Yemeni Civil War: What is behind the denying of targeting children?

    In 2014, After several weeks of street protests against the former president of Yemen Hadi’s administration, which made cuts to fuel subsidies that were unpopular with the group, the Houthis fought the Yemen Army forces under the command of General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar and drove the internationally accepted government from the capital, then Yemen's civil war began. (Wiki)

    Until now, the Saudi-led alliance, attempting to return power to the country, that supported by Britain, still remained deadlocked with the opposition Houthis who are funded by Iran. 

 

Humanitarian crisis

    According to human rights workers in The Yemeni city of Taiz, over 450 children have been killed or injured by Houthi sniper fire (BBC, 2021), though the Houthis refute to recognize the claim. In fact, the Houthis are not alone: children with more than one-third of fighters reported to be under the age of sixteen, the age that was meant to receive educated, are also constantly recruited by various parties to the conflict (Giulio, 2018).

Orla Guerin, Goktay Koraltan, Claire Read, Suad Al-Salahi, and Wietske Burema (2020). Ruweida was shot in the head and her brother, Amri, was dragging her to safety [documentary]. BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-56072279

    Besides child abuse, the famine in Yemen became an emergency. In 2016, the United Nations reported that more than three-quarters of Yemen's population lacked access to clean drinking water and sanitation, while almost half lacked access to adequate food and medicine. Then in 2018, the battle of Al-Ḥudaydah effectively blockading the main source of food imports. By the end of 2018, nearly 16 million Yemenis were on the brink of starvation, and the country was facing the world’s worst famine in a century. (Britannica)

Famine risk in Yemen. Via. Coppi Giulio

And until 2020, It is estimated by the United Nations that about 80 percent of Yemenis dependent on food aid, and around half of all children suffer from stunted development due to malnutrition. The U.N. on Nov. 20, The Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, said Yemen was “now in imminent danger of the world's worst famine in decades.” (New York Times, 2021)

    Instead of being sympathetic towards citizens that have been killed and a passion for the state’s future, the eyes of Yemeni look indifferent and hopeless. 

 

The Loss of the National identity

    The loss of the national identity was the first thing that jumped into my head and it can be largely explained by the association between history and the political system. Even though Yemen, officially, transformed into a multi-party representative democracy after the re-union, each government still remained its own governance; for example, in the north, each province was subdivided into district and tract levels, sensing a decentralized government. The South, in contrast, was composed of the indigenous centralized British government and tribal affiliations in the hinterland. Different governance turns out different local civilizations. Suffering such a long-term difference, also, even they changed into a federal government, people would not simply change the way of thinking and recognize others’ culture based upon the tradition. Moreover, the incumbent government of Yemen actually failed on becoming a genuinely democratic country but an authoritarian regime (EIU Democracy Index, 2020), showing a high autonomy that the head of the state is able to fulfill basic tasks with a minimum of public, which limited individual freedom to some extent. An authoritarian government seems reasonable when recalling the past that “in order to eradicate both the remnants of British occupations and traditional socio-political structure of Yemeni society, the South Yemeni started the Marxist experiment on the new, socialist state, but found it inappropriate at the end (Müller, 2015).” In general, the traditional norms and rules and the experience of communism both indirectly caused people a less sense of belonging and identity. 

    Warfare as the lack of regulation and the absence of the national identity, any of both would be fatal for the democratic future of Yemen.

 

 

References

 

BBC News. 2021. “Yemen: The boy who saved his sister from a sniper.” (February 16, 2021)

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-middle-east-56072279

The New York Times. 2021. “The U.S. to Declare Yemen’s Houthis a Terrorist Group, Raising Fears of Fueling a Famine”. (February 16, 2021) 

Britannica. 2021. Yemen. (February 16, 2021)

https://www.britannica.com/place/Yemen 

Giulio (2018). The Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen: Beyond the man-made disaster. (February 16, 2021)

https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/resources/docs/IPI%20Humanitarian-Crisis-in-Yemen.pdf  

Müller (2015). A Spectre is Haunting Arabia: how the Germans brought their Communism to Yemen. transcript Verlag. (February 16, 2021)

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/45632

The Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index. (February 16, 2021)

https://www.eiu.com/topic/democracy-index

The New York Times. 2021. “The U.S. to Declare Yemen’s Houthis a Terrorist Group, Raising Fears of Fueling a Famine”. (February 16, 2021)

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/10/us/politics/us-yemen-houthis-terrorist-group.html