Supporters of $15 minimum wage to
rally at City Hall. Coalition wants City Council to override mayor's veto. Supporters of a
$15 minimum wage will gather at noon on Mon., Apr. 3 outside City Hall to
express concerns over Mayor Catherine Pugh’s decision to veto the legislation.
Baltimore clergy and members of the Fight for $15 Baltimore Coalition are
calling on the City Council to override Pugh's veto. Supporters of the
legislation are also focusing on holding Pugh accountable for breaking her
campaign promise to sign the $15 minimum wage bill. The City Council voted 11-3 to pass legislation to increase the city's
minimum wage to $15 by 2022. To override a veto, the council needs 12 votes.
Published on Portside (https://portside.org)
Yemen:
After Two Years of War A Stupendous Human Crisis Looms
April 1, 2017
Helen Lackner
Sunday, March 26, 2017
openDemocracy
Two years
ago, on 26 March 2015, the Saudi-led coalition started aerial attacks on Yemen,
transforming a civil war into an international conflict with the predictable
result: humanitarian disaster, intensification of the fighting, a far higher
casualty toll, no exit strategy, much nonsense in international political
circles and the media.
Officially
there are now some 40,000 human casualties, including more than 2,500 children
and 1,900 women killed directly by the strikes. In addition thousands of women
and children have died from lack of access to medical facilities and treatment.
UNICEF estimates that a child dies every ten minutes from disease or hunger.
Men also die, and not just in the fighting.
A summary
for those whose attention may be distracted by other disasters.[1] The
2011 uprisings led to the formal departure of Saleh from the presidency he had
held for 33 years, and restricted him to his role as head of the General
People’s Congress, his political party. He was replaced by his former Vice
President Hadi to head a 2-year transition through the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC) Agreement mechanism and with the support of the United Nations. Between
2012 and 2014 while the formal transition moves were taking place (a failed
security sector reform, National Dialogue Conference, constitutional committee,
government of national unity), the Huthi movement, based in the far north of
the country allied with its former enemy Saleh and took control of areas beyond
its own stronghold. When the transition unravelled in 2014, this alliance
moved further south, took over the capital and eventually ousted the
transitional regime. Hadi, after a brief stop-over in the newly appointed
temporary capital of Aden, took refuge in Saudi Arabia when the air strikes
started and the war was internationalised.
Making a
poor country destitute
Already the
poorest country in the region, Yemen has now suffered from massive destruction
of its limited infrastructure: some towns and villages have been reduced to
rubble, most bridges and major mountain passes will need millions to repair.
And while the international community, led by the GCC, organises luxurious
pledging conferences for reconstruction, anyone with previous experience of
such pledges knows that they are little more than fantasy.
At a time
of low oil prices, when Saudi Arabia is actually borrowing to cover its budget
deficit, and other GCC states are also retrenching, there is little likelihood
of their actually paying for reconstruction of Yemen. With a few notable
exceptions, mainly in Scandinavia, the northern/western states, also cutting
into public expenditure on aid and for services at home to finance increased
military spending can be expected to find more and better excuses than those
they used in the past decade to renege on their pledges.
The coming
famine
You may
have read or heard about the famine which is threatening Yemen and countries in
Africa. In some areas of Yemen people are already dying from starvation. First
people can’t afford to buy food, even if prices had not risen as they have.
Government staff are not paid, private sector employment is almost
non-existent, and foreign funded development projects reduced to a bare
skeleton of their pre-war situation.
In some
areas of Yemen people are already dying from starvation.
Second, as
Yemen imports 90% of its staples, the blockade is an effective weapon: although
intended to enforce the arms embargo on the Huthi-Saleh alliance, it is used to
prevent basic supplies entering the country. A UN Verification Inspection
Mechanism was finally agreed in 2016, but failed to seriously accelerate the
arrival of essentials. Destruction of the cranes at Hodeida port further slows
unloading. Constraints to delivery continue as truck drivers have to pay
‘taxes’ at endless checkpoints. Economic warfare also includes the transfer of
the Central Bank, which in any case had run out of money. Therefore importers
can no longer get the letters of credit needed to purchase grains on the
international market: as 90% of imports are commercial, simply put, within
weeks, the result will be no food to buy at any price.
