UN Official Warns That Millions in Yemen May Not Survive

FROM EIR DAILY ALERT

UN Official Warns That Millions in Yemen May Not Survive

Oct. 17, 2018 (EIRNS)—The warnings about the humanitarian situation in Yemen continue to get more stark. “The crisis in Yemen is so huge and of such magnitude, we have to be frank about whether we can together deal with what is facing us,” Lise Grande, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, told the Britain’s Guardian daily yesterday. “We are literally looking at hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people who may not survive.” Grande pointed not so much to food shortages but the total disruption of the local economy, led by the collapse of the Yemeni rial.

“Tens of thousands of destitute families, who were barely able to buy what they needed just a few weeks ago, can no longer afford to feed themselves at all,”

she said. She estimates that 14 million people are affected.

“Things are deteriorating very, very quickly. The implications of this are enormous, and, truthfully, frightening. The reality is that time may be running out,”

she said.

The British government announced yesterday that it would provide funding to help screen 2.2 million children for malnutrition, but this news was treated with appropriate cynicism by the Norwegian Refugee Council. “I anticipate the calls will come for international governments to inject more cash into solving the crisis,” said Suze van Meegen, a protection and advocacy advisor for the council based in Sana’a.

“But the crisis doesn’t lie with money. It lies in stopping the war. There is a duplicity in the U.K., for example, where the British government is providing a lot of money to help us reach people with aid, but it could get more bang for its buck if it just stopped selling weapons to Saudi Arabia.”