Alwaght- After around 7 years from the crisis in Yemen, the humanitarian catastrophes still unfold at a high level. Recently, the UNICEF reported that 11.3 million Yemeni children are in desperate need of humanitarian aids. The UN agency added that during the years of deadly war, the country suffered the gravest humanitarian crisis, with 20.7 million or about 71 percent of the total population in need of humanitarian help.
Children rights: A humanitarian catastrophe as big as Yemen
The recent report by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) comes at a time when the UN has repeatedly warned of the danger to the safety and lives of Yemeni children. In early July, the organization warned in a report that more than 6 million children in Yemen are at risk of being deprived of education and more than 2 million school-age children are currently out of school. UNICEF had also stated that 8.1 million Yemeni children needed immediate educational assistance due to the conflict in the country, and tweeted: "This is a significant increase compared to the estimated 1.1 million children before the war."
The noteworthy point is that the UN has added Ansarullah resistant movement to the list of children rights abusers while Saudi Arabia as the aggressor side has a black record in human rights and war crimes. A UNICEF report held that over 2,500 schools were closed down as a result of war and two-thirds of these schools incurred damage from airstrikes. Seven percent of the schools across the country are used as refuges for the displaced, said the report.
UNICEF cites the plight of children in Yemen caused by ongoing conflicts, natural disasters like floods, widespread diseases like cholera, measles, polio, and poverty, saying that more than 2 million Yemeni children are out of school and 5.8 million children who were enrolled in schools before the coronavirus epidemic are at risk. In addition, due to the war and the all-out siege imposed by the Saudi-led Arab coalition, teachers' salaries are not paid in 11 provinces.
Existing reports and those shared by the Yemen Center for Human Rights from 2015 to 2020 suggest that over 7,221 children were killed and injured in attacks carried out by the Saudis and Emiratis. Moreover, the war, insecurity, and lack of future expectancy have created improper psychological conditions for children frequently at risk of air raids. Another report by the UNICEF adds that about 2.5 million Yemeni children are increasingly exposed to diseases and malnutrition.
Additionally, the World Food Program, the FAO, UNICEF, and the World Health Organization announced in a joint report that at least 400,000 Yemeni children under five will lose their lives due to starvation should the current conditions continue. The UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres admitted in 2020 that Yemeni children are at high health risks, with one Yemeni child dying every 10 minutes due to conflict or illness. All these reports have one point in common: The catastrophe affecting the Yemeni children is nationwide, not just in specific areas in the north of south.
Yemeni children victim of West's double-standard human rights
For decades, the Western countries foisted their values on other nations using such terms as human rights, democracy, freedom, women's rights, and children's rights. They insist that the only way out of the shadow of war, tensions, and problems is reliance on the Western liberal democratic values. In the years after the end of World War II and the ensuing Cold War, Western governments insisted on defending human rights through establishing various institutions and writing human rights chapters and conventions.
For decades, these countries have called for the promotion and expansion of electoral democracy and the establishment of liberal democratic systems in other countries and regions of the world. In the years following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US-led capitalist world rejoiced in its victory over the Eastern Bloc, calling for the establishment of democratic systems in various parts of the world, including West Asia. The outcome for this insistence was the US invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s and meddling in other countries' internal affairs after the 2011 Arab uprisings.
Three decades on after the end of the Cold War, it has become clear that the West has taken a biased approach towards human rights concept and the defense of human values and democracy, using them to build dominance on other countries. Actually, whenever and wherever their interests assign, the Western countries take pro-rights and democracy gestures, and democracy dies for them when advocating it does not serve their interests. Sometimes, they even present inverted narrative of human rights. An example is the children's rights in Yemen.
While it was Saudi Arabia and its allies are responsible for many crimes against humanity in the war Riyadh waged against the Yemenis, the UN blacklisted Ansarullah as a child abuser. The irony here is that there is no mention of Saudi Arabia as the aggressor country. This is where the West and the liberal democratic-based international institutions replace the oppressor and the oppressed.
There is no reason to doubt that declining to add Saudi Arabia to the children abuse list was driven by the financial and military relations between Riyadh and its Western allies. In the five years before anti-Yemeni war, the US arms shipments to Saudi Arabia was $3 billion. This figure averaged $10.7 billion annually between 2015 and 2020, with Washington agreeing to sell $64.1 billion worth of weapons to the Arab kingdom. During this period, arms sales to other participants in the war, mainly the UAE, also increased sharply. According to Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), since 2015, the US has been the biggest arms supplier to Saudi Arabia, with 73 percent of the kingdom's arms provided by Washington.
Yemen's geopolitical importance is another driver behind the Western silence to the daily violation of the children rights in the already impoverished country. The Western dealing with the Saudi crimes against the Yemeni civilians demonstrates that geopolitical and political interests in the Western logic overweigh the political ethics and pro-human rights advocacy.
Western media, meanwhile, have a big and undeniable role in inversion of truth. Actually, in the new world, media are the main "truth-making" instruments. In the revolutionary developments in West Asia and North Africa past 2011, they obviously showed a dual and biased function. A crisis like Libya's, for example, has been at the center of focus by Western media because of its special political and geopolitical interests for the West, but the Yemeni crisis, in which one of the greatest human catastrophes of the twentieth century took place, has been boycotted and ignored.
The same approach is being adopted by the Western media to the heinous Saudi crimes against Yemeni children, with such mainstream media as BBC, Fox News, CNN, The Guardian, and France 24 rewriting the reality of Yemen crisis. The truth is that if it was not for the Western media support, Saudi Arabia would not dare commit such crimes against the Yemeni children and civilians.
