The conflict, which began in March 2015, has brought the country to humanitarian catastrophe. Children are the first victims of a war that the West has decided to ignore, continuing to sell arms to Saudi Arabia.
The war has finally reached Hodeidah. The port city on the Red Sea, a strategic landing point for food and essential goods, is the scene of violent fighting and Saudi air force bombardments. The high stakes and the crucial nature of the battle for control of the city are borne out by the numbers: in the first fifteen days of November, more than 600 people were killed.
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The goal of Abd ar-Rabbo Mansour Hadi's government, backed by Saudi Arabia, is to drive the Houthi rebels out of the city — rebels supported by Tehran. And to do so, they are prepared to make the civilian population pay the highest price. Besieging Hodeidah effectively means paralysing the entire country: before the war, it was through this port that 70 per cent of food imports, aid and fuel passed.
The proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran for control and spheres of influence across the wider Middle East has effectively brought Yemen to its knees. Yet the atrocities of another conflict — that in the ravaged Syria — have until now overshadowed events in what the United Nations considers the worst humanitarian crisis in the past 100 years. Contributing to the general indifference towards the crimes committed in Yemen is the objectively difficult task of obtaining up-to-date and credible data on the war's victims.
The conflict officially began in March 2015, when Saudi Arabian aircraft, backed by a coalition of eight other Arab countries, began bombing the positions of Houthi Shia rebels who, moving south from the north towards the capital Sana'a, had seized large swathes of the country within a matter of months. The crisis, however, has its roots further back in time, in the street uprisings that in 2012 led to the fall of then-president Ali Abdullah Saleh (who had led the country for over thirty years).
The new president Abdel Rabbo Mansour Hadi, backed by the United States and Egypt as well as the Gulf states, never managed to take full control of the country, nor to launch the promised reforms — that is, to form a government that would also include the groups that had been oppressed or discriminated against under Saleh. From 2014 onwards, the Houthis, supported by Iran and frustrated in their demands for autonomy in the north of the country, launched a campaign that brought them, within a matter of weeks, to take control of the capital Sana'a itself. The rapid advance of the rebels, backed by Tehran, convinced Saudi Arabia to intervene militarily, widening the conflict and turning it into a regional crisis.
According to the World Health Organisation, those killed in the conflict that began in March 2015 number at least 10,000. This is a conservative toll, given the intensity of the fighting and the indiscriminate bombardments. The death toll could be far higher, according to humanitarian organisations. A count by the independent research group Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project now estimates that at least 56,000 people have been killed since January 2016 — that is, ten months after the start of the Saudi war. The figure does not include those who have died of hunger and disease.
What is certain is that there are numbers that feed the risk of a humanitarian catastrophe: to date, approximately 22 million people out of a population of 28 million are suffering from nutritional deficiencies. Among them, above all, children at risk of hunger and disease. There are 20,000 cholera cases.
"Yemen today is a living hell for children": it was on 4 November last that a senior Unicef official, Geert Cappelaere, lifted the veil on the disastrous situation in the country, reeling off merciless figures on the conditions of the youngest. In today's Yemen — he stated — every ten minutes a child dies from diseases that are easily preventable. Around 1.8 million children suffer from acute malnutrition, and of these 400,000 are at risk of dying. Furthermore, 30,000 children under the age of five die every year from diseases for which malnutrition is a contributing cause. "The suffering of millions of children in Yemen is man-made. If we are facing the risk of a famine, there is not a single natural cause. It is for reasons for which adults are responsible, but for which children are paying the highest price."
But something, within the international community, began to stir after years of indolence. What triggered it was not outrage over the devastation and the deaths of so many children, but the murder of a journalist that took place on 2 November last in Istanbul, Turkey. The execution at the Saudi consulate of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of Riyadh and of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — the principal architect of the war in Yemen — became intertwined with the fate of the conflict from the very outset. From the investigations into the journalist and his work, it emerged that Khashoggi had intended to expose the use of chemical weapons by the Saudi air force in Houthi-controlled territories.
The outrage over the involvement — first denied, then partially admitted — of the highest Saudi echelons in the murder forced Riyadh's main backers, the United States, France and England, to face international public opinion. And for the first time the three diplomatic services stepped up their efforts to push the warring parties towards a way out of the conflict.
Yet the Western stance is nothing short of hypocritical: according to a study carried out by the US portal Middle East Eye, between 2015 and 2016 European countries sold $86.7 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, who are on the front line in the Yemeni conflict — 55 times more than their donations to the United Nations humanitarian aid plan. According to Mee, in 2016 no fewer than 17 countries gave the go-ahead to the sale of $50 billion in arms.
During the same period, the European Union (as a collective of states) donated $1.56 billion to the UN Yemen Humanitarian Response Plan campaign, equivalent to 1.8 per cent of the value of the arms sold.
The arms trade is a lucrative market, and Italy is a willing participant. Human rights organisations have been calling for a halt to the supply of made-in-Italy weaponry to the Saudis for years. Last June, more than 10 million euros' worth of arms and ammunition — to be precise, €10,453,696 — were exported from Sardinia to Saudi Arabia. The figure appears in the lengthy list in Istat's database, which records monthly exports of every product from Italy to the rest of the world.
Even though the database does not make it possible to trace the number of munitions exported, we know that these are MK-series aerial bombs produced in Domusnovas, Sardinia, by the German company Rwm Italia, whose registered office is in Ghedi, Brescia, and that they are being used by the Saudi military air force to bomb Yemen indiscriminately. According to the United Nations, these bombings constitute war crimes.
Ultimately, everything will depend on the political will of those in power. In the meantime, bombs continue to rain down on Yemen and its people.
