Saudi Arabia is a good market for our arms industry. It just sold them $110 billion of arms, which is added to the $350 billion we already had. One way the Saudis are using these arms is by bombing the hell out of Yemen. They have devastated transportation routes (both sea and air), storage facilities for holding food (including an Oxfam warehouse for food aid) and a water project funded by the European Union.
The UN’s special envoy for the secretary general for Yemen says that 20 million of Yemen’s 25 million people are affected by the war. Most of them have little access to water, sanitation, hygiene and food. Seven million of them — including 2.3 million children under the age of 5 — are on the “cusp of famine.” The UN is trying to raise $6.27 billion to prevent the famine but has been able to raise only half of it. There are now 320,000 suspected cases of cholera in the country, with 1,700 confirmed deaths because of that disease.
In 2016, a UN panel of experts concluded that the Saudi war on Yemen documented grave violations of human rights that were “widespread and systematic.”
No comments:
Post a Comment