By Stephen Lendman.
Over two-and-a-half years of US-orchestrated/Saudi aggression in Yemen created the world’s most severe humanitarian crisis.
Millions of lives are threatened by war, untreated diseases including the worst cholera epidemic expected to affect up to one millions Yemenis this year, severe malnutrition, starvation, and overall deprivation.
The world community failed to intervene to stop the carnage, along with holding Washington and Riyadh fully responsible for devastating war.
Genocide haunts the country, the region’s poorest, the suffering of its people largely ignored. Most countries and Western media barely notice.
Months earlier, UNICEF said a Yemeni child under age five dies every 10 minutes from starvation alone, countless numbers more from war-related violence and untreated diseases.
Since March 2015, many thousands of Yemenis perished, maybe tens of thousands. The death toll mounts daily, children in harm’s way devastated like adults.
Unaddressed famine stalks the country. Humanitarian crisis conditions affect over 80% of the population, war and blockade responsible.
If not halted, the death toll could reached staggering proportions. It’s already claimed far more lives than a disgraceful UN report admits.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres submitted the world body’s annual report on Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) to Security Council members.
While blacklisting Riyadh and rogue partners for killing and maiming Yemeni children, it downplayed the carnage – disgracefully claiming only 683 child deaths in 2016.
The true number is multiples more than this sanitized figure – even though the CAAC report verified 38 attacks on schools and hospitals.
Countless others targeted residential areas, mosques, marketplaces, food storage facilities and other civilian sites – massacring noncombatants, including children, cluster bombs and other banned weapons used.
In 2015, Saudi Arabia was included in the CAAC report, Ban Ki-moon disgracefully removing it, caving to Western and Riyadh pressure.
Saudi Arabia is the Arab world’s leading terror state, brutalizing its own people, committing egregious human rights abuses – public beheadings, whippings, and imprisoning regime critics among them.
The 2017 CAAC report included the country in a new category, disgracefully claiming it instituted “measures during the reporting period to improve the protection of children” – a deplorable perversion of truth.
Amnesty International’s Sherine Tadros said “(w)orld powers should do everything possible to keep the pressure on states that blatantly disregard children’s lives.”
“The USA and other states that supply arms for use by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition in Yemen must stop doing so and the United Nations Security Council should impose an arms embargo to bring an end to such horrific abuses.”
Why hasn’t AI condemned ongoing US high crimes in multiple theaters including in Yemen, along with its rogue partners, responsible for millions of casualties post-9/11!
Like Ban Ki-moon and his predecessors, Guterres serves Western interests, betraying fundamental UN Charter principles.
Instead of working to restore peace and security worldwide, he’s an imperial tool, part of the problem, not the solution.