Demonstrating for the release of detainees in Yemen's youth revolution, 2013. Demotix\/Luke Somers. All rights reserved. Yemen has never
\nbeen a staple of the western media. It did pop up on the news when in a
\nleadership shift \u00e0 la Arab Spring, Ali Abdullah
\nSaleh stepped down in February 2012 as president after thirty-three years as strongman.
\nIn January this year Yemen came back to our screens when the Houtis, a Zaidi Shiite
\ngroup, seized control of the government. In response, a Sunni Saudi-led, US-backed
\ncoalition started bombing the south of the country in March to neutralize the
\ninsurgents. Amidst the confusion and vanished institutions, Al-Qaeda in the
\nArabian Peninsula (AQAP) and the Islamic
\nState (IS) affiliate in the region strengthened their foothold in this corner
\nof the Middle East.<\/i><\/p>\n
This chain of events has
\nbrought to Yemen a humanitarian disaster. According
\nto UNOCHA, the UN\u2019s humanitarian agency, over 84% (21.1 million) of Yemenis cannot meet basic needs such as food,
\nwater, and medical supplies. Almost 1.5 million Yemenis have been forced out of
\ntheir homes. Since March more than 5,600
\npeople have been killed, around of whom 2,700 are civilians.<\/p>\n
This situation
\nhas been worsened by a maritime blockade engineered by the Saudi-led
\ncoalition to cut supplies to the Houtis. Yemen is now
\nhardly importing any food or fuel, the latter essential to keep
\ngenerators, ambulances and water pumps working. After a visit to Yemen in
\nAugust, Peter Maurer, President of the International
\nCommittee of the Red Cross, said,
\n\u201cYemen in five months is like Syria after
\nfive years [\u2026] the world needs to wake up to what is
\ngoing on.\u201d Yet media coverage of Yemen, in
\nparticular of its dire humanitarian situation, remains shamefully scant. But
\nwhy is that?<\/p>\n
The fact that one
\nof the world's poorest and hungriest countries is being fatally hit by man-made
\nmayhem has failed to make a sustained dent in the western media in the way that
\nsimilar conflicts did. The 2011 Libyan civil war that overthrew and killed Gaddafi,
\nor Israel\u2019s military operation against Hamas in the Gaza Strip in the summer or
\n2014 \u2013 more civilians have already died in Yemen than did in Gaza – generated far more media indignation, or, "sense of moral urgency,\u201d as Sara
\nRoy, Harvard associate of its Center for Middle Eastern Studies, puts it, than
\nthe Yemeni conflict has done or will ever do. <\/p>\n
It
\nis true that with very few international and local reporters on the ground, verifying facts is challenging. \u201dLocal journalists have either fled to their villages or left the
\ncountry and there are only a handful of foreign journalists in the country and
\nthey keep a low profile,\u201d says
\nCharlene Rodrigues, a freelance journalist
\nbased in Sana'a, Yemen\u2019s capital. With sea and
\nland routes to Yemen nonexistent or notably dangerous, the two weekly
\nSaudi-controlled flights to Sana\u2019a are pretty much the only option for foreign
\nreporters to enter the country. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe public responds best to human interest stories,
\nphotos, and videos that paint a picture of what it is like to live under
\nblockade and in the middle of a war. But in the case of Yemen these products
\nare thin on the ground. Without journalists in the country, Yemen is slowly fading
\nfrom people's consciousness," argues Imad Aoun, Oxfam\u2019s Yemen Media Lead.<\/p>\n
Updates
\nfrom inside the country became even scarcer when, following a UN resolution in mid-April demanding the
\nend of violence in Yemen, the major international powers shut down their
\nembassies and evacuated their diplomats. <\/p>\n
Given
\nthe critical lack of journalists and diplomats, the hundreds of aid workers
\nactive in the country are a crucial source of updates from the field. UN
\nagencies and charities like the International Federation of Red
\nCross (IFRC) and M\u00e9decins Sans Fronti\u00e8res (MSF) maintain
\na significant presence. In late October, news of a bombarded MSF-run
\nhospital, the only operational facility in the North-western district of
\nHaydan, by Saudi-led
\nairstrikes emerged thanks
\nto the condemnation of the organisation\u2019s aid workers. Occasionally, charity
\nworkers use main
\nstream media channels to shed light on the dreadful situation in war-torn
\nYemen.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is tragic that, even before the current
\ncrisis began, 61percent of Yemenis needed humanitarian aid. That went on
\nfor around a decade with hardly any coverage in the media,\u201d 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
\nclass, in particular \u201cby the lack of engagement from leftist politics [indeed displayed with Palestine],\u201c as Sophia
\nDingli, a lecturer in International Relations at the University of Hull, maintains.\n<\/p>\n
Finian Cunningham,
\na contributor writer for RT, argues that given that the US,
\nBritain and France provide the Arab coalition with intelligence
\nand logistics "the onus\u201d is \u201don [CNN, BBC and France 24] because
\ntheir governments are implicated in grave crimes.\u201d The mainstream media\u2019s lack of interest in this conflict cannot be
\nattributed to the irrelevance of the country. But the potential role of Yemen as a supplier of oil to the west; the
\ncontrol of the key port of Aden, gateway to
\nthe Red and Arabian Seas; the country\u2019s proximity to volatile Somalia; and
\nSana'a\u2019s strategic position in the Sunni-Shiite struggle make Yemen an
\nimportant territory for western and regional powers to rein in. <\/p>\n
With the Yemeni
\nconflict eclipsed by the Syrian and Iraqi chaos, it is still surprising that
\nthe nature of the Arab intervention in the country has failed to raise enough
\neyebrows. The very fact that the obscure and opulent Saudi absolute monarchy is
\nguiding autocratic regimes like Egypt\u2019s and Sudan\u2019s into the gory assault of
\none of world\u2019s worst-off countries should surely have dragged western editors
\nto pay a much closer look to Yemen.<\/p>\n
Of the main non Anglo-Saxon, state-own
\nEnglish-language broadcasters, four are widely covering the Yemeni conflict. RT (originally Russia Today) and
\nIran\u2019s Press TV are reporting almost
\ndaily about the alleged atrocities committed by the Saudi-led coalition against
\nthe Iran-allied Houthi insurgents.<\/p>\n
On the other side, Qatar\u2019s Aljazeera is proving comparatively
\nobjective on its extensive reporting of the conflict \u2013 the more remarkable
\nbearing in mind that Qatar sent 1,000 troops
\nto Yemen as part of the Arab coalition. Meanwhile, the Saudi-owned Al Arabiya does very little more than
\nglorifying the advance of the Arab coalition in what is a de facto propaganda war vis-\u00e0-vis RT and Press TV.<\/p>\n
The wholesale
\nreturn of IS to the headlines following the Paris massacre will soon bring
\nYemen to the attention of commentators. The bloody chaos engulfing the country
\nand the increasing grievances unleashed by the Arab invasion guarantee
\nsectarian and jihadist volatility for years to come. The media should play a
\nproactive part in warning our leaders that another Syria and another Iraq are
\nin the making. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u00e0 la Arab Spring, Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in February 2012 as president after thirty-three years…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1316"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1316\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}