ON SUNDAY, thousands of Yemenis marched through the streets of the capital Sana’a against the US/Saudi blockade of their country and holding American imperialism responsible for an economic war that has pushed Yemen to the brink of outright famine.
The US-backed war by a Saudi Arabian-led military coalition against the people of Yemen has been waged since 2015. Constant military bombardment of the country has been accompanied by a vicious economic war designed to starve Yemen into submitting to world imperialism.
The latest move has been to increase customs tariffs by 100% following the decision to double the US dollar exchange rate used to calculate customs duties.
Chair of the Supreme Revolutionary Committee of Yemen, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, delivered a speech to thousands of protesters on Sunday, stressing that the US is constantly trying to depreciate Yemen’s rial currency against the American dollar.
Al-Houthi said: ‘We are under siege, but we are accused of having a role in the siege, in an attempt to distort the facts. We do not need help from the aggressor countries.
‘If the aggressors return the revenues of the Yemeni ports, oil, and gas, then, we will be able to pay the salaries of our employees. It is the US that has put a blockade against our country and killed our people. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are nothing more than tools for implementing US schemes and agendas.’
Saudi Arabia launched the war on Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, Yemen’s former president and a staunch ally of the Saudi monarchy, and crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement.
At stake for the Saudis, was to retain control over the vital strategic oil pipelines that cross Yemen. For the US and world imperialism the war to crush the Houthi resistance and the Yemeni people is integral to the fast developing plans for war throughout the Middle East to restore US domination of the region’s vast oil and mineral wealth for exploitation.
The war against the Yemen has been financed and supplied by both the US and British governments.
The US has pledged to sell over $64.1 billion of weapons to the Saudis, while this year the UK authorised £1.4 billion of unrestricted arms exports to the country after the Tories concluded there had been only ‘isolated incidents’ of civilian casualties from bombing raids carried out by the Saudi coalition.
At least 8,750 civilians recorded killed in airstrikes are written off as ‘isolated incidents’. At the same time, the economic blockade of Yemen has caused the estimated death of a child under the age of five every 10 minutes!
Despite all the attempts to crush the people of Yemen, which have pushed the country close to the brink of outright famine and created the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, they remain defiant as Sunday’s powerful demonstration showed.
Yemen’s defence forces have vowed not to lay down their arms or halt their resistance operations until the country is completely liberated.
It is imperialism that has been defeated throughout the region, with the US driven out of Afghanistan and forced to retreat from Syria while all attempts to crush the Palestinian people have failed.
These defeats for imperialism have come at a time when the economic and political crisis of capitalism in the US and UK has never been sharper, with a worldwide financial crash swiftly approaching as the major capitalist countries collapse under the weight of debt.
The crisis that is driving imperialism to war in the Middle East is simultaneously driving war against the working class at home.
In this war on two fronts the working class will stand with the people of the world in fighting the common enemy.
The only way forward is to build sections of the Fourth International in every country to organise the working class to smash capitalism and imperialism through the victory of the world socialist revolution that will bring in a planned socialist economy worldwide to provide for the needs of all the people of the world and end imperialist wars forever. This is the way forward!
