Dilip Simeon's blog

So relentless has the violence convulsing the Middle East become that an attack on yet another Arab country and its descent into full-scale war barely registers in the rest of the world. That’s how it has been with the  onslaught on impoverished Yemen  by western-backed Saudi Arabia and a string of other Gulf dictatorships. Barely two weeks into their bombardment from air and sea, more than 500 have been killed and the  Red Cross is warning of a “catastrophe”  in the port of Aden. Where half a century ago Yemenis were tortured and killed by British colonial troops, Houthi rebels from the north are now fighting Saudi-backed forces loyal to the ousted President Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Up to 40 civilians sheltering at a UN refugee camp in the poorest country in the Arab world were killed in a  single Saudi air attack last week . But of course the US and Britain are standing shoulder to shoulder with the Saudi intervention. Already providing ...

The war in Yemen has killed  as many as 57,000  people since March 2015, left  8.4 million  people surviving on food aid and created a  cholera epidemic . The British government claims to have been at the forefront of international humanitarian assistance, giving more than  £570 m  to Yemen in bilateral aid since the war began. Yet the financial value of aid is a drop in the ocean compared with the value of weapons sold to the Saudi-led coalition – licences worth at least  £4.7bn  of arms exports to Saudi Arabia and  £860m  to its coalition partners since the start of the war. Relatively speaking, aid has been little more than a sticking plaster on the death, injury, destruction, displacement, famine and disease inflicted on Yemen by an  entirely man made disaster . Britain and the US have been the key supporters of the Saudi-led coalition, providing arms, intelligence, logistics, military training and diplomatic cover. ...

A recent UN report sheds light on the devastating humanitarian and economic impact of the war in Yemen and how it sets back human development there more than 20 years,  Anadolu  reports. The report by the organization’s development program (UNDP) highlights the humanitarian situation there, which was one of the worst in the world even prior to the war, but has gotten worse since tensions escalated. With its 30 million people, Yemen ranked 153 on the Human Development Index, 138 in extreme poverty, 147 in life expectancy, 172 in educational attainment and was already on the World Bank’s low-middle income category, according to the report. UNHCR aids 250,000 displaced people in Yemen Experts suggest “Yemen would not have achieved any of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” set out by the UN to reach by 2030 even in the absence of conflict. The UNDP’s Yemen representative, Auke Lootsma, said “even if there were to be peace tomorrow, it could take decades for Yem...

AFTER THE U.S.-BACKED , Saudi-led coalition  bombed  a hospital in Yemen supported by Doctors Without Borders on Monday, the U.S. State Department offered a rare condemnation of the coalition’s violence. “Of course we condemn the attack,” said Elizabeth Trudeau, a spokesman for the State Department. The State Department has previously deflected questions about coalition attacks by  referring reporters  to the Saudi government — even though the U.S. has supplied the coalition with  billions of dollars  of weapons, and has  refueled Saudi planes.  Trudeau also stressed that “U.S. officials regularly engage with Saudi officials” about civilian casualties — a line that spokespeople have  repeated for months . Saudi Arabia has nevertheless continued to bomb civilian sites, including homes, markets, factories, and schools. “We’ve also encouraged them to do their utmost to protect entities protected by international law, such as hospitals,” s...

As the  court of appeal prepares to rule  on the legitimacy of the British government’s continued supply of weapons to the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen, new figures show the conflict’s death toll is fast approaching the 100,000 mark. With no clear resolution in sight, the extent of civilian casualties caused by direct targeting as the war with Houthi rebels enters its fifth year has been outlined in a  report  by the the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project (Acled). The project claims to provide the most comprehensive evaluation of the war to date, extending its previous research into fatalities to cover the start of the  Yemen  conflict in March 2015 through to the present day, Clionadh Raleigh, Acled’s executive director, said the data provided “an estimate of the war’s true toll for the first time”. “The data is both a tool and a warning,” said Raleigh. “The international community must use it to help understand, monitor, and ul...

