Saudis continue to violate the truce in Yemen
Despite ceasefire agreements, Saudi military attacks are ongoing, as is the brutal blockade of Yemeni ports, leaving millions at risk of starvation.
Our regular readers will be more than aware of the long and inhuman suffering that has been brought down on the people of Yemen since March 2015. That was when a Saudi-led coalition of imperialism’s puppets launched a merciless ongoing attack to reinstate the regime of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, which had been ousted by the Yemeni people.
Hadi still claimed the title of president-in-exile until very recently, when the Saudis, looking perhaps for an exit strategy, told him to stand down. The people of Yemen, under the leadership of the popular Ansarullah resistance movement, despite horrifically high losses, have not only hit back at the Saudis and their immediate allies in Yemen, but have take the liberation war to the streets of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
On 2 April 2022, under the auspices of the United Nations, a two-month truce started at the beginning of the muslim fasting month of Ramadan. This truce, more notable for its breaches on the Saudi side than its observance, was, again under UN guidance and negotiation, extended for a further two months on 2 June.
UN special envoy for Yemen Hans Grundberg noted that the truce was extended under the same terms as the previous one. This extension was announced after Yemen’s supreme political council declared a voluntary and unilateral three-day pause in retaliatory strikes against targets in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi-led coalition has agreed to end its attacks on Yemeni soil and end the murderous blockade of Yemen that has cut off medicines and food to the poorest people on the planet.
Yemen’s Brigadier General Yahya Abdullah al-Razami stated: “Sana’a puts emphasis on the full implementation of the ceasefire without any shortcomings, in a way that would provide security and stability, and bring about a just and honourable peace to all Yemenis.” He added: “We expect the other side to have a clear vision this time, and demonstrate more seriousness to advance this important step.”
By 4 June, hundreds of thousands of Yemeni people were on the streets across the country demonstrating against the continuing aggression of the Saudi coalition and their allied Takfiri militants and assorted mercenaries. In the capital Sana’a; in the Mahliyah district of Yemen’s central province of Ma’rib; in the province of al-Bayda; in the Rada’a and As Sawadiyah districts; in the Jabal al-Sharq, Wusab al-Ali, and Wusab al-Safil districts in the southeastern province of Dhamar; and in many other places, Yemen’s people were out almost as one waving the flag of Yemen, praising the late founder of the Ansarullah movement, Hussein Badreddin al-Houthi, and his successor, Abdul-Malik al-Houthi, both of whose portraits were prominently displayed.
The protesters vociferously chanted slogans such as “Death to America”, “Death to the House of Saud” and “Death to Israel”, while expressing rage and indignation over the Saudi-led coalition’s continued atrocities and crimes in Yemen. They also expressed continued support for Palestine and hatred for Arab leaders who seek normalisation with Israel.
These nationwide popular protests were held under the overall slogan of ‘Cry in the Face of Aggressors’. The Yemeni people expressed their continued support for the Yemeni army and for fighters from the popular resistance committees, and showed their resolution to struggle until all the aggressors had left Yemen.
In just the two days from the start of the truce extension on 2 June, the Saudi side had violated it hundreds of times, including: 57 flights of Saudi-led warplanes and reconnaissance drones in the skies of Ma’rib, Ta’izz, Hajjah, Jawf, Sa’ada and Bayda provinces as well as across the borders; positions of the army and popular committees had come under missile strikes and artillery shelling at least 11 times in Hajjah, Ma’rib, Sa’ada and areas close to Saudi Arabia’s southern region of Jizan; 42 shooting incidents were also recorded in Ma’rib, Ta’izz, Sa’ada, Hajjah and Dhale provinces as well as border fronts, where shots and missiles were fired at residential buildings and at positions of the Yemeni army and popular committees.
On the day of the demonstrations, 4 June, the Arabic-language al-Masirah television network reported missile and artillery fire directed at the Umm al-Khashab area in the Az-Zahir district of al-Bayda by Saudi-sponsored mercenaries. As a result, a Yemeni child was killed and two other members of her family were badly injured.
Also on that day, owing to the Saudi side not lifting the blockade as promised, the Force Power tanker, which was due to dock at Yemen’s western port of Hudaydah with 22,915 tons of mazut and 7,296 tons of diesel fuel, was hijacked.
Essam al-Mutawakil, a spokesman for the Yemeni National Oil Company, said that the ship was confiscated despite being inspected and cleared for the port by the United Nations staff. He noted that the Saudi-led coalition is still openly pressing ahead with its acts of piracy against fuel tankers carrying oil derivatives to Yemen, in flagrant breach of the UN-brokered truce.
Instead of implementing the measures they have signed up to, Saudi-led coalition forces and their lackeys have now also established new combat fortifications in al-Jabaliya, Hays and Maqbana areas.
For those readers who are not familiar with the seven-year long ordeal of the Yemeni people at the hands of the western imperialist-backed Saudi-UAE coalition and their puppets, it is important to understand that Yemen is a country that is fighting for its independence; a country where the former pro-Saudi puppet rulers were overthrown by the people, who wanted to rule themselves.
With the exception of a very small number of countries who do support the Yemeni struggle, most other countries, especially those claiming to ‘defend human rights’ or to ‘investigate war crimes’, such as the imperialists who are guiding the Saudi war-crimes (eg, the USA, Britain and the multistate European Union – all of whom openly arm the Saudi and UAE invaders) have adopted the silence of death and deliberately turned a blind eye to the war, generally referring (if at all) to this struggle of the Yemeni people as a ‘religious’ or ‘ethnic’ ‘civil war’ in their media.