The United
Nations has stated that, of the four famines predicted for 2017, Yemen is the
worst, with seven million people close to starvation and a further ten million
in urgent need. It appeals for USD 2.1 billion for humanitarian work in Yemen
this year. At a time of reduced international funding, this amount is unlikely
to materialise. Last year’s appeal received 60% of the USD 1.6 billion
requested.
Translated into plain English this means people of all ages,
including thousands of children, will be left to starve or die of disease,
without water or having to walk miles to collect dirty water from wells or
springs. The 2 million or more displaced families have nothing, no shelter, no
food, no sanitation, nothing.
Meanwhile
in the UK, the DEC Yemen appeal launched last December, has collected more than
20 million pounds, but is now superseded by the new appeal for East Africa.
Readers are urged to contribute anything they can to MSF, UNICEF, DEC or
whichever is their favoured organisation operating in Yemen.
Meanwhile,
on the military front…
The
Saudi-led coalition air forces have carried out over 90,000 sorties over Yemen,
and there is no prospect of them ending. Many sorties involve aircraft each
dropping two 2000lb bombs. Precision targeting, assisted by US and British
advisers in Saudi operations rooms has had mixed results: four Medecins Sans
Frontières and another 270 medical facilities have been bombed, close to 750
schools, more than 500 markets and shops damaged or destroyed, let alone the
damage to the country’s cultural heritage, with historic mosques,
archaeological sites and museums attacked. There are plenty more figures,
including the destruction of more than 400,000 homes: just think what this
means for the families who lived there!
Two years
on, the short air-borne war which the newly appointed Saudi Minister of Defence
probably hoped would seal his position as future king, has reached quagmire:
most fronts have been more or less static for 18 months or more. The widely
broadcast success of the current offensive along the Red Sea coast is proving
more limited and more expensive than claimed. It is also accompanied by the
usual ‘mistakes’, for example on 17 March a helicopter and sea attack killed
more than 40 Somali refugees on their way to Sudan with UNHCR assistance. The
coalition tactic of blaming the enemy fell flat, as the Saleh Huthi alliance
has not one single aircraft of any description able to fly.
Temporary
capital Aden, the north-east area round Mareb, and most of the southern
governorates (area of the former People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen) were
liberated from Saleh-Huthi control in the summer of 2015. These areas have not
experienced re-establishment of effective administration by the Hadi
administration. For the first year, most ministers made occasional brief forays
into Aden and even briefer stop-overs elsewhere.
Even
military control is debatable, given that current security and military units
are largely unconnected and unrelated groups of armed men, mostly under the
titles of ‘Security Belt’ or ‘Elite Forces’ trained, paid and supervised
directly by the main coalition partner in that area, the United Arab
Emirates.While Al Qaeda has evacuated urban areas, they re-appear frequently.
Many interventions publicised as being against al Qaeda are actually targeted
at the Yemeni Muslim Brothers (known as Islah), because for the UAE, Islah is
the prime enemy. What governance exists is local.
The one
positive feature in the southern rural areas is that coalition airstrikes are
rare. Instead, until January 2017, the people there had to expect US drone
attacks against al Qaeda at any time. With the Trump Presidency, they have
found that drone strikes are far more frequent and, in addition, US air strikes
have become a regular feature. The now notorious Yakla ground attack in al
Baidha governorate may be a foretaste of what is to come. Al Baidha deserves
special mention as it is a front with ground fighting, coalition air strikes
and US direct strikes. It is still largely controlled by the Huthi-Saleh
alliance; resistance against Saleh’s forces is an alliance of local tribes with
jihadis, so the people of that governorate get the worst of all worlds! Taiz
city is another complex situation where all factions are present, but air
strikes are rare.
A political
solution? Negotiations? Saving the lives of ordinary Yemenis?
Every
political statement from the UN, coalition members, even the opposing Yemeni factions,
states that the only solution to the problem is political. Meanwhile arms are
delivered, the UN Special envoy travels from one fruitless meeting to the next
contributing to carbon emissions, Hadi and his ministers repeat ad nauseam
their totally uncompromising demands, the Saleh-Huthi team claim willingness to
negotiate, and the fighting and killing go on and on.
The
coalition boasts advances on the ground, while their demands can be summarised
as complete surrender by their opponents. The Huthi-Saleh alliance remains
militarily strong and don’t appear to be running out of weapons or ammunition.
