Yemen might just be on the brink of an irreversible collapse. The country is grappled in a perverse storm of difficulties along with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis. With an ill-timed war, coronavirus, extensive human rights violations, famines, regional oil conflicts, and a crumbling health care system, Yemen has now become what the UN calls “exceptionally vulnerable in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis”.
As much as two-thirds of the country’s 30 million population bank on food assistance, a lack of which could lead to a 20 percent rise in the number of malnourished children as per the UNHRC. The reliance on humanitarian aid has spiralled to a disturbing degree, leading to a frail health infrastructure, fatigued immune systems, and acute vulnerabilities, in the face of a pandemic. To add to the disaster, COVID-19 is aggravating across a war-torn Yemen, while a recurrent cholera outbreak worsens, food and water scarcities are surging, and civilians are continued to be bombarded at, and the skirmishes between Saudi-led forces and the anti-government, Zaidi Muslim minority; known as the Houthis, continue.
For years now, the Yemeni Forces, allied with the Houthi rebels, have been fighting for control of the impoverished nation. When it initially intervened in Yemen’s multifaceted civil war, Saudi Arabia had expected to overpower the Iranian-backed Houthis, who took hold of the capital, Sana’a. Despite this, even after half a decade of war, the Houthis are still in power; while the Saudi troops struggle to keep their allied forces together, and resort to torturing the civilians. Meanwhile the Houthi movement has fortified its power in the North, acquired territories, and with aid from Iran, deployed long-range weaponry that menaces the region.
Saudi Arabia’s latest quest for a unilateral cease-fire in Yemen displays the kingdom’s ominous socio-economic crisis brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and the drop in oil prices. The Houthis will certainly not go along with the cease-fire, given that the Saudi government has played the ceasefire card time and again, for momentary gains. Nonetheless, Yemen’s decline into a chaotic conflict with multiple civil wars amid a larger war, has made it completely unprepared for a pandemic.
The Tangled Geopolitics of the Middle East
As Yemen continues to face major problems fuelled by external intrusion, internal conflicts, and economic destruction against the backdrop of a humanitarian crisis, the country is exposed to massive geopolitical uncertainty.
Yemen’s decline into a tumultuous and multifaceted civil war is affected by deep-seeded alliances and oppositions along ideological, tribal, and religious lines, and the subsequent violence has assisted the country’s descent into poverty and famine. Local and global state and nonstate actors have played decisive roles in Yemen’s civil war.
After the bombings, naval blockade and deployment of ground forces under the Operation Decisive Storm (the codename for Saudi-led intervention), anarchy spread beyond Yemen’s borders in two fairly minor, but important, migrant flows, further expanding the internal crisis. The geopolitical rift widened with Saudi Arabia and Iran funding opposing sides in the war, for stakes in southern Yemen; obscuring the chances of conflict resolution. There was no consensus among the nations involved vis-à-vis whether the conflicting regions in Yemen should be united or disbanded into states. Nor was there any agreement over instilling a federal or confederal administration in Yemen. Further, Yemen’s petroleum assets amassed in the southern regions became a potential point of contention in the conflict between the southern extremists and Yemenis as they struggled to protect the north-south integrity.
Without the authoritative blocs in Yemen moving towards mediation and negotiation, it has become tough to envision peace in Yemen. After almost five years into the Saudi-initiated intervention in Yemen, the crisis is not singular to just Yemenis. The conflict has matured into a war between regional powers.
External actors including western powers, Gulf Cooperation Council states, Iran, and Russia have contributed to Yemen’s problems by direct military interventions, and funding and aiding various allied and proxy groups to further their political agendas. This remains an obstacle to achieving a realistic peace strategy that could in turn politically stabilize Yemen. Further adversities like a massive cholera epidemic, climate change, and the surge in the dominance of extremist forces—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS—add to the nation’s woes.
