While Saudi Arabia is
trying its best to supplant Israel in terms of crime,
terror and barbarism, pushing a whole country to the
edge of the abyss to general indifference, the poorest
of the Arab countries gives the world a lesson in
courage, dignity and lucidity, following the example of
the Palestinian people.
The Saudi-American war against Yemen has
now lasted for more than four months. It has caused more
than 4,000 deaths, including 3,000 directly caused by
the terrorist bombings of the Arab coalition against
Yemen, with 20,000 injured and nearly 1.3 million
displaced. 6.5 million people are immediately threatened
by famine, while 13 million – half the population – lack
access to the most basic means of subsistence and are
reduced to a permanent struggle to gather their daily
bread. According to a recent report by Oxfam entitled
Yemen: Struggling to Break the Fast,
Yemen is a pressure
cooker that is reaching its critical point. Attacked
from the air, from the ground and cut-off by land, sea
and air – Yemenis are in desperate need and have nowhere
to go. [...] Thousands more face death and impairment
due to the secondary effects of this conflict – not
least of which is hunger, malnutrition and disease. To
prevent Yemen from reaching a tipping-point, the
international community need to urgently lift
restrictions on imports and implement a permanent
ceasefire which facilitates safe movement of goods
across the country. […]
Even for Yemen, a country with chronic food insecurity, this is the highest ever recorded number of people living in hunger in Yemen. Four months of intense airstrikes, shelling and ground fighting and restrictions on imports imposed by the Saudi-led coalition have left the country in tatters. A lack of food is leaving people hungry and causing an increase in malnutrition levels, particularly among women and children, and is putting hundreds of thousands of lives at risk. […]
Nuha Al Saeedi,
Oxfam Deputy Programme Manager and a resident of the
capital Sanaa said: “Even if we survive the bombs we are
running out of food”. The violence, the restrictions on
imports and the cost of fuel means that what limited
supplies exist, are only sporadically available, and at
hugely inflated prices. Price hikes have pushed vital
food, fuel and medical supplies out of the reach of
cash-strapped families, most of whom have not had
regular income for several months. A lack of food in the
market, high prices, difficult access to markets, and a
lack of income, have all contributed to a rapid increase
in the number of Yemeni’s going hungry. […]
Families fleeing
violence are placing additional strain on the
communities that now host them, as they arrive
empty-handed and communities share what little they
have. […]
UNICEF has announced that the child malnutrition rate has passed the critical stage. Drinking water is sorely lacking, and curable infectious diseases spread and cause hundreds of deaths due to lack of medicine. The lack of fuel, gas and electricity alone can trigger yet another disaster. Must we wait until we really start talking about genocide? The plight of the Yemeni people is beyond anything words and statistics can express, and even the most heartbreaking of pictures can only imperfectly help to represent the horror.
The Oxfam report was
relayed by the
UK and
US press, and these images are so unbearable that
despite the Western media blackout, they made their way
to the
Daily Mail, a sensationalist and voyeuristic British
newspaper. But the French public was spared of such a
spectacle, the report having had no echo in their media
that keeps a discreet silence on the humanitarian crisis
in Yemen. It is true that the Saudi aggression enjoys
the full support of the United States and
Great Britain, and it is carried out with French
weapons in particular, which currently play
a major role in Aden – the very ones which, as the
Mistral saga was supposed to show, would never be
delivered to belligerent parties.
While many Middle
Eastern countries have for years been torn by bloody and
unprecedented conflicts, which continue to make the news
headlines, Yemen already stands out because of the
vulnerability of its society, which was one the poorest
in the world and depended almost entirely on outside
importations. Also, its location puts it at the mercy of
the
ruthless naval blockade imposed on it, and prevents
the population from joining the millions of refugees who
fled the devastation of their country by hordes of
bloodthirsty terrorists supported covertly by the very
countries who,
in their rage and spite, now openly unleash their
colossal resources to destroy the weakest of the Arab
countries, with no red line. Even truces are
systematically violated by new airstrikes right from
their implementation. The Saudi-American coalition also
assists Daesh/ISIS and al-Qaeda in Yemen, working
closely with them. Yet despite this extreme disparity
between forces, Yemen heroically resists and promises to
be a new
Leningrad to the Saudi aggressor.