Their evident shortage of cash is alleviated by a taxation system which levies
cash from citizens anywhere and everywhere as many times as possible along the
routes of food supplies and anything else.
Internationally,
the war is mostly described as a proxy one between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This
success of the Saudi public relations machinery is a rare achievement for the
millions of dollars spent with western PR firms. Although the Obama
administration provided uncritical support, only slightly tempered by public
protests at civilian deaths, Saudi Arabia is expecting and finding even more
uncritical support now.
While Trump
decides whether Al Qaeda, Daesh or Iran is its prime target, whichever it
chooses leaves Yemen in the firing line: although Daesh is barely present,
propaganda about deep Iranian involvement has trumped the reality of little
more than propaganda support, while the presence of famous Al Qaeda leaders in
remote locations provide great targets. History analyses longer than tweets are
probably of little interest to a US president whose concern is limited for the
lives of human beings who are not Christian fundamentalists. It would be
ridiculous to expect his administration to devote funds and time on famine
relief, wider humanitarian needs or good governance at the expense of good
relations with GCC millionaire monarchs.
Making
America Great again includes increased military budget and more arms sales.
Since the conflict began, the US and UK have together transferred more than
US$5 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia, more than 10 times the US$450
million that the US State Department and the UK’s Department for International
Development have spent or budgeted for aid to Yemen.[2]
Where does
the UK come into this?
While
boasting of being one of the largest aid and relief ‘donors’ to Yemen,
with just over Sterling 130 million last year, that same year Britain agreed
weapons sales worth USD 3.3 billion to Saudi Arabia. It has been demonstrated
that some of the cluster bombs dropped in civilian areas were of British
manufacture. Under pressure, the Saudis stopped using British cluster bombs and
promptly replaced them with Brazilian ones, rather than giving up weapons which
are known to kill and maim civilians and children decades after being dropped
(see Laos, Cambodia for example).
Opposition
to British arms sales has led to a judicial review of their legality, whose
findings are awaited. In addition there has been increasing discomfort in
Parliament and beyond. While these are likely to lead to somewhat greater
public attention and possibly to ensuring that more than half the British
population know about the war, the May government is unlikely to stop weapons
sales to allies expected to save the British economy from Brexit-related
recession.
In
conclusion, as we enter the third year of this awful war, the only new feature
is the impending famine which is likely to kill thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands.
Yemenis are not starving, they are actively being starved first by their own
warmonger leaders, and second by the foreign states which feed this war with
weapons and ammunition and allow the blockade of food and fuel.
Prospects
for peace are nowhere in sight. No serious pressure is being put on the
internationally recognised government and its coalition partners to compromise
while the other side has enough military capacity to continue indefinitely.
Local smugglers of weapons, food and fuel are laughing all the way to their
cash stores while international arms dealers are counting their profits. The
Yemeni people have justifiably lost what little confidence they ever had in
their leaders who, yet again, prove daily that they haven’t got an ounce of
humanity in their souls. Eventually one can only hope that ordinary Yemeni men,
women and children, will succeed in imposing their voices and views, and
overcome the nightmarish obstacles in their path to peace and reasonable living
conditions. Meanwhile let us all try and bring this day forward.
[2]
See Amnesty International (23 March 2017) Yemen: Multibillion-dollar arms sales by USA and UK reveal
shameful contradiction with aid efforts [2].
Helen
Lackner has worked in Yemen since the 1970s and lived there for close to 15
years. She has written about the country’s political economy as well as social
and economic issues. She is the author of Why
Yemen Matters, Saqi books 2014 [3]. And her
new book, Yemen in Crisis: autocracy, neo-liberalism and the disintegration of
a state, will be published by Saqi books in October.
Links:
[1] https://www.opendemocracy.net/arab-awakening/helen-lackner/war-in-yemen-two-years-old-and-maturing
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/03/yemen-multibillion-dollar-arms-sales-by-usa-and-uk-reveal-shameful-contradiction-with-aid-efforts/
[3] http://www.saqibooks.co.uk/book/yemen-matters/
[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/03/yemen-multibillion-dollar-arms-sales-by-usa-and-uk-reveal-shameful-contradiction-with-aid-efforts/
[3] http://www.saqibooks.co.uk/book/yemen-matters/
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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