The Saudi-led coalition initially started military operations against the Houthis to support President Hadi’s government but is no longer completely affixed to its initial goal. This is especially accurate as new political divisions between anti-Houthi forces have emerged during the war, as evidenced by the UAE-backed Southern Transitional Council’s (STC) takeover of Aden from the Saudi-backed Hadi government. These divisions undermined agreements among regional powers with stakes in Yemen, and have shifted the dynamics of the conflict. The Saudi-UAE alliance that had initially united forces against the Houthis has now partially collapsed following their contrasting interests. The Saudis have continued to support the Hadi government, the UAE has its own proxy in the separatist STC, and the Houthis and Iran, have strengthened their alignment and partnership given the rivalry between Tehran and Riyadh. The war in Yemen has altered the geopolitics of the country creating new layers of conflict and instability. The eastern borders of the Governorate of Mahra, the Southern archipelago of Socotra, and the maritime routes of the Red Sea have seen conflict between warring factions, steering in a new phase to the conflict.
The geopolitical fault lines of the Middle East are now being defined by political chaos, failed states, protests, military interventions, twisted social systems, religious extremism, internal conflicts, and external proxies. The course of these catastrophic advances must be addressed. Autocrats and external actors must be held accountable. Political reforms have been crushed for far too long, leading to ruined economies, bolstered ignorance and aggravated regional conflict scaring the Middle Eastern landscape.
These dynamics accentuate the degree to which the Yemeni crisis has been distorted and oversimplified as an al-Houthi/Saudi conflict; ignoring the many other intricacies in Yemen’s complicated and twisted war.
Civilians: The Real Victims
Just days after declaring a ceasefire and announcing aid in April 2020, fighter jets linked to the Saudi-led alliance attacked Yemen’s Houthi rebels launching dozens of air raids on several Yemeni civilian provinces, as the Kingdom proclaimed the beginning of a new military operation. The ceasefire game has been played before, with no end in sight; only to lead to more civilian casualties. The difference this time is that with the pandemic and the economic costs of the war, Saudi is in too deep. Saudi is in a catch-22 of sorts; considering it has economic costs of the war weighing it down but pulling out of the war would mean losing all its leverage on Iran.
Saudi air strikes have besieged civilian sites for over five years. According to a survey from a UK based think tank, one-third of all the air strikes have hit civilian targets including hospitals and schools. Only half of the country’s medical facilities are functioning because of the aerial bombing and the ongoing civil war.
Data from Human Rights Watch suggests that over 2,33,000 civilian casualties have been reported during the five year-conflict; these were primarily due to lack of food, healthcare and infrastructure. The deficiency of food and lack of primary infrastructure in the country has forced people out of their homes, and forced them to live in cramped makeshift quarters, without access to basic food and resources. Further, the famine-ridden country is running out of humanitarian aid. The United Nations was compelled to cut 75 percent of its programs in Yemen this year. Donor nations are slashing aid. Funding from the Gulf States has substantially decreased. Roughly 80 percent of the population is reliant on humanitarian assistance, and two-thirds are malnourished. Nearly two months post Yemen’s yearly funding conference, hosted by Saudi Arabia, the Kingdom gained much appreciation from the UN for providing aid to cover-up the problems it created in the first place.International donors donated just 18 percent of the $3.37 billion required to meet the urgent humanitarian need in the country. Without additional funding, 19 million people could lose access to health care, 8.4 million may lose access to water and sanitation facilities, and 2.5 million malnourished children could lose life-saving nutrition support. Millions of more vulnerable Yemenis could lose access to the $90 per month provided by the UN and humanitarian agencies, as per statistics from the UNDP. The manipulation of the war in Yemen has led actors on different sides of the multifaceted civil war to deprive specific sections of the civilian population; access to food and medical services to achieve their own political objectives.
Further, a perilous shortage of fuel, for which the Houthis and the government are playing the blame game, is now obstructing the operation of the electricity grid, water supply, and key infrastructure like hospitals. Ships aren’t being permitted by the government, to transport life-saving commodities. The currency is depreciating quickly. The central bank is defaulting. The price of basic foods was hiked by 30 percent in the last few months alone. Also, the Houthis have taxed humanitarian aid from external sources, restricted journalists, and fired missiles at civilian targets in Saudi Arabia.
With a looming pandemic and almost no funds, the country has nearly no testing capacity. Most of the people being tested, already have severe symptoms, ensuing a death rate that is five times higher than the global average. Health experts estimate millions could become infected by August, with a worst-case scenario of 85,000 deaths.
