Yemen and the Weaponization of Human Rights and Humanitarian Aid

“A country on the brink well before war arrived, Yemen’s humanitarian crisis has been labeled the worst of our generation.”

On March 25th, Yemen entered the eighth year of its conflict, a conflict that has brought misery to a people and thrown the region off of its axis to such an extent that any expert would be hard pressed to predict what will (or could) come next. At this point, offering a viable solution to the litany of crises that the war-torn nation now faces seems even more far-fetched.

Torn apart by competing political ambitions and ideologies, the Yemeni Civil War has moved well beyond traditional warfare and into an arena that the media has seldom had the courage to examine. This is because the relevant actions reveal such a disdain for international law and well-accepted standards that their exposure could lead to widespread scandals throughout the international community, as well as calls for recalibrating foreign relations vis-à-vis our Middle Eastern partners. Whether we care to admit it or not, Western powers have not only helped to export violence to Yemen politically but have actively enabled the flow of weapons to the warring factions.

In the name of geopolitics, world powers have not only allowed certain networks to thrive but made room for nefarious dynamics to become normalized and entrenched within Yemeni society. Should we collectively fail to read the proverbial writing on the wall and abstain from holding governments accountable for the policies they have pursued, we could soon find that it is our very security with which we are bargaining. Readers will recall how the Taliban and its ideological iterations were initially funded, sustained, and armed by the United States so that they could act as convenient proxies against Soviet Russia; we know all too well what that gamble led to by way of promoting imperial jihadism.