Since the beginning of
the war, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, head of the Yemeni
Resistance, has condemned with the utmost vehemence the
“Trinity of Evil”, composed of the United States, Israel
and Saudi Arabia, the “horn of Satan” which is entirely
subject to their interests. He describes it as their
armed wing in the region, in whose service it brought
forth the Daesh/ISIS monster, and emphasizes the
atrocious crimes it perpetrates against the Yemeni
people. But what is most notable
in his last speech is the recurrent mention he made
of Palestine, the suffering of the Palestinian people
and the struggle against Israel, which he said remains
the central cause of the Yemeni people despite the
dramatic and unprecedented situation in which it is
found.
Indeed, on the 10th of
July 2015, on the occasion of the International Al-Quds
(Jerusalem) Day, commemorated every last Friday of
Ramadan in solidarity with the Palestinian people, tens
or even hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people took part
in the demonstrations to express their unwavering
commitment to the Palestinian cause. And this despite
the fact that the humanitarian truce, proclaimed by the
United Nations for the last ten days of the holy month
of Ramadan, after more than 100 days of a ruthless and
unprecedented attack against Yemen, was violated daily
by Saudi Arabia.
On the occasion of his
speech commemorating the Quds day, Hassan Nasrallah, the
Secretary General of Hezbollah, spoke of the millions of
people filling streets around the world to show their
support for the Palestinian cause (Iran, Iraq, Syria,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia itself, Tunisia, Mauritania, Sudan,
Palestine, Turkey, Pakistan, and more modestly in other
western and European cities, until the Place du
Trocadero in Paris, seat of the most pro-Zionist
government in the world), but he made a special tribute
to the Yemeni people in these words:
“Let me pause especially on two
events, two anniversaries: the first in Yemen, where
these dear and noble (brothers) took to the streets of
Sanaa, protesting for Palestine and Al-Quds, and despite
the continued Saudi-American aggression against their
country, their towns and villages, and absolutely
everything they possess of living beings and (inanimate)
stones. Despite the ongoing strikes reaching even Sanaa,
against the interior of Sanaa and the suburbs of Sanaa,
tens of thousands – If not hundreds of thousands – came
out and demonstrated for Al-Quds, for Palestine, for
Gaza and for the Palestinian people.
Of course, psychologically, we
understand that. The Yemeni people have the feeling that
the world has abandoned them, for the Arab world and the
Islamic world have abandoned them. The world has not
divided between supporters and opponents of the war, but
between support for the aggression against Yemen and
those who are silent about it. And those who oppose this
war are few.
Nevertheless, despite this painful,
shocking and shameful reality, the Yemeni people were
not brought to declare that they had nothing to do with
Palestine, Al-Quds, Gaza or the Palestinian people. That
deserves respect and honour, and indeed – I cannot find
words strong enough – glorification and exaltation,
admiration and veneration faced with the will of the
Yemeni people, their awakening and resistance, as well
as the sincerity of this people who today confirmed its
commitment in principle, politically, in combat and
morally for the cause of Palestine.
And the second point I want to discuss
is Bahrain. For what unites Bahrain and Yemen, is
abandonment. Abandonment by the Arab and Islamic world,
and the rest of the world.
For other countries of the world where
there are oppositions, armed groups, popular revolutions
– call them what you will – we find many powerful
countries supporting them financially, with weapons,
media, they organise international conferences, sessions
in the Security Council, and considerable regional and
international movements. But for Bahrain and Yemen, it
is quite different. Both countries are victims of a
special injustice and oppression, and that is why I have
distinguished them in particular.”
