Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Shireen Al-Adeimi, assistant professor of education at Michigan State University, who is originally from Yemen. Here, she discusses the current attack on the port city of Hodeidah, famine and disease across the country and the role of the U.S. military.
SHIREEN AL-ADEIMI: Yemen right now, Scott, is experiencing what the UN calls the worst humanitarian crisis on earth. If your listeners remember at the height of the cholera epidemic in Haiti, there were about 750,000 people who were infected by cholera. In Yemen, the number has already surpassed a million people. And you know, cholera is due to lack of access to clean water. There’s essentially, you know, it’s very difficult to access clean water in Yemen. Yemen used to even import its water, as well as 90 percent of its food. So, people are having trouble accessing water; they’re getting sick. And then the remedy for cholera is as simple as, you know, rehydrating with clean water and electrolytes and so on. But again, the health system has been so destroyed that people don’t often have access. And a lot of the children who have died because of cholera are, you know, their immune systems are weakened because of hunger and malnutrition.
So we’re talking 113,000 children who’ve been, who’ve died due to diseases like cholera and starvation in the years 2016 and 2017 alone – 113,000 children. This is the impact of this war. This is an addition of course to the over 28,000, oh sorry, 44,000 deaths from violent deaths. And this is the newest figure that’s been updated from the 10,000 that we’ve often heard. The country is essentially completely in ruins. The healthcare system has been destroyed. The education system is barely functioning. Civil society has been destroyed. So it’s been, it’s had a very devastating impact. And this is what happens when you have a coalition of countries in an international community that is attacking the Middle East’s poorest country.
BETWEEN THE LINES: As many of us have been reading, the Saudi-led military coalition is currently launching an assault on the vital Yemeni port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea. As I understand it, this port is the most critical point where food and humanitarian aid enter the country, the little humanitarian aid that does find its way to Yemen. Tell us about this attack and the concern the world has about the consequences for Yemen’s civilian population.
SHIREEN AL-ADEIMI: So in the past, the Americans, even though they’ve been very helpful to the Saudis in this war, have drawn a red line when it comes to Hodeida because they recognize that if the Hodeidah port is attacked – you know this is where 70 percent of aid comes into the country and 80 percent of the population is reliant on the food and the aid that’s coming in through the port of Hodeidah – if it was attacked and the shipments are disrupted in any way, then these 22 million people will essentially starve to death. And so, you know, last week the UAE decided to lead this offensive on Hodeidah. And they’ve ignored all sorts of calls by U.S. senators and you know, U.S. generals. And unfortunately, as soon as they began attacking on Wednesday, the U.S. jumped to help them by providing airstrike targeting. So again, we’ve seen that the U.S. is willing to help the Saudi and UAE-led coalition at all costs even while knowing that this attack essentially is a deliberate use of starvation as a weapon, which we know is a war crime under humanitarian law. You know, right now this, there’s been six days of fighting inside the city. Thousands of people who have the means to flee, have fled. Many more people, of course, are not able to flee. The fighting has been intense. We know that there are French special forces on the ground helping the Emiratis and the Saudis, and of course all sorts of mercenaries from various countries. But this is very disturbing because so many more people are going to be affected if there’s any kind of disruption to the aid that’s coming into Hodeida.
BETWEEN THE LINES: I’m certain that there are millions of Americans who know little or nothing about the war in Yemen. Why is this important? Why should Americans care about this conflict so far away?
SHIREEN AL-ADEIMI: I think anybody who cares about justice would care about this issue. Again, this is not a call for intervention. This is the very opposite of it. We don’t want to spend taxpayer money on creating these conditions. I am calling for the U.S. to stop its intervention in Yemen, to leave people alone. Let it be. This civil war had nothing to do with the United States and it would have never escalated to this degree had we not been involved in it. So, there’s so many issues at home that we have to worry about. Why should we spend all this time and energy and commit war crimes to help our ally, Saudi Arabia, when this has nothing to do with us? So I hope that people would care enough about that just to pick up the phone and say we should not be involved in Yemen.
For more information on the Yemen Peace Project, visit yemenpeaceproject.
