Who to Bill for Yemen's Destruction?

UN's $28 Bln Yemen Appeal? Send the Bill to Washington, London, Riyadh

by Finian Cunningham - Sputnik

February 10, 2017

The United Nations this week launched an emergency appeal to raise $2 billion in humanitarian aid for Yemen, the Arabian Peninsula country where war has raged for nearly two years. The UN says some 12 million people - half the population - are facing starvation unless the international community urgently comes to their aid.

UN officials are making dramatic statements urging nations around the world to dig deep and come up with the necessary funds.

Stephen O'Brien, head of UN relief operations, called for "immediate action."

Another official, Jan Egeland, put the dire situation like this:

"In Yemen, if the bombs don’t kill you, a slow and painful death by starvation is now an increasing threat."

These UN officials are the same shameless people who have been distorting the nature of the conflict in Syria. They are now doing the same in Yemen. Their so-called "humanitarian" appeals are carefully disguised distortion about who the real culprits and causes of the crisis are.

As in Syria, the violence and humanitarian crisis in Yemen is the result of external, criminal aggression against the country. In both cases it is the United States, Britain and Saudi Arabia who are largely driving the war, either covertly as in Syria through sponsoring proxy terror groups, or openly in Yemen through the aerial bombardment of that country.

Since March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition of Arab states have been bombing Yemen relentlessly on a daily basis. Ceasefires have been routinely broken and not even the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan has been spared from the Saudi bombs.

Before the war erupted, Yemen was already one of the poorest countries in the world.

Saudi Arabia is fully supported by the United States and Britain to carry out this aggression on Yemen. Washington and London sell to the Saudi regime the F-16 and Typhoon warplanes and the bombs that they drop. The munitions include internationally banned cluster bombs, as documented by various rights groups.

Just one measure of how much the US and Britain are making a financial killing from the Saudi aggression on Yemen is this: since March 2015, Britain alone has sold $4 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia.

This week, US president Donald Trump is reportedly lifting a temporary freeze on American weapons exports to Saudi Arabia that his predecessor Barack Obama latterly imposed. The Obama administration flogged a total of $115 billion in arms to Saudi over eight years. Due to pressure from humanitarian critics over Yemen, Obama moved to curtail future sales to the Saudis. Now Trump is going ahead to resume the deadly business.

It's not just military hardware that the Americans and British are supplying. They also provide the logistics and refueling of Saudi air operations over Yemen. In other words, the Saudis would not be able to drop one bomb were it not for their American and British handlers.

Mainstream Western media, like they also do in Syria, indulge in the official lies and distortions over Yemen. Britain's Independent tells its readers that Yemen "descended into full-scale civil war in March 2015." Like all Western news media, the Independent peddles claims by Washington, London and Riyadh that they are supporting the "internationally recognized government of Yemen".

The truth is that the Western and Saudi-backed puppet regime of Abdu Rabbo Mansour Hadi was kicked out by a popular uprising that was underway since 2011. The so-called "international recognized government" is more accurately described as a "Western-backed" corrupt cabal which is sheltered in luxury palaces while exiled to Saudi Arabia.

When Hadi and his cronies fled Yemen, his Saudi and Western patrons immediately began bombing the country in an attempt to reverse the popular uprising led by the Houthi rebels. (Western claims that the Houthis are Iranian proxies is another load of propaganda lies.)

No target in that forsaken country is off limits, in brazen violation of the Geneva Convention. Family homes, schools, hospitals, farms, markets and mosques have been blasted with American and British weapons. Over and over again. In many instances, whole families of parents and children have been obliterated in the raids.

Even funerals have been hit. Last October, some 140 people were killed when a mourning ceremony in the Yemeni capital Sanaa was bombed from the skies.

The total death toll is estimated at 10,000. That is most likely a flagrant underestimate to distract from the real carnage. Most of the dead are civilians, mostly from air strikes, according to the UN.

In addition to the merciless bombing, Yemen is blockaded by air and sea. That blockade is imposed by Saudi and American warships patrolling the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden. The UN even admits that the embargo on the entire country is restricting what little flow of aid is being sent. Shipping ports have also been bombed for despicable good measure.

The UN and the mainstream Western media are now calling upon people of the world to respond with an emergency relief effort to Yemen. They show videos of skeletal children so weak that they can hardly cry from the pain of starvation.

© Wikipedia/ Jialiang Gao

But what the so-called humanitarian agencies and mainstream Western media don't tell is that this abomination is being caused by American and British governments who are making billions of dollars from weaponizing a barbaric Saudi regime.

This is the same triumvirate of evil that weaponized head-chopping terrorist mercenaries to wage war on Syria for regime change over the past six years.

Only Russia's military intervention in Syria from the end of 2015 salvaged that country from the disaster that befell others like Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya and which is befalling Yemen, where the West pursues similar regime-change machinations.

And yet the mainstream Western media have the audacity to accuse Russia of "killing civilians in Syria."

This week, American media were full of unfounded claims about Russian President Vladimir Putin being a "killer". In the same week that news emerged of a US military raid ordered by Trump in Yemen that resulted in over 20 civilians being slaughtered.

The Western double-think and hypocrisy are stupendous.

What is happening in Yemen is heartrending beyond words. Children are dying from thirst, hunger and shrapnel wounds that go untreated. And still the Saudi, American and British bombs continue to rain down on them.

No doubt the $2 billion fund that the UN is appealing for on behalf of Yemen is a gross fraction of the actual damage to the people and their country. The real figure could be as high as $200 billion considering two years of wholesale destruction.

But that bill of damage should not be spread over the world for responsibility. It should be presented precisely to Washington, London and Riyadh for them to pay alone. And then after the financial reparations are made, the UN should stop sanitizing the criminals and facilitate an international court to prosecute American, British and Saudi leaders for war crimes.