Credit: Gary Raynaldo /  Gregory D. Johnson (left), Nonresident Fellow, Sana’ a Center for Strategic Studies,   Priyanka Motaparthy (center), Director, Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School,  Peter Salisbury (right), Senior Gulf Analyst, International Crisis Group, at Council on Foreign Relations forum:   “An Inside Look at Yemen”,   in New York Oct. 10, 2019.

By Gary Raynaldo   /  DIPLOMATIC TIMES

“Yemen has what I would call a Humpty Dumpty problem; that is, it’s broken and there’s simply too many groups with too many guns for any one of them to ever impose their will upon the entire country.” Gregory D. Johnson, Nonresident Fellow, Sana’ a Center for Strategic Studies, made that observation during a forum held at the Council on Foreign Relations on “An Inside Look at Yemen”  in New York last week.  Johnson also made note that the Yemen  civil war has been going on longer than the regional war, the Saudi-led coalition war which started in 2015, “and this civil war will likely go on long after the Saudis and the Emiratis eventually go home.”  The scholar added that  the idea of a unified Yemen is “really a fiction.”  In 2015, Saudi Arabia initiated a bombing campaign against its southern neighbor Yemen in what was essentially a proxy war — the Saudis backed a government that had been forced out of the capital by the Houthis, a group allied with Iran. The war in Yemen continues — in part with bombs the Saudi-led coalition of countries bought from the U.S.  From 7 to 10 August 2019, fighting between southern separatists and Yemeni government troops, who have been nominally allied as part of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition against the Houthi rebel group, resulted in separatists taking control of Aden, Yemen’s interim capital since 2015.  The UN is warning the Saudi-led assault is contributing to the death of a young child every 10 minutes in Yemen, a country at the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula.

UN Special Envoys for Yemen Have Not Been Successful:  Johnson

“So when we talk—most of the reconciliation efforts have been U.N.-led. This is where crises that have no real solution end up sort of in the forum of last resort, the U.N. Security Council, and the U.N. has a special envoy. They’re now on their third special envoy. The were on their third special envoy in four years. It’s now the third in fifth year—in five years, excuse me. None of them have been very successful. I don’t think this is because the various special envoys aren’t talented diplomats; I think it’s because they’re dealing with a very uneven field. That is, the Houthis up in the north feel as though they have the territory. They feel as though they are negotiating from a position of strength. The Saudi-led coalition has had four-plus years of airstrikes and air campaign, which have done very little to push the Houthis out.” Johnson stated.

YEMEN Humanitarian Disaster Getting Worse

“Well, the war in Yemen is very preventable, and it’s much cheaper to stop the war than to keep paying this humanitarian assistance. So Yemen started to be known as the worst humanitarian disaster since two years, and now the situation is even worse. So twenty-two millions of Yemenis, they need a certain humanitarian assistance, and this is almost all of us. I stopped counting the numbers since last year. But what we have—keep saying that it’s not—we should remember all the time it’s not a natural disaster; it’s a manmade disaster. So all the violations that is committed by all parties to the conflict led to this disaster.

-Radhya  Almutawakel,  Cofounder and Chairperson, Mwatana for Human Rights

Credit:  Gary Raynaldo /  Radhya  Almutawakel,  Cofounder and Chairperson, Mwatana for Human Rights speaks on Yemen humanitarian disaster, as Gregory D. Johnsen listens at  Council on Foreign Relations meeting on “An Inside Look at Yemen”  in New York Oct. 10, 2019.

DIPLOMATIC TIMES Video /  Priyanka Motaparthy Director, Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School, speaks on war crimes committed in Yemen

WAR CRIMES  Committed In YEMEN

“So when we’re talking about war crimes in Yemen, the most prominent example of war crimes in Yemen, the one that most people are familiar with, tend to be the airstrikes carried out by the Saudi-led coalition. These airstrikes have had indiscriminate impact on civilians. The Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights has documented more than seven thousand civilian deaths and we know that number is very likely to be much higher than that. But when we talk about war crimes in Yemen, we cannot only focus on the airstrikes.  

“Since the beginning of the war the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and of course Iran as well have all taken a lot of criticism for their support for various sides in this conflict. The sort of specter of complicity has been raised. It has been increasingly used by advocates like myself and international lawyers to put these countries on notice that they may be doing something wrong in providing this support.”

-Priyanka Motaparthy Director, Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School

Credit: Gary Raynaldo / (Left to Right)   Radhya  Almutawakel,  Cofounder and Chairperson, Mwatana for Human Rights speaks on Yemen humanitarian disaster, Gregory D. Johnsen, Nonresident Fellow, Sana’ a Center for Strategic Studies,   Priyanka Motaparthy, Director, Counterterrorism, Armed Conflict and Human Rights Project, Human Rights Institute, Columbia Law School,  Peter Salisbury , Senior Gulf Analyst, International Crisis Group, and Catherine Amirfar,  Partner and  Co-Chair, Public International Law Practice, Debevoise  Plimpton  LLP, moderator of  Council on Foreign Relations forum:   “An Inside Look at Yemen”,   in New York Oct. 10, 2019.