This is because the ‘human rights’ theme of these countries, which pretend to be ‘antiwar crime fighters’, has a different narrative based on their imperialist interests. The degree of incitement of their humanitarian sentiments depends on the degree of their colonial and marauding interests.
The secretary-general of the United Nations, António Guterres, under orders from the USA, shot off to Kiev, Ukraine, quicker than any missile to talk with the murderer Volodymyr Zelensky and declare his support for Zelensky’s crimes. But for the people of Yemen it is a totally different story. Mr Guterres has not travelled to Yemen even once during the past several years to bear witness to Saudi Arabia’s disgusting and inhuman atrocities against the Yemeni people and their country.
The lying corporate media claim that only ‘Houthis’ are involved in the anti-Saudi struggle. This is part of the smokescreen that the western media promote to confuse their own people. ‘It is only an ethnic and religious war against Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates; a war between Shia and Sunnis,’ they tell us.
But in reality, the main Yemeni fighting force, the Ansarullah movement, is a front, including not only Houthis, but also people with other ethnic and religious affiliations, who participate because they want to fight for the freedom and independence of their country. Ansarullah is the united front of the Yemeni people’s struggle.
The Saudi aggressor, even with the most modern US, British, German and French weapons, and even with its Israeli and British and Nato advisors, is still unable to break the will of the Yemeni people. Saudi’s imported mercenary armies have been regularly defeated on the battlefield, and, even among their allies, including the United Arab Emirates, there is a growing disagreement over the amount of influence that each member of this heinous coalition should get to enjoy over a partitioned Yemen (should they win, of course)!
From the beginning of 2015 to 18 November 2021, the US, Britain and EU-backed Saudi aggression has killed more than 3,825 children and injured 4,175 more. During the entire war, more than 10,000 children have been killed. And these are only the direct deaths from military operations. The deaths from war-related causes, including disease and starvation, number into the hundreds of thousands.
In 2021, a Unicef spokesperson reported: “Four hundred thousand Yemeni children suffer from severe acute malnutrition. More than two million children are out of school. Another four million are at risk of dropping out.”
A little-read (in the west) human rights report published by the United Nations Development Program recorded that the number of children with various disabilities caused by the Saudi aggression has reached 5,559; more than 3 million Yemeni children are now suffering from malnutrition, while more than 300 children die daily and more than 3,000 have suffered congenital malformations.
The Saudi aggressors, by bombing residential areas – a clear crime against humanity – have destroyed 1,128 primary schools and educational centres, 8,326 farms, 136 sports centres, 250 archaeological sites (Yemen was home to several ancient cultures of major historical importance), and 50 media centres. The report also states that by the end of 2021 the number of Yemeni victims was estimated to be about 377,000, 60 percent of whom are indirect victims of war, who have died from starvation, outbreaks of disease and a lack of medical or health facilities.
According to the same report, in the al-Mughraba district, a remote area in Yemen’s northern Hajjah province, families have turned to eating the leaves of a local tree in order to survive, boiling them to form a bitter paste and make it a little more digestible. Al-Mughraba is one of 11 regions in Yemen that were identified as having famine conditions in late 2020. Mothers who themselves suffer from starvation have dry breasts and cannot feed or save their children.
No country in the world, and no UN official, is trying to open Yemen’s still-blockaded ports to food so that civilians do not die. Sanctioning and starving people to death are part of the Saudi-western strategic policy of bringing the Yemeni people to their knees. The imperialists are intentionally violating Yemenis’ human rights, while loudly pretending to defend them.
Efforts must be made to deliver food supplies to Yemen and to pressure international agencies to ensure the delivery of essential supplies to the Yemeni people. We are now halfway through 2022 and, despite the alleged truce, relief is still not getting through. Only last week, it was announced that half a million Yemeni children are presently at risk of starvation from food shortages.
The Ansarallah movement, building on its victories in partisan warfare on the ground, and even moving the war into Saudi Arabia, has achieved a kind of partisan warfare in the air by developing new technology and receiving arms from Iran. All the soft and vital facilities of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, of western companies based in the region, of construction and financial monopolies and the entire tourist industry in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Hijaz, etc are within range of Yemeni resisitance drones and missiles.
Major blows inflicted by the Yemeni resistance have brought the Saudi and UAE governments to the negotiating table, but it seems that more pressure needs to be brought to bear before they sit at that table in seriousness.
We are sure that this will be provided. Like the heroic Palestinian people living daily under the hammer blows of the zionist regime, the proud Yemeni people will bear the pain, fight back against the imperialists’ puppet aggressors, and will eventually win their land back to rule as they themselves wish.
Meanwhile, the whole current world order is changing fast. Nato, the USA, the EU and Britain – aka ‘the west’ – are all watching their economies nosedive as they struggle to hold onto all their bloody and ill-gotten gains around the world.
In their desperate attempt to stay on top, they are going all-out to try to weaken Russia and China as a preparation for launching wars against them. Despite all the logical reasons (self-evident to any rational human) for avoiding such a conflagration, these are wars that the imperialists must both wage and win if they are to have any chance of prolonging the existence of their rotten and decaying system of imperialist vampirism.
