Better Health For All

One Saturday afternoon 2 years ago, not long after I had joined the Public Health training scheme, a WhatsApp message came through from one of my childhood friends. The remarkable thing about this was that my childhood friends are all from Yemen, and therefore all in the middle of ‘the War’, and so did not often have WiFi. The message meant that someone had managed to get hold of some increasingly unaffordable diesel, to power up a WiFi mast.

I rang her; she said there was no point video-calling as they had no electricity and all 8 of them were huddled around one solar-powered desk lamp in the basement, which also charged their phone. I felt a little unsure of what to say, so I switched my video on and walked them around my roomy house and we laughed at how many electrical appliances I had and how useless I would be should I also find myself in the middle of ‘the War’. I think they were just relieved to hear someone else’s voice, to have a sense that there was a part of the world where things were calm enough for things like toasters to exist, but after I had rung off my mind was buzzing and I felt a strange ache. What could I do? I felt far away and helpless.

But it made me think that is these very things that compelled me to pursue public health in the first place. I want to use whatever drop of energy I have in things that challenge my mind, but also give me heart ache; that bizarre human feeling of being both strong and weak all at once.

I felt it again today, while I sat on a train going to work reading a new report by Martha Mundy for the World Peace Federation; “Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War”. It is a fine piece of public health work. It collates and displays a range of data and information to generate patterns, from which to draw evidence-based conclusions, which are to motivate change that would save many many lives.

In general the war in Yemen, despite being in its fourth year, gets little press. However, as the civilian death toll in Yemen rises, there has been increasing international scrutiny of the Coalition, which consists of Saudi, backed by its allies the UK, France and the US. Are so many non-military hits justifiable?

It seems not.

This new report profiles large amounts of data on Coalition attacks in Yemen between March 2015 to March 2018. It describes the geography and changes in tactics of attacks over time, along with mapping out the proportion of attacks on civilians in the different governorate regions, shown in Figure 1 below.

Proportion of civilian, military and unknown targets in governorates of Yemen. YDP data March 2015 – March 2018.

“From August 2015 there appears a shift from military and governmental to civilian and economic targets, including water and transport infrastructure, food production and distribution, roads and transport, schools, cultural monuments, clinics and hospitals, houses, fields and flocks.”

In particular, the report maps the targeting of agricultural land and fisheries, and explains the consequences for a country on the brink of famine, that relies on small scale farming and fishing for survival.

The report describes some of the recent attacks with high civilian death counts, such as a school bus target from August this year, and then states:

These atrocities receive attention from the UN Humanitarian Affairs Coordinator and the international press, but shielded by allies, the Coalition remains exempt from any independent investigation to determine legal responsibility and from significant international mobilization to stop the war in Yemen.

Figure 2. All Agricultural targets

The conclusion that the report comes to is a clear one, as colluding in war crimes is not an allegation to make lightly:

If the Coalition war in Yemen is not to mark the erasure of legal referent in war, other forces and institutions will need to call into question the blanket ‘legitimacy’ accorded the Coalition to date by the world’s highest legal body, the UN Security Council. If UN Security Council resolution 2417 (24 May 2018), condemning starvation of civilians in wartime, is to be meaningful, then it is necessary for the UNSC and its member states to halt such crimes in Yemen, to investigate them, and to call to account those responsible for perpetrating them.

I wish I could tell my friends, that people who are out there, with toasters, feel that humanitarian laws should apply to Yemen.

You don’t need to be an expert on Yemen, just have a mind, and a heart. It’s in these challenging times that we are invited to exercise what is important.

If you are interested in knowing or doing more, please get in touch with the Yemen Special Interest Group via this link. Depending on what you are like, you can also write to your MP, share the report, or even write a song.

Written by Rachel Handley, member of FPH’s Yemen Special Interest Group