The US Provided Cover for the Saudi Starvation Strategy in Yemen
Saturday, April 08, 2017
By Gareth Porter, Truthout | Report
The aftermath of an airstrike that killed seven people in Sanaa, Yemen,
September 5, 2015.
New York Times)
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 th 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.
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.
Copyright, Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission.
Gareth Porter
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.
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