Yemen’s Zaydi Shiite Houthi rebels, who control the northwest of Yemen, including the capital of Sana’a,  claimed on Saturday to have launched  the 10 drones that struck the major Saudi petroleum production and refining installations at Abqaiq and Khurais. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denied that the drones came from Yemen, blaming the attack on Iran instead. Iran provides some minor aid to the Houthis, but the latter lack control of a port or secure overland routes out of the country and so Iran couldn’t possibly have given that much help. The Houthis are an indigenous Yemeni movement with Yemeni discontents with Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Prince plans to make us forget about the murder of Khashoggi before the US election Attack on Saudi oil field a game-changer in Gulf confrontation : The attack on the world's  largest oil processing plant  early Saturday morning is a dramatic escalation in the confrontation between Iran and Saudi Arabia --  even if the...

The Saudi- and United Arab Emirates-led coalition fighting in  Yemen  is under unprecedented pressure from the international community to end its involvement in the war after the killing of the Saudi journalist  Jamal Khashoggi . Since the coalition intervened in 2015,  Yemen  has become the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, according to the UN. Rights groups say up to 56,000 people have been killed, half of the 28 million-strong population are starving and the country is suffering the worst cholera epidemic in modern history. But who are the coalition fighting, and why has the war descended into a stalemate? Yemen’s Houthi rebels are a decades-old resistance movement, born in opposition to Saudi Arabia’s religious influence. Although they cannot hold out forever against the coalition’s air power and blockades, they say they are determined not to give up. The Houthi movement was founded in the 1990s by Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, a member of Ye...

The struggle for West Asian supremacy has engulfed one more country: Yemen. Saudi Arabia has called in every IOU it has to mobilise a Sunni military response to the Iranian-backed rebels who have captured much of northern and interior Yemen. The Pakistani and Egyptian military and even the far-off Moroccan monarchy — all long-standing recipients of Saudi money — have promised troops or aircraft. Riyadh’s response seems extreme. The Yemeni rebels a mix of Shia Houthi tribals and Sunni fighters allied to ex-president Ali Abdullah Saleh — are a minor threat. Many sources, however, say the Saudi’s fear encirclement. Over the past year, Tehran has gained a proxy government in Baghdad, saved the Shia regime in Syria from collapse and is on the verge of a nuclear breakout as its negotiations with the US move towards an end to economic sanctions. The geriatric Saudi royal family also needs to whip up things to maintain its standing at home. Says West Asia expert Bruce Riedel of the Brooking...

The promise by Donald Trump to veto the bipartisan Congressional War Powers Resolution on Yemen is significant in and of itself. The decision is rightly drawing significant fire. The war in  Yemen  is a humanitarian disaster and a strategic failure, with precisely the forces the Administration says it opposes - Iran, jihadists, separatists - gaining ground on the back of the bankrupt Saudi-led war strategy. However, there is a wider, ugly picture, beyond Yemen. It can be summarized as an Age of Impunity: where war crimes go unpunished and the laws of war become optional. This is not solely the responsibility of the United States, but the US has the power and position to set a global standard, and when it fails to do so the effects are felt worldwide, by innocent civilians feeling the brunt of lawless military tactics and humanitarian aid workers risking life and limb as they go about their work. Individual cases retain the power to shock. Last week in Yemen, an airstr...

Haraz, a collection of medieval villages in Yemen’s highlands, feels very far away from the devastation of the country’s civil war. Banks of cloud tumble down green farming terraces and caress the gingerbread-like houses clinging to the mountainside, and the unique environmental conditions create some of the best coffee in the world. A farmer with freshly picked coffee cherries in Haraz.   Photograph: Mohamed Al-Sayaghi/Reuters Yemen has exported coffee since the 1400s: the Red Sea port of Mokha gives chocolatey coffee its name. Although native to Ethiopia, the coffee plant was developed into the form that gives us the modern beverage by Sufi monasteries in  Yemen  that shared it with traders and pilgrims. Eventually, coffee made its way to Constantinople (now Istanbul), Baghdad and London, leading to the rise of the coffee house. Today the global coffee industry is worth £61.4bn, making coffee the most valuable trading commodity in the world after oil. Dec...

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. The Guardian view onYemen: stop arms sales to...

