Demonstrating for the release of detainees in Yemen's youth revolution, 2013. Demotix/Luke Somers. All rights reserved. Yemen has never
been a staple of the western media. It did pop up on the news when in a
leadership shift à la Arab Spring, Ali Abdullah
Saleh stepped down in February 2012 as president after thirty-three years as strongman.
In January this year Yemen came back to our screens when the Houtis, a Zaidi Shiite
group, seized control of the government. In response, a Sunni Saudi-led, US-backed
coalition started bombing the south of the country in March to neutralize the
insurgents. Amidst the confusion and vanished institutions, Al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic
State (IS) affiliate in the region strengthened their foothold in this corner
of the Middle East.
This chain of events has
brought to Yemen a humanitarian disaster. According
to UNOCHA, the UN’s humanitarian agency, over 84% (21.1 million) of Yemenis cannot meet basic needs such as food,
water, and medical supplies. Almost 1.5 million Yemenis have been forced out of
their homes. Since March more than 5,600
people have been killed, around of whom 2,700 are civilians.
This situation
has been worsened by a maritime blockade engineered by the Saudi-led
coalition to cut supplies to the Houtis. Yemen is now
hardly importing any food or fuel, the latter essential to keep
generators, ambulances and water pumps working. After a visit to Yemen in
August, Peter Maurer, President of the International
Committee of the Red Cross, said,
“Yemen in five months is like Syria after
five years […] the world needs to wake up to what is
going on.” Yet media coverage of Yemen, in
particular of its dire humanitarian situation, remains shamefully scant. But
why is that?
The fact that one
of the world's poorest and hungriest countries is being fatally hit by man-made
mayhem has failed to make a sustained dent in the western media in the way that
similar conflicts did. The 2011 Libyan civil war that overthrew and killed Gaddafi,
or Israel’s military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the summer or
2014 – more civilians have already died in Yemen than did in Gaza – generated far more media indignation, or, "sense of moral urgency,” as Sara
Roy, Harvard associate of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, puts it, than
the Yemeni conflict has done or will ever do.
It
is true that with very few international and local reporters on the ground, verifying facts is challenging. ”Local journalists have either fled to their villages or left the
country and there are only a handful of foreign journalists in the country and
they keep a low profile,” says
Charlene Rodrigues, a freelance journalist
based in Sana'a, Yemen’s capital. With sea and
land routes to Yemen nonexistent or notably dangerous, the two weekly
Saudi-controlled flights to Sana’a are pretty much the only option for foreign
reporters to enter the country.
“The public responds best to human interest stories,
photos, and videos that paint a picture of what it is like to live under
blockade and in the middle of a war. But in the case of Yemen these products
are thin on the ground. Without journalists in the country, Yemen is slowly fading
from people's consciousness," argues Imad Aoun, Oxfam’s Yemen Media Lead.
Updates
from inside the country became even scarcer when, following a UN resolution in mid-April demanding the
end of violence in Yemen, the major international powers shut down their
embassies and evacuated their diplomats.
Given
the critical lack of journalists and diplomats, the hundreds of aid workers
active in the country are a crucial source of updates from the field. UN
agencies and charities like the International Federation of Red
Cross (IFRC) and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) maintain
a significant presence. In late October, news of a bombarded MSF-run
hospital, the only operational facility in the North-western district of
Haydan, by Saudi-led
airstrikes emerged thanks
to the condemnation of the organisation’s aid workers. Occasionally, charity
workers use main
stream media channels to shed light on the dreadful situation in war-torn
Yemen.
“It is tragic that, even before the current
crisis began, 61percent of Yemenis needed humanitarian aid. That went on
for around a decade with hardly any coverage in the media,” argues Karl Schembri, Regional Media Advisor at the Middle East Regional Office of the Norwegian Refugee Council. Such media apathy is reinforced by the aloofness of the western political
class, in particular “by the lack of engagement from leftist politics [indeed displayed with Palestine],“ as Sophia
Dingli, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Hull, maintains.
Finian Cunningham,
a contributor writer for RT, argues that given that the US,
Britain and France provide the Arab coalition with intelligence
and logistics "the onus” is ”on [CNN, BBC and France 24] because
their governments are implicated in grave crimes.” The mainstream media’s lack of interest in this conflict cannot be
attributed to the irrelevance of the country. But the potential role of Yemen as a supplier of oil to the west; the
control of the key port of Aden, gateway to
the Red and Arabian Seas; the country’s proximity to volatile Somalia; and
Sana'a’s strategic position in the Sunni-Shiite struggle make Yemen an
important territory for western and regional powers to rein in.
With the Yemeni
conflict eclipsed by the Syrian and Iraqi chaos, it is still surprising that
the nature of the Arab intervention in the country has failed to raise enough
eyebrows. The very fact that the obscure and opulent Saudi absolute monarchy is
guiding autocratic regimes like Egypt’s and Sudan’s into the gory assault of
one of world’s worst-off countries should surely have dragged western editors
to pay a much closer look to Yemen.
Of the main non Anglo-Saxon, state-own
English-language broadcasters, four are widely covering the Yemeni conflict. RT (originally Russia Today) and
Iran’s Press TV are reporting almost
daily about the alleged atrocities committed by the Saudi-led coalition against
the Iran-allied Houthi insurgents.
On the other side, Qatar’s Aljazeera is proving comparatively
objective on its extensive reporting of the conflict – the more remarkable
bearing in mind that Qatar sent 1,000 troops
to Yemen as part of the Arab coalition. Meanwhile, the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya does very little more than
glorifying the advance of the Arab coalition in what is a de facto propaganda war vis-à-vis RT and Press TV.
The wholesale
return of IS to the headlines following the Paris massacre will soon bring
Yemen to the attention of commentators. The bloody chaos engulfing the country
and the increasing grievances unleashed by the Arab invasion guarantee
sectarian and jihadist volatility for years to come. The media should play a
proactive part in warning our leaders that another Syria and another Iraq are
in the making.