case is Syria, where Bashar al-Assad has
killed hundreds of thousands of his own people – more than Saddam ever did –
and yet has been allowed to retain his throne untroubled by outside challenge.
If there has been
little western public appetite for action to shield Syria’s people from their
dictator, there’s less to protect the people of Yemen. There’s not much
interest even in pressuring London and Washington to stop arming the Saudi regime
that is responsible for the country’s torment, despite the warnings that Yemen risks becoming
the next Syria: its soil soaked in blood, rendered fertile for the next
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