Behind US-Backed Attacks, Humanitarian Crisis Soars in Yemen

One Million Children Acutely Malnourished

by Jason Ditz, July 16, 2012

In countries like Syria, the humanitarian crisis coming with the ongoing fighting between regime and rebels has fueled condemnation from Western nations and demands for more aggressive action. Not so in Yemen.

Yemen has had a massive humanitarian problem for years, but the US-backed military offensives of recent months have dramatically worsened it, with UNICEF warning that 60 percent of Yemeni children are now in a state of chronic malnutrition, with one million “acutely malnourished.”

Since Yemen is almost always fighting some war or other, the regimes have cheerfully made a point of spurning domestic spending and instead pump a massive portion of the limited domestic economy into building weapons and blowing up people on the margins of society.

US-backed dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh was notorious for this, leaving Yemen as a nation of slums and military bases interspersed between one another. Following mass protests which forced his ouster, new US-backed dictator Major Gen. Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who took power in a single candidate election, looks to continue that trend, focusing entirely on attacking the various secessionists that cropped up in the waning days of Saleh’s reign, and with the US eagerly throwing weapons and advisers at him to do so.

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