The US
Provided Cover for Saudi Starvation Strategy in
Yemen
By Gareth
Porter
April
08, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Truth
Out"
-
As Yemen's
population has teetered on the brink of mass
starvation in recent months, the United States
has played a crucial role in enabling the Saudi
strategy responsible for that potential
humanitarian catastrophe.
Both
the Obama and Trump administrations have
prioritized the US's alliance with the Saudis
and their Gulf allies over the lives of hundreds
of thousands of Yemenis under imminent threat of
starvation.
Although the UN agencies have offered no public
estimate of the number of Yemenis who have died
of malnutrition-related conditions, it is likely
that the figure is much higher than the estimate
of 10,000 killed directly by the Saudi-coalition
bombing. United Nations agencies have estimated
that 462,000 Yemeni children under five years of
age are already suffering severe acute
malnutrition, putting them at serious risk of
death from starvation and malnutrition-related
disease.
The Saudi coalition has pursued a war strategy
of maximizing pressure on the
Houthi resistance by
destroying agricultural, health and
transportation infrastructure and by choking off
access to food and fuel for most of Yemen's
population. The United States has enabled the
Saudis to pursue that strategy by refueling the
Saudi-led coalition planes bombing Yemen and
selling the bombs. Equally important, however,
the US has provided the political-diplomatic
cover that the Saudis need to carry out this
ruthless endeavor without massive international
blowback.
The
Trump administration has gone even further in
supporting the Saudi strategy. Whereas the
Obama administration opposed a Saudi-led
coalition offensive to regain control over the
main port of Hodeidah and the rest of the Red
Sea coast, saying it would worsen the
humanitarian crisis in Yemen, the Trump
administration has clearly given the green light
to the Saudis to launch that offensive.
Furthermore the commander of Central Command,
Gen. Joseph Votel, has called Yemen
a "vital interest" of the United States, arguing
that anti-Iranian forces must be in control of
it to prevent Iranian threats to the
Bab-el-Mandeb Strait. That argument, which
conjures a wholly artificial threat to
commercial traffic through the Strait, clearly
implies active support for the Saudi strategy of
recapturing Hodeidah and choking off all access
to food for the portion of the Yemeni population
under the control of forces loyal to the Houthi
and to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
But the
Obama administration had already acquiesced to a
series of moves by the Saudi-led coalition to
impose ever-tighter restrictions on the
population's access to food, fuel and medical
supplies. A coalition of Houthi rebels and
troops loyal to former President Saleh had
driven the US- and Saudi-backed Saudi-supported
President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi from power in
2015, and he ultimately escaped from Aden to
Riyadh. The Saudis sought and obtained the
support of the Obama administration for a war to
reinstall the Hadi government by force. But the
Saudi-led coalition advance soon stalled, as the
Houthi-Saleh forces demonstrated their mastery
of guerrilla tactics. So the Saudis started to
rely on a strategy that deprived the population
in the Houthi-Saleh area of control of food and
fuel.
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The administration's permissive stance toward
the Saudi war strategy was evident from the
beginning of the war. When the United Nations
Security Council was negotiating the April 2015
resolution on Yemen, the original text
circulated for discussion included a requirement
for "humanitarian pauses" in military
operations, but after the Saudis and other
coalition members objected vigorously to the
language, it was dropped from the final text, according
to journalist Sharif Abdel Khouddous.
The
Saudi coalition quickly revealed the essence of
its strategy in Yemen: to impose extreme
hardship on the population in Houthi-controlled
governorates. The strategy included not only
bombing raids that targeted Yemen's fragile
infrastructure for transportation, food
production and medical care, but a naval
blockade, ostensibly to prevent any arms from
reaching Yemen, but also clearly intended to
limit severely the population's access to
foodstuffs and fuel.
Even in
peacetime, Yemen is dependent on imports for 90
percent of its staple foods as well as virtually
all of its fuel and medical supplies. The
consequences of the blockade on the nutrition
and health of the civilian population were bound
to be devastating.
Oxfam-America humanitarian policy adviser Scott
Paul testified to the Tom Lantos Human Rights
Commission in January 2017 that, after imposing
a naval blockade, the Saudi-led coalition had
begun to withhold or delay permission for major
commercial and humanitarian vessels to berth in
Yemen ports. The coalition held up approval of
the delivery of such shipments for weeks, and
food often spoiled. "By setting up an arbitrary
and onerous regime," Paul told the Commission,
the coalition created a "de facto blockade"
preventing food, fuel and medicine from reaching
the population.
The
climax of the blockade strategy was a series of
airstrikes on August 17, 2015, that destroyed
all of the cranes used to unload container ships
at the main commercial port of Hodeidah, Yemen's
only port capable of receiving such ships. The
strikes also destroyed an entire World Food
Program warehouse, one of the berths, the port
authority warehouse, the port control building
and the customs building.
