The UK Foreign Secretary has announced emergency funding for Yemen as millions are at risk of starvation. Dominic Raab has pledged £14 million of aid to help 1.5 million households access food and medicines. This takes the UK’s total contribution of international aid to Yemen to £214 million this year.
Situation in Yemen
Over the past year the conflict has intensified, now with 47 identifiable front lines by the end of October. This is a significant increase from 33 front lines identified at the start of 2020. Such intensified hostilities have caused tens of thousands of civilian casualties. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) reported on 1 December that almost a quarter of a million people have died in the war. 131,000 of those deaths are from indirect causes such as lack of food, poor infrastructure and no access to health services. This figure includes 3,153 child deaths. Acute malnutrition rates among children under the age of five are the highest ever recorded in some parts of Yemen, with half a million cases in the southern districts. UNICEF reported that 11 children, including a one-month-old baby, had been killed in the last three days of November in separate attacks in Taizz and Al Hudaydah governorate.
The OCHA estimates 24.3 million people will need humanitarian assistance in 2021. This equates to roughly 80% of the population, including 12 million children.
COVID-19 has exacerbated the dire situation. Sanitation and clean water are in short supply, and only half of health facilities are properly functioning. There is little basic health equipment such as masks and gloves, and even less oxygen and other essential supplies to tackle COVID-19. Many health workers do not receive salaries. There have so far been 2,239 recorded COVID-19 in Yemen, with 624 deaths. The numbers are an estimate, as COVID-19 testing and tracing in the country is virtually non-existent. The Guardian reports that a COVID testing, treatment and quarantine centre in Ataq city hasn’t received a single patient since August.
The centre has so far conducted nearly 4,000 tests, 90 returning positive. Shabwa province has recorded 46 deaths. Speaking to the Guardian, the centre’s director Dr Hisham Saeed worries that the growing stigma associated with the disease and the difficulty of travel means that people who may have the disease or are in need of treatment are just staying at home. “People think it’s a normal fever. Sometimes they ask me whether coronavirus is all just a big lie,” he said. COVID-19 has hit the province of Aden the hardest according to satellite imagery analysis of graveyards. A study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine found that the number of new burials had nearly doubled in the area since the first case was reported in April. There have been 2,100 excess deaths by the end of September, against an expected baseline of 1,300.
International Aid
UN Secretary General António Guterres warned on 20 November that “Yemen is now in imminent danger of the worst famine the world has seen for decades. In the absence of immediate action, millions of lives may be lost”. Last month, the UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock informed the UN Security Council that only $1.5 billion had been received from Yemen’s $3.4 billion appeal for 2020. He noted that at the same time last year, the UN had received almost $3 billion, twice as much.
When announcing the emergency funding, UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said that “thousands of Yemenis are now living in famine conditions, facing the daily threat of starvation and conflict.” He urged the international community to also step up contributions and support the peace process to prevent the crisis worsening even more.
“New UK aid will save lives by making sure the poorest Yemenis can feed their families. But the UK cannot solve this crisis alone. Other donors must now release their funding and contribute more support to prevent this becoming an even bigger tragedy,” he said.
In 2019, famine was narrowly avoided due to international funding to ensure UN agencies and NGOs were able to provide food and support. Since the global COVID-19 outbreak, funding for Yemen has dropped significantly. 2020’s funding is a record low. The UK is still one of the biggest donors to the crisis, committing over £1 billion in aid since the conflict began in 2015.
However, the UK government is embroiled in controversy over its arms sales to Saudi Arabia, who are a main actor in the Yemen war. On 23 November, Sam for Rights and Liberties, a Yemeni NGO based in Geneva, and British NGO Foundations for Peace urged the British government to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE due to their ongoing involvement in the war.
In their statement, they said that “The United Kingdom should listen to calls by international organizations (such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch in previous statements) to stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and the UAE.”
“Based on data from arms bans campaigns, the total value of British export licenses of military products to Saudi Arabia since the start of the bombing in Yemen amounts to £5.4 billion, however the real value of weapons exports is no less than £16 billion”, they added. According to their report, Saudi purchases account for 41% of total British arms exports between 2010 and 2019. This includes aircrafts, helicopters, drones, hardware and £3 billion worth of defence related products, as well as £2.5 billion worth of bombs, missiles and grenades.
Analysis released in November by the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) showed that “most UK arms are sold via a secretive and opaque licensing regime that allows for the mass transfer of deadly weapons to sensitive locations.” CAAT’s research found that the UK government had approved at least 10,390 open licenses since 2010, many to countries with poor human rights records, including more than 200 to Saudi Arabia. The government denies accusations that it attempts to mask the true extent of British-made arms exports to repressive regimes, despite research showing tens of billions of pounds worth of missiles, bombs and machine guns had been sold under open licences, a mechanism which makes tracking arms sales more difficult.
Critics of the open arms license said that the figures were “extremely alarming” and called for the use of such licenses to be stopped. As well as Saudi Arabia, almost 270 were to India, which has been accused of human rights abuses in Kashmir. Earlier this year in February, the UK government said it will establish a “new process” to prevent unlawful arms sales to Saudi Arabia after a Court of Appeal ordered the suspension of arms sales in June 2019. The ruling had found that licensing military exports to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen was lawful. Despite this, it emerged in September 2019 that the Court’s ruling had been violated, prompting an inquiry.
The Secretary of State for International Trade, Liz Truss MP, admitted that the UK had breached the Court order, but said that “further steps have already been taken forward, including increased governance and risk management within the Export Control Joint Unit to meet the issues identified.” UK export policy states that military equipment licences should not be granted if there is a “clear risk” weapons might be used in a “serious violation of international humanitarian law”, which many argue is the case with Saudi Arabia.
As the government pledges more aid to help those in need in Yemen, it should also evaluate its conduct with Saudi Arabia, and follow the advice of Courts and human rights groups to suspend arms sales.