This tribute to Yemen
by the Lebanese Hezbollah, who, in 1982-2000 and again
in summer 2006, found himself in a similar situation of
devastation and abandonment – recall that in 1982, the
invasion of Lebanon by Israel had been overshadowed in
the Arab world by the Soccer World Cup, which
Hassan Nasrallah has already repeatedly denounced –,
and is the forefront of the struggle against Israel,
underlines the exceptional nature of the commitment of
the Yemeni people for the Palestinian cause, and their
great clear-sightedness in reading the events that occur
in the region. Hassan Nasrallah had already stressed
that in 2011-2012, Yemen had massive protests in
solidarity with Syria to denounce the international
terrorist war that was being carried out, while the Arab
world was plunged into blindness and torpor. And
according to Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, the US-Israeli-Saudi
obstinacy is indeed due to this remarkable awakening of
the Yemeni people, and their desire for independence and
realignment of the cause of the Arab peoples, like Iran
and in flagrant opposition to the Saudi project of
allegiance and collaborationism:
“To pretend (the
reality of the Iranian influence) is an attempt at
delusion:
the Saudi regime is trying to deceive the peoples of the
region. He who manifests hostility to Israel, they
describe him by saying that he is a (hostile) Iranian;
one that provides full support for the Palestinian and
Lebanese resistance in their struggle against Israel,
they say he is Iranian. They thus try to deceive and
silence everyone, and create a new balance in strategic
causes in the region so that the normalisation of
relations with Israel and cooperation with Israel
becomes the heart of the Arab identity, so that it
becomes a defence of the Arab national security. They
want that the struggle against Israel and against
Israeli rule, and that solidarity with the Palestinian
people, the sense of responsibility towards the Al-Aqsa
Mosque (in Jerusalem) and holy places in Palestine
should become an Iranian cause, and they believe that
whoever builds his policy in this direction must be
targeted and accused by all as having wandered away from
Arabism. Does Arabism mean collaborationism,
humiliation, degeneration, surrender, submission to
Israel? The assimilation to the regimes that collaborate
with Israel? This distortion shall profit you nothing,
absolutely nothing, for your cooperation with Israel is
revealed for all to see. You have clearly become
(Israeli) you the Saudi regime and takfiri instruments (Daech
and Al Qaeda), your identity has emerged as Zionist and
your allegiance is clearly to Israel. […]
One of the main causes of this
disastrous role and the targeting of our noble
Yemeni people is what is known of this dignified
people, namely its values, ethics, principles, and
major and active engagement with the Arab peoples
towards Palestine and the Palestinian cause, as well
as a marked hostility to Israel. When the growing
awareness of our Yemeni people became apparent, and
when its level of commitment and responsiveness
greatly developed in marches and demonstrations of
solidarity, to the point that in this first
anniversary of the [2014] aggression against Gaza,
we can remember demonstrations very large in scale
in Yemen throughout the war against Gaza, to a point
unmatched by any other Arab country, huge,
spectacular demonstrations, with great response from
our people, to the point that in truth, hundreds of
thousands of Yemeni people desire, hope and aspire
to be side by side with the Resistance in Palestine
and the resistance in Lebanon to fight the Israeli
enemy directly. This is the Yemeni people, about
which one can say with certainty that this is the
Arab people the most committed to the Palestinian
cause, the one that showed the most solidarity and
compassion with Palestine, at the human and moral
levels, but our people is unfortunately very poor
financially because of the policy of impoverishment
and targeting he has suffered for decades. Likewise,
this Yemeni people have always been subject to war,
a war of a very large scope, and we are witnessing
intensified violence and aggression targeted against
them, to a point that has further increased their
awakening and consciousness, and commitment to this
important cause.”