By February 2016, the humanitarian crisis in
Yemen as a result of the Saudi blockade was
already worse than Syria's. The UN Security
Council had a series of meetings about
humanitarian access in both Syria and Yemen, and
the members of the Council agreed that
resolutions should guarantee humanitarian access
-- the ability to get food and other
humanitarian assistance -- to those in need in
both countries. But once again, after the Saudis
intervened with the United States and its
European allies to oppose such a resolution on
Yemen, the
idea was dropped.
In
mid-2016 the Saudis and the Hadi
government began planning a much more drastic
form of pressure on the population in the
Houthi-Saleh-controlled North: eliminating the
last institutional barrier to starvation, the
Central Bank of Yemen (CBY).
The CBY,
which was located in the Houthi-controlled
capital, Sanaa, was playing a key role in
providing a minimum of liquidity in the society.
It was paying the monthly salaries of 1.2
million people on the government payroll, the
vast majority of who were still loyal to former
president Saleh and are now fighting the
Saudi-led coalition forces alongside the Houthis.
It was also financing the commercial shipments
of food and fuel still arriving at Hodeidah and
other ports.
The
international financial institutions -- with the
support of Western governments, including the
United States -- understood the crucial role of
the CBY as an "economic truce" between the
warring Yemeni parties that was a necessity to
avoid a complete humanitarian catastrophe. But
in early July Prime Minister Ahmed Obeid bin
Daghr of the Saudi-backed government in Aden
explicitly criticized that "economic truce"
indicating the intention to bring it to an end.
And on August 6, bin Daghr accused the CBY of
having used its funds to finance the
Houthi-Saleh war effort and called on banks and
financial institutions holding large
Yemeni foreign reserves to cut off relations
with the CBY.
The
bank's governor, Mohammed Awad bin Humam, a
highly respected technocrat, wrote a letter to
President Hadi denying the charge and proposing
that the IMF send a reputable accounting firm to
verify his staff's management of the bank's
accounts. In a press briefing on September 1,
IMF press spokesman Gerry Rice endorsed bin
Human's proposal and confirmed that the CBY had
played "a crucial role in facilitating minimum
levels of import of basic food items, fuel and
medicine" over the previous 16 months and had
"averted an all-out humanitarian crisis."
But in mid-September the Hadi government went
ahead with its plan to name a new governor of
the Central Bank, who would serve in Aden, which
was under Saudi coalition control. An unnamed
Western diplomat harshly
criticized the
move to Reuters, calling it an effort to "weaponize
the economy by preventing the central bank
access to funds abroad."
The
Hadi government promised that the relocated CBY
would continue to maintain the bank's role in
providing liquidity and financing imports. In
fact, none of Yemen's civil servants have been
paid since the Sanaa-based CBY was cut off from
Yemen's foreign currency reserves abroad,
further increasing the number of Yemenis who can
no longer purchase food.
Oxfam
humanitarian affairs adviser Scott Paul recalled
in an interview that Obama administration
officials had told him that they had informed
the Saudis that they disapproved of the Hadi
government's decision. But the administration
said nothing about the move publicly, signaling
that it had decided to accept the move. "The
idea that the administration should tell the
Saudis that Hadi had to back off his replacement
of the Central bank governor was never going to
fly," said Paul.
Obama
was unwilling to override Saudi policy because
of his administration's firm commitment to the
alliance with Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab
allies. In testimony before the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee on March 9, 2017, former
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the
Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor
Dafna Rand recalled that the administration's
policy toward Yemen had reflected "unconditional
support for the coalition," because of what she
called "our deep loyalty to our allies" and
their aims in regard to Iran.
That
"deep loyalty" primarily reflects the overriding
US interest in military relations with the
Saudis and their Gulf allies. The Saudis and
Qataris control the major US bases in the Arab
world, such as the naval base in Bahrain -- a
Saudi client state -- and the air and ground
bases in Qatar. Moreover the Saudi-led coalition
had accounted for $130 billion in US arms sales
during the Obama administration alone,
generating crucial foreign revenues for major
arms contractors and more lucrative future jobs
for senior military officers.
So it
should come as no surprise that the Pentagon has
been the main driver in the US policy of
supporting the Saudi strategy of starvation. In
August 2016, the Saudis bombed a bridge that the
Obama administration had put on a list of
targets that were not to be hit, because it was
crucial to getting humanitarian goods to
population centers in northern Yemen. But the
administration did nothing in response.
In fact, the Pentagon openly declared its
disinterest in which targets the Saudis and
their Gulf allies were actually hitting. A
spokesman at the Central Command told
journalist Samuel Oakford that
the US refueled the coalition's jets without
regard to the target or whether and how it had
been vetted, and that if the Saudis decided on
more bombing targets, the command would refuel
more missions.
The
United States shares responsibility with the
Saudi-led coalition for the Yemeni deaths from
starvation that will result from the Saudi war
strategy, because of the coalition's dependence
on US logistical and political-diplomatic
support. But the Pentagon and the Central
Command are already actively diverting attention
from that shared guilt by focusing media
attention on what they claim is a new threat
from Iran. The result will be to compound the US
guilt for mass starvation in Yemen.
Gareth Porter is an independent investigative
journalist and historian writing on US national
security policy. His latest book,
Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the
Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in
February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter:
@GarethPorter.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.
