Still from the film documentary,'Starving Yemen'2016. BBC Arabic/BBC Our World. All rights reserved.Most of us are glued to our visual media watching the nightmare unfolding in Aleppo and the systematic bombing and killing of a besieged population in the city while the world’s politicians are debating allocation of responsibility in New York between meals at expensive restaurants. Meanwhile, as we are watching Syria, other tragedies are unfolding in the region, Libya and Iraq…. But I will focus on Yemen. For a year, the UN has been predicting famine in the war-torn country. Some of us have pointed out that Yemenis, unlike people elsewhere, don’t go out and starve to death in public. They have a different culture and do it at home and in private.
These horrors are caused by war, they are not climate change ‘natural’ disasters. They happen because politicians (is that the right word?) pursue their narrow interests and objectives at the expense of the welfare and lives of millions of their people. Are these men (at the moment few women are involved here) completely deprived of any sense of humanity?
Many of us wonder what answers we will give the next generation when they ask how we could sit and watch these tragedies and do nothing, just as we asked our parents how they allowed the Nazi holocaust to happen. And this time, there is no way we can answer that we don’t know. Why are we so helpless? Is there really nothing we can do? Just write, read, watch, turn up at demos in front of embassies and be ignored? Is that the best ‘democracy’ can offer?