Following the events
that have shaken the Arab world since its so-called
“Springtime of the Peoples” in 2011, the greatest danger
that threatens the Palestinian cause is that every
government, every people and every Arab country (and up
to the international public), taken in their own
internal crises and struggles, put aside the question of
Israel, Palestine and the US-Israeli domination project
in the region, of which Daesh/ISIS is only the latest
avatar.
Sayed Ali Khamenei and
Hassan Nasrallah have constantly recalled this, and
Abdel Malik al-Houthi, and with him the Yemeni people in
their majority, clearly share their views and
commitment, going as far as apologizing to the
Palestinian people for not being able to help them, in
their extreme destitution and while being submitted to
the most vicious aggression! This is very moving and
revealing indeed. Moreover, as noted by the head of the
Yemeni resistance, the Saudi barbarism eclipses even the
Israeli crimes in Gaza, which is the height of infamy
and an act of treason perhaps even greater than that of
Sadat:
“They [the Saudi regime] have no
humanity in them, no honour, no morals, no values.
They have no (human) quality. They are monsters in
every sense of the word. Who commits such crimes?
Targeting markets, crowds of people in the markets
in all provinces, here and there, in both the north
and the south? Through all these crimes, they reveal
their monstrosity: they have no humanity and no
values that men respect even during wars. They
have no such conception. For them, the one who has
money can do whatever he wants, without any limits,
and distribute the money here and there, such a sum
for the Council of Human Rights, such a sum for the
United Nations, for such and such a country, and its
aggression will be covered and legitimated, and
there will be no problem. […]
The demonic Israeli hold on the
Saudi regime has managed to cause this Saudi furious
madness in its aggression against Yemen, this
terror, this barbarity in the commission of the most
atrocious and the most heinous crimes against the
dignified, Muslim and Arabic Yemeni people. The
demonic Israeli hold on the Saudi regime is
reflected in what this regime is perpetrating,
horrible and unspeakable crimes which are an affront
to humanity itself, crimes that do not have an
example in the region. And one can even say that
Israel has succeeded in pushing the Saudi regime to
do worse than it had done itself so that this regime
appears in the global consciousness as the worst of
all, the biggest, most heinous and the most
atrocious criminal, the more tyrannical in its
aggression. Israel has managed to do this, as it
managed to push all takfiris in that direction.”
Again, Sayed Ali Khamenei and Hassan Nasrallah also stressed this “achievement” of Saudi Arabia in surpassing the Israeli massacres in Gaza, an exceptional fact given their fundamental and unsurpassable hostility toward Israel, the ultimate enemy. But they predicted a humiliating defeat for the attacker, or even the fall of the Saudi regime. Indeed, on the slogans “"Death to Israel” and “Death to America”, traditional in Yemeni streets, was superimposed “Death to the House of Saud”, an unprecedented development which appears as the indispensable preliminary, the necessary condition for the end of the Usraelian hegemony in the Middle East, which Nasser already called for. And this is actually a horizon that is emerging more and more clearly for all to see.
Since Hezbollah’s
direct involvement in Syria alongside the Syrian Arab
Army, Hassan Nasrallah has often explained that
according to the vision of Hezbollah – a vision
supported by all the recent developments – the struggle
against Israel and the liberation of Palestine and Al-Quds
necessarily goes through Syria, “by the Qalamoun by
Zabadani, by Homs, by Aleppo, by Dera'a, by Sweida, by
Al-Hasakah. Because if Syria falls, Palestine also falls
and Al-Quds will be lost”, as he recalled in his
speech on July 10th. But concerning Yemen, he also
added:
“The way (of liberation) of Al-Quds
also goes through Yemen. It is imperative that the
Saudi-American aggression against Yemen ceases, of which
we reiterate our condemnation and our vehement
denunciation. And in Hezbollah, we move closer to the
Most High God at any hour, at any time and on any
occasion by declaring openly, loudly and clearly, our
condemnation of this barbaric, inconsistent and inhuman
aggression against Yemen and the people of Yemen on the
part of Saudi Arabia and its supporters. The attack has
lasted for 107 days. What is the result? Failure upon
failure. I will not be long, I am fasting and you too,
but you know the record and we have already spoken in
the past: remind to me the objectives of the operation
“Decisive Storm”, my dear ones, and show me what you
have accomplished. And remind me the objectives of the
operation “Renewal of Hope”, my loved ones, and show me
what you have achieved. You will not find but failure
upon failure. Is it not time for Saudi Arabia – for the
Saudi regime – to realize that the war is hopeless? And
that it is unable to break the will of the Yemeni
people? And that the hope that it founds on its armed
groups inside Yemen has no other result than to increase
the killings? And that the continuation of air strikes
will not break the will of the Yemeni people determined
to gain independence, freedom and sovereignty, as well
as a noble and dignified life? Just see the
demonstrations in Sanaa today, you've seen them and
you've heard the slogans. After 107 days of massacres!