Britain is at risk of being prosecuted for war crimes because of growing evidence that missiles sold to Saudi Arabia have been used against civilian targets in Yemen’s brutal civil war, Foreign Office lawyers and diplomats have warned. Advisers to Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, have stepped up legal warnings that the sale of specialist missiles to the Saudis, deployed throughout nine months of almost daily bombing raids in west Yemen against Houthi rebels, may breach international humanitarian law. Since March this year, bombing raids and a blockade of ports imposed by the Saudi-led coalition of Sunni Gulf states have crippled much of Yemen. Although the political aim is to dislodge Houthi Shia rebels and restore the exiled President, Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, thousands of Yemeni civilians have been killed, with schools, hospitals and non-military infrastructure hit. Fuel and food shortages, according to the United Nations, have brought near famine to many parts of the ...

The government has been accused of “putting profit before people’s lives” ahead of the start of a High Court case aimed at stopping the UK from exporting  arms to Saudi Arabia.  The case is being brought by the group  Campaign Against Arms Trade  (CAAT), which claims there is “overwhelming evidence” that British-made jets and bombs are being used by Saudi-led forces to violate international humanitarian law in  Yemen. CAAT says more than 10,000 people have been killed since a Saudi-led coalition began  fighting Houthi rebels  in 2015, and UK-made weapons have helped create “a humanitarian catastrophe”. CAAT is being backed by other groups being represented at the hearing, including Human Rights Watch, Oxfam and Amnesty International, whose strategic litigation director Lucy Claridge said outside court: “It is time for the UK Government to stop putting profit before people's lives. “By selling billions of pounds worth of arms to Saudi Arabi...

NB : The word 'mistake' is so ugly in the midst of corpses of children and piles of rubble. Led by the US, the western powers have an unofficial and flexible algebra for the numbers of Palestinian civilians killed, hospitals and schools in Gaza destroyed, before they call for a cease-fire. This is not a mistake you shameless people. This is a crime against humanity; this is prolonged and planned ethnic cleansing and you are complicit in it. Read the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide and ask yourselves what is going on in Palestine. Thank God there are persons of conscience in the US, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez  and Bernie Sanders and Noam Chomsky who are exposing you for what you are: spineless opportunists. DS ‘Bearing the brunt’: the suffering of children in the Gaza-Israel conflict – photo essay Gaza Tests Biden Foreign Policy Team’s Promise To Learn From past Mistakes Two years before Joe Biden won the presidency, 30 national security experts who worked with him und...

Since start of war in Yemen, UK government has committed £770 million in aid – compared to £4.7 billion worth of arms licensed to Saudi Arabia. Since the Stockholm agreement on 13 December, it is estimated that eight children have been killed or injured in Yemen every day Five opposition parties published a letter on Monday condemning the  UK ’s continued arms trade with the “murderous regime” of  Saudi Arabia  and calling the government complicit in  Yemen ’s devastation. The letter,  published in full by  The Independent , is signed by leaders of the  Labour  Party, SNP,  Liberal Democrats , Plaid Cymru and the Green Party’s lone MP. Peace as a punctuation mark in eternal war ‘ We can’t afford to give up’: the Yemenis keeping hope alive The  UN  special envoy for Yemen, Martin Griffiths, is expected in London this week to discuss  the redeployment of forces  and the opening up...

Only six of our British military chaps, it seems, are helping the Sunni Saudis kill Shia Yemenis. And they’re not actually in Yemen, merely helping to choose the targets – which have so far included hospitals, markets, a wedding party and a site opposite the Iranian embassy. Not that our boys and girls selected those particular “terrorist” nests for destruction, you understand. They’re just helping their Saudi mates – in the words of our Ministry of Defence – “comply to the rules of war”. Saudi “rules”, of course, are not necessarily the same as “our” rules – although our drone-executions of UK citizens leave a lot of elbow-room for our British warriors in Riyadh. But I couldn’t help chuckling when I read the condemnation of David Mephan, the Human Rights Watch director. Yes, he told us that the Saudis “are committing multiple violations of the laws of war in Yemen”, and that the British “are working hand in glove with the Saudis, helping them, enhancing their capacity to prosecut...