The country is disintegrating as the pandemic annihilates the poorest in the Middle East. More than 40 percent of people have lost their daily source of income. Most day labourers, struggling with food insecurity can’t stay home even in the face of a pandemic. Health workers, civil servants and soldiers among many others have not been paid in months. The conflict has crushed the water, education and health systems. The conflict is intensifying with civilians facing the brunt. The ramifications of the catastrophe must be completely understood and addressed. The solution should not be to reduce aid, like the Trump administration is doing, or to throw money at self-created problems; like the Muhammed bin Salman regime; but to curb the blockade and open the country to outside assistance and the media.
Despite the aid and assistance, the country is right back where it was; with fewer resources to push it back.
The UN and the World
Yemen’s immediate future is unclear due to internal actors, the interests of other regional powers, and the agendas of the international community. The war in Yemen is escalating.
According to a UN report, the US, along with Britain and France, are equally complicit in the war crimes happening in Yemen given the continued exports of weapons and intelligence assistance to the Saudis and their allies, especially the UAE. This subsequently enabled civilian casualties, violence, killings and wrecked health facilities in Yemen. It is essential that these countries use their supremacy and resources to diminish the conflict, not fuel it.
The American contribution in the Yemen war though, is far more destructive than just intelligence and trading weapons worth of billion dollars to UAE and Saudi Arabia which happen to be its biggest buyers. The US has for years turned a blind eye as its allies execute outrageous war crimes and then avoided accountability for incentivizing a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Since the Saudi and allies intervened in Yemen’s civil war in March 2015, the US has given a relentless backing to all of its war-prone campaigns where thousands of warplanes and bombs were targeted at civilian regions and infrastructure. Due to this, the US has lost all its moral credibility to criticize the delinquencies in other armed conflicts when it continues to provision and aid an alliance that is executing the same misconducts in Yemen.
The UK has always been deceptive when condemning Saudi Arabia. Despite pledging $196.56 million in aid to Yemen, it resumed supply of arms to Saudi Arabia to fuel the war. The British tend to align with the US when backing the Saudis. The UK should commit to maintaining funding and critically using its diplomatic leverage to support war-trodden Yemen. Even the Gulf States have had a major role to play in the Yemeni crisis. Funding from the Gulf States has recently dropped to record lows, with less to no funding from the UAE and Kuwait.
Russia has maintained favourable ties with the major actors in the Yemeni war by advocating a political resolution. The Kremlin’s agenda to build a military base in Southern Yemen to gain sea access, is a vital motive in Russia’s Yemen policy. Moscow has always looked to capitalize on its ties with the STC to gain geopolitical strategic influence.
The UN removed the US-Saudi military alliance, which was largely accountable for the conflict in Yemen, from an international blacklist of states and armed groups responsible for killing civilians and maiming children, in a major triumph for Saudi Arabia. Though the surge in the war and bombings marks the failure of the efforts by the UN, to arrange a ceasefire. The situation in Yemen implies an impending disaster for millions of vulnerable people, together with a rise in child labour and malnutrition as families are forced to take extreme measures for survival. Covid-19 is widening the gap in the country’s fragile healthcare system.
The only possibility for peace in Yemen, in theory; would be for a political covenant shaped through dialogue, not continued warfare. Most peace talks and agreements have become redundant now. Due to the geopolitical reality of continued warfare on-ground for half a decade now, the possibility of a loose confederation of two or more states could be considered. Settling Yemen’s multi-sided civil war will require cooperation and faith-building initiatives involving all major actors in the conflict. Those responsible for abusing the international law in Yemen must be liable.
Humanitarian assistance needs to be delivered to all Yemenis in need. Implementation of existing agreements like the Stockholm Agreement and the Riyadh Agreement that allowed power sharing between the Hadi government and the STC must be bolstered. Further, for Yemen to recover from Covid-19, its already dwindling economy must be kept buoyant. Urgent economic reforms and re-building a strong healthcare system must be a priority. Humanitarian law and human rights should be given utmost precedence. Yemen cannot face two conflicts; a war and a pandemic at the same time. But with the failure of negotiations for a nationwide ceasefire, if the past is any sort of prologue, peace and stability in Yemen will remain elusive with only war in sight.