377,000 dead: the forgotten Yemen war

It looks like morals and logical consistency are thrown out the window if they stand in the way of the British Government’s immediate aims.

While it is mortifying that war has returned to the European continent, and events that are geographically closer to home are naturally given greater awareness to those that are past many more horizons, we must remind ourselves that the media’s lens is not the centre of the universe.

Since the Kremlin’s deplorable invasion of Ukraine, the eyes of the world are transfixed on the East and the shores of the Black Sea, but do not give a minute’s airtime to what has been happening in the Middle East and the shores of the Red Sea. Since 2015, a brutal war has gripped Yemen, which has slain 377,000 either through direct fighting or famine.

The only acknowledgement of this humanitarian catastrophe is through the odd charity advert that automatically crops up in the corner of one’s computer monitor from time to time. Very few citizens of the West are aware of the destruction and untold horror that has afflicted the Yemenis people. But this is largely by design, as this display of ignorance is largely down to geopolitics rather than geography.

When the rebel Houthi group seized the nation’s capital Sana’a and began battling for total political supremacy of the entire country, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who have longed believed that the fighting force is nothing but a puppet of the Shia Iranian state, launched Operation Decisive Storm on the 26th of March 2015 in order to restore the overthrown Yemenis Government.

Ever since that day, there have been roughly 25,000 airstrikes carried out on direct orders from Riyadh, which have killed close to 15,000 civilians in direct bombing attacks. With the disruption to infrastructure, farming, and shipping, countless more have starved to death, with many innocent children succumbing to hunger.

Rather than sanctioning Saudi Arabia, the UK has allegedly sold the Kingdom over £20 billion worth of explosive weaponry and the metal wings of death that accompany them. The United States has also backed them, which has made its offensive dependent on American/British technology and arms production, which has prolonged this terrible war.

In trying to relinquish the nation’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels, ‘Boris’ Johnson recently paid a visit to the leaders of Saudi Arabia to ensure that Britain is fed with enough ‘black gold’ to suit its needs, despite the Kingdom executing eighty-one people within a single day. It looks like morals and logical consistency are thrown out the window if they stand in the way of the British Government’s immediate aims.

If your nation’s capital has a place called Chop Chop Square, executes via sword, and hacks apart dissident journalists in an embassy basement thousands of miles away from your own borders, the UK will ask: ‘so how many of our beloved football teams would you like to buy?’

For all the unwarranted violence and extreme political repression, not one of Saudi’s oil merchants have been hit with economic sanctions. Russian oligarch money was once a lucrative source of income and status for London until it became politically untenable – will the Sheiks revving their cars until their ears bleed ever suffer the same fate? Well, not so long as London and Riyadh walk hand in hand into the sunset.