{"id":145436,"date":"2019-10-21T12:01:01","date_gmt":"2019-10-21T11:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=145436"},"modified":"2024-09-23T14:41:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-23T13:41:48","slug":"death-misery-and-bloodshed-in-yemen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/10\/death-misery-and-bloodshed-in-yemen\/","title":{"rendered":"Death, Misery and Bloodshed in Yemen"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cStrike with Creativity,\u201d proclaims Raytheon.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sean Reynolds<\/p><\/div>\n

16 Oct 2019 – <\/em>Writing about his visit<\/a> to the world\u2019s largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon\u2019s stall: \u201cStrike with Creativity.\u201d Raytheon manufactures Paveway laser-guided bombs, fragments of which have been found in the wreckage of schools, hospitals, and markets across Yemen. How can a weapons manufacturer that causes such death, bloodshed, and misery lay claim to creativity?<\/p>\n

Greta Thunberg, sitting alone outside her school as she initiated a movement of climate strikes, could properly invoke the words \u201cStrike with Creativity.\u201d She inspired Friday classroom walkouts, worldwide, by young people protesting destruction and death caused by climate catastrophe. Her admirable goal is to save the planet by promoting such strikes.<\/p>\n

Coming from Raytheon, the words \u201cStrike with Creativity\u201d sound chilling, -grotesque.<\/p>\n

Consider the Raytheon weapons now demolishing Yemen. Fragments of Raytheon and other U.S. manufactured weapons dot blast sites where Yemeni survivors struggle to collect body parts and scattered bits of clothing, which are needed to compile lists of the dead.<\/p>\n

In September, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) hit a detention center in the Dhamar governorate, in the northern highlands of Yemen with seven airstrikes that killed at least 100 people and \u201cpulverized\u201d the area, according<\/a> to Bethan McKernan, reporting for The Guardian.<\/em> \u201cIt took five days to remove all the bodies impaled on metalwork ripped from the walls in the blasts,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n

After the attack, McKernan interviewed Adel, a 22-year-old security guard\u00a0 employed at the site. His brother, Ahmed, also a\u00a0guard, was among those killed. Adel pointed to a blanket, visible on the second floor of a building where the guards had slept. \u201cYou can see Ahmed\u2019s blue blanket up there,\u201d said Adel. \u201cThere were 200 people here but now it\u2019s just ghosts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Saudi-led coalition bombarding and blockading Yemen have killed<\/a> tens of thousands, wrecking the country\u2019s already enfeebled infrastructure and bringing Yemen to the brink of a famine that may kill millions. President Trump signaled additional support for Saudi Arabia on October 11 when the U.S. military announced<\/a> it would send thousands more troops to the kingdom, bringing the number of U.S. troops there to 14,000.<\/p>\n

Just as Greta Thunberg insists adults must become intensely aware of details and possible solutions regarding\u00a0the climate catastrophe, people in the U.S. should learn about ways to end economic as well as military war waged against Yemen. For us to understand why Yemenis would link together in the loose coalition of fighters called Huthis requires deepening awareness of how financial institutions, in attempting to gain control of valuable resources, have pushed farmers and villagers across Yemen into debt and desperation. Isa Blumi writes about this sordid history in his 2018 book, Destroying Yemen<\/em><\/a>, What Chaos in Arabia Tells Us about the World.<\/em><\/p>\n

Blumi details<\/a>\u00a0how Yemen\u2019s society, largely independent and agrarian, became a guinea pig for International Monetary Fund (IMF) \u201cdevelopment projects\u201d which, based on strikingly colonialist theories of \u00a0modernization, crushed grassroots institutions and amounted<\/a> to\u00a0\u201ccost-effective ways of prying Yemen\u2019s wealth out of its peoples\u2019 hands.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Political Geography Now<\/p><\/div>\n

Local Development Associations, for example, were formed during the 1970s to help people hang on to their land, cooperatively determine what crops they would grow and decide how they would use the profits. But U.S. Agency for International Development \u201cexperts\u201d pressured<\/a> these groups to instead produce \u201ccash crops strictly meant for export.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter all,\u201d Blumi writes<\/a>, \u201cwith the right kind of cash crop and the use of American labor-saving technology, pesticides and fertilizers included, Yemen\u2019s villagers were no longer needed in the fields. Alternatively, they could work in cities in sweatshops producing clothes for a global market or the soon booming oil and gas projects.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blumi’s book documents the fiercely stubborn creativity with which, decade by decade, Yemenis kept surprising the West, exploring and pursuing countermeasures to resist its exploitative control, and risking the West’s destructive anger.<\/p>\n

Yemenis resisted U.N. and IMF prescriptions of global integration and debt peonage. When farmers desperate for cash went to work in, for instance, Saudi Arabia, \u201cthey consistently sent remittances home to families that saved the cash and invested in local projects, using local bank transfers.\u201d Imams and village leaders encouraged people to resist imperialist “modernization” projects, knowing that the West’s preferred “modern” role for them was as wage slaves with no hope of developing a better future.<\/p>\n