107 days of bombings that have spared absolutely
nothing: hospitals, cities – even during the month of
Ramadan – markets... They see that it's a market, it's
not a mistake, it's not because someone has placed a
Katyusha in this market, it's only a simple market, in
the heart of Yemen, from where a rocket cannot possibly
be launched on to Saudi territory, they bombard it, and
dozens of martyrs fall daily. But this people took to
the streets today, and announced its position, they
revealed their determination.
It appears, my brothers and sisters,
the Saudi war has no more goals. It has no political
goals and its only remaining goal is revenge against
Yemen and the people of Yemen. What is happening in
Yemen today is not a military operation, because where
could the Saudi (land) army intervene? It must defend
its border posts. I do not remember all their names, but
you hear every day that Yemenis took such and such
border post, the Saudis have deserted their posts and
that the Yemenis have withdrawn because they would need
for air defence to keep those positions and that Saudi
planes bombard them, and so it's their air force which
must intervene. But either way, any country that has
planes can do such a thing, bomb, destroy, perpetrate
massacres ... What your army must first be able to do is
keep its border posts, and then we will see if you are
capable or not of entering Yemen territory. It is
neither a military operation nor a political operation.
We are facing a revenge operation: “You, the Yemeni
people, you have ceased to obey the master (because the
Saudis consider themselves the masters), you have ceased
to be slaves of the Saudi Lord, you want to be the
masters of yourselves, but this is not allowed in this
region, it is not permissible that the Yemeni people be
so, so then, pay the price of your choice.” What is the
price? The bombing, destruction, massacres, crushing,
etc. There is no other way. This is what is happening.
Nevertheless, Saudi Arabia must stop,
and the world must help it to descend from the tree (on
which it is perched), to descend from its roost. The
assaulted who is defending himself, and who has chosen
to defend his dignity, his family, his sovereignty and
freedom has no other choice but to continue to defend
himself, as long as the war may last. As for the
aggressor, it is for him to review his choices. And I
think Saudi Arabia has begun to review its choices.”
Day after day, the
Yemeni people reveals its determination to defend its
independence and its principles, and its rejection of
any surrender facing the US-Saudi aggression, whatever
the sacrifices. Yemen seems clearly moving into the way
of the Lebanese Islamic Resistance, both in terms of its
unwavering commitment to the Palestinian cause as by its
historic victories – past and future. Similarly, the
Arab-Muslim public opinion is awakening more and more to
the reality of the takfiri project in the region and to
the collusion of the forces of imperialism, and the
smoke screen that covered the true identity of Saudi
Arabia, adorned with its deceptive title of the cradle
of Islam and guarantor of its holy places, is
irremediably fading away. The Saudi aura can only
diminish in the future, while the Resistance Axis’
cannot but grow.
Yemen today displays
an example of courage and lucidity to the world, and its
heroic and tragic struggle for independence, despite the
shameful abandonment of the entire world – with the
exception of Iran and Hezbollah –, honours the Arab
world and all humanity by its example, like the struggle
of the Palestinian people.
