A UK-BASED charity says more than 84,700 children under the age of five have starved to death in Yemen since the Saudi regime and a coalition of its allies, all armed and supported by the USA and the UK, launched their brutal imperialist war on the Yemeni people over three years ago.
On Tuesday, Save the Children calculated in a report the mortality rate for untreated cases of Severe Acute Malnutrition among Yemeni children between April 2015 and October 2018.
Tamer Kirolos, the aid group’s Yemen director said: ‘We are horrified that some 85,000 children in Yemen may have died because of extreme hunger since the war began. For every child killed by bombs and bullets, dozens are starving to death and it’s entirely preventable.’
‘Children who die in this way suffer immensely as their vital organ functions slow down and eventually stop … Parents are having to witness their children wasting away, unable to do anything about it,’ Kirolos added. And still the US and the UK carry on arming Saudi Arabia’s feudal elite, as they put the brutal, strangling of Saudi dissident Khashoggi behind them.
He was strangled, beheaded, and then dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, after receiving a message guaranteeing him that he would be perfectly safe visiting the consulate to get some documentation for his projected marriage.
In fact, the UK government received advance warning of the deed from MI6 and GCHQ, which led to Foreign Secretary Hunt telling MPs that he could not say anything publicly about this issue but was prepared to talk to them in a top security environment, away from a public session of the House of Commons.
The UK is now united once again with its US master to insist that they consider that the Saudi Crown Prince did not give the go-ahead for the murder. The government will say anything to smooth the further development of the lucrative arms trade as well as securing the anti-Iran and anti-Palestine alliance which intends to hand the West Bank to Israel and then say that there are no more Palestinian refugees.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in its report, Save the Children raised concerns that ‘In the past few weeks there have been hundreds of airstrikes in and around Hudaydah, endangering the lives of an estimated 150,000 children still trapped in the city. Save the Children is calling for an immediate end to the fighting so no more lives are lost.’
The reality is that this escalation of the Saudi offensive is taking place when the US and UK are nominally seeking to get ‘peace talks’ underway!
The real situation is that up to 14 million Yemenis are at risk of famine and an estimated 400,000 children are expected to suffer from severe acute malnutrition in 2018. Yemen’s Houthi Ansarullah movement, which runs state affairs in the capital Sana’a in the absence of an effective government, has been defending the nation against the Saudi aggression.
In fact, in June, the Saudi-led coalition launched an offensive on Hudaydah despite international warnings that it would compound the country’s humanitarian crisis. Hudaydah is the point of entry for 80 per cent of the country’s commercial imports and nearly all UN-supervised humanitarian aid.
At the same time as Saudi Arabia organises the slaughter in the Yemen, Amnesty International says that detained political dissidents and pro-democracy campaigners inside Saudi Arabia face being ‘repeatedly tortured by electrocution and flogging’ that left some ‘unable to walk or stand properly’.
In fact, the Saudi war in the Yemen is a continuation of its life and death struggle against the democratic rights of its ‘subjects’ at home. Workers in the UK must show their support for the tortured victims of the Saudi establishment at home and for the Yemeni people who are being starved and murdered in the hundreds of thousands abroad, by taking action to bring down the May government to bring in a workers government.
This will stop arming Saudi Arabia and Israel and instead support the people of the Yemen, Palestine and democrats in Saudi Arabia to bring in a socialist and peaceful Middle East.