The \u201cHuthi\u201d movement began when Husayn al-Huthi, an opponent of Yemen\u2019s dictatorial (and Western-allied) Saleh regime, tried to defend the water and land rights of locals in the Sa\u2019adah province in northwestern Yemen. Sharing what was then a porous and informal border with the KSA, they often found themselves\u00a0in disputes with Saudi border patrols. They also resisted \u2018structural adjustment\u2019 demands by the IMF to privatize some of Yemen\u2019s best farming and grazing land. When the dictator Saleh made criminal concessions to the KSA, al-Huthi and his followers persisted with protests. Each new confrontation won over thousands of people, eventually spreading beyond Sa\u2019adah.<\/p>\n

Blumi cites numerous instances in which Yemen\u2019s economic assets were pillaged, with Saleh\u2019s approval, by \u201cwell-heeled global financial interests\u201d who now designate Saleh’s successor Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi as Yemen\u2019s \u201cinternationally recognized government.\u201d Hadi governs from Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, due to a stunning lack of Yemeni support.<\/p>\n

In 2008, an extremely wealthy member of the bin Laden family aimed<\/a> to build a bridge across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen to Djibouti. The project could generate hundreds of billions for investors, and quicken the process of exploitative modernization; but it would also require building railways and roads where there are only villages now. People living along the coastline of the Red Sea would be in the way.<\/p>\n

Since 2015, fighting has been concentrated in this area, called the Tihama. Control of the coastline would also allow financial takeover of potentially profitable Yemeni fisheries. Blumi says billions of dollars of annual income are at stake, noting with irony that a war causing starvation is being waged, in part, to gain control over food assets.<\/p>\n

A recent United Nations<\/a> report says that Yemen is now \u201con course to become the world’s poorest country\u201d with 79 percent of the population living\u00a0under the poverty line and 65 percent classified as \u201cextremely poor.\u201d The Yemen Data Project estimated<\/a> 600 civilian structures have been destroyed, monthly, in Yemen, mostly by airstrikes.<\/p>\n

\u201cStaple food items are now on average 150 per cent higher than before the crisis escalated,\u201d says<\/a> a 2019 report by the Norwegian Refugee Council. \u201cTeachers, health workers and civil servants in the northern parts of the country haven\u2019t been paid in years,\u201d according to the same report.<\/p>\n

Mainstream media reports could convince concerned onlookers that Yemenis have been particularly vulnerable to violence and war because they are socially and economically backward, having failed to modernize. Blumi insists we recognize the guilt of financial elites from multiple countries within and beyond the Gulf states as well as institutions within the World Bank, the IMF and the UN. It\u2019s wrong to blame \u201ceighty percent of a country\u2019s population currently being starved to death\u201d<\/p>\n

Here in the United States, news commentators discussing the Trump impeachment story liken<\/a> the breaking developments to \u201cbombshell after bombshell.\u201d In Yemen, real and horribly modern bombshells, made in the United States, kill and maim Yemeni civilians, including children, every day.<\/p>\n

Greta Thunberg continues calling us to join her on an unfamiliar, unprecedented, and arduous path to change course as our world careens toward terrifying devastation. We\u2019re offered a chance to resist destructive, albeit \u201cmodern\u201d means of exploiting the planet\u2019s resources. A true strike for creativity, necessarily challenging militarism and greed, will help prevent the hellish work of destroying Yemen.<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Kathy Kelly is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a>,<\/em> an American peace activist, pacifist and author, one of the founding members of <\/em>Voices in the Wilderness, and currently a co-coordinator <\/em>Voices for Creative Nonviolence<\/a>. <\/em>Three times since 2000, she has been nominated for the <\/em>Nobel Peace Prize. As part of peace teamwork in several countries, she has traveled to Iraq twenty-six times, notably remaining in combat zones during the early days of both US-Iraq wars. Her recent travel has focused on Afghanistan and Gaza, along with domestic protests against U.S. drone policy. She has been arrested more than sixty times at home and abroad, and written of her experiences among targets of U.S. military bombardment and inmates of U.S. prisons. She lives in Chicago.<\/em> Kathy@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a> – info@vcnv.org<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

A version of this article appeared in <\/em>The Progressive Magazine<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

16 Oct 2019 – Writing about his visit to the world\u2019s largest weapons bazaar, held in London during October, Arron Merat describes reading this slogan emblazoned above Raytheon\u2019s stall: \u201cStrike with Creativity.\u201d Raytheon manufactures Paveway laser-guided bombs, fragments of which have been found in the wreckage of schools, hospitals, and markets across Yemen. How can a weapons manufacturer that causes such death, bloodshed, and misery lay claim to creativity?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":145437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[232,120,354,267,487,866,629,504,88,263,767,291,91,86,109,287,103,107,701,985,249,981,292,70,126,118,172,75,174],"class_list":["post-145436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-transcend-members","tag-capitalism","tag-conflict","tag-economics","tag-geopolitics","tag-human-rights","tag-indigenous-rights","tag-international-law","tag-international-relations","tag-israel","tag-matw","tag-middle-east","tag-military","tag-nato","tag-occupation","tag-politics","tag-power","tag-racism","tag-religion","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-social-justice","tag-trump","tag-uae","tag-un","tag-usa","tag-violence","tag-war","tag-west","tag-world","tag-yemen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145436"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145436\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":275139,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145436\/revisions\/275139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}