MOHAMMED HUWAIS / AFP
The COVID crisis has played out as bane on the humanitarian front while opening up an opportunity on the political front for pursuing further negotiations. The recognizable effects of the pandemic are largely indirect and not direct as in the case of other more stable and developed countries where a large number of cases and deaths are visible while the economic meltdown occurs before the eyes of bankers and economists in the highrises of the financial hubs.
What we see in Yemen are problems where the funding and aid are rapidly depleting, and the same results in the drop in survival rates of men, women, and children. United Nations has reported that 80 percent of the Yemeni population is dependent on aid for basic life necessities such as food, sanitation, and above all survival. The economic hit caused by the pandemic has caused a spillover effect on Yemen where a sharp decline in aid and donations has occurred. The June event for raising funds for Yemen only received aid from 9 out of the 31 countries participating in the event, a trend noticed and brought forward by UN officials since time immemorial.
However, this does not mean that the pandemic is not directly hurting the country on the public health front. Although it is not an openly recognizable effect, the country’s population is quickly succumbing to the pandemic. The worst part of the civil war coupled with the pandemic is the inability of the health officials to detect the causes of death in several situations while testing is extremely scarce in the country where people are unable to receive sufficient food and water for survival. London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine developed modeling to study the effect of COVID 19 on the health of Yemenis. The results indicated that a staggering one million people could have been infected with coronavirus in the last month alone while over 85,000 succumbed to the virus. This report comes in light of the fact that only 1,300 cases of the virus have been detected in the country along with 359 deaths.
The lack of visibility does not translate into a lack of problem, and Yemen is the case for the same. The modeling attributes more of the deaths to the almost non-existing primary and tertiary healthcare infrastructure in the country which gets worst with each passing day of the civil war and the pandemic that rages through the desert towns and cities of Yemen. The lockdown has seen a sharp decline in any income generation even in the slightly better parts of the country where survival was possible earlier. Amidst these problems, the stop on shipping in the country which results in the lack of additional aid to be sent through seas increases the cost of sending the aid. In these cases, every penny matters, and the lack of aid from seas due to political decisions of the warring parties sends the country plunging down the abyss of death at a faster than before pace.
The pandemic has also provided an invaluable opportunity on the political front of the civil war which could potentially stop the war completely and turn around the country’s fate in a revolutionizing fashion. The warring parties in the war - Saudi Coalition and Hadi government on one side while Iran and Houthi rebels on the other are facing tremendous pressure on supporting their own countries in case of Saudi Arabia and Iran while the local Hadi government and Houthi rebels show an entirely contrasting view with no empathy for the local people of Yemeni people from either of the warring parties. The picture is not all pessimistic as the war for both the local parties is ultimately funded by those sitting in Riyadh and Tehran, and this provides both the countries to reevaluate their positions on the ground and determine a new course of action through political means rather than just the military ones.
This pandemic must hammer out the age-old belief that only an international approach can end local civil wars. The international approach to the political process is one of the greater barriers to peace in Yemen. The government of President Abed-Rabbo Mansour Hadi still holds that any deal must be built on the foundations of the UN Security Council Resolution 2216 passed in April 2015. The Hadi government interprets this resolution as a form of legal summons for the Houthis to surrender, hand over heavy weapons and allow the government to return to rule Yemen from Sanaa. The UN-brokered talks in Kuwait in 2016 produced a draft agreement built around UNSC Resolution 2216 that went on to become the framework for all subsequent negotiations. The agreement would have led to a power-sharing arrangement that included a minority Houthi role in government and opened a pathway to national elections.
However, it is not 2016 anymore and Houthis hold the strong belief that they are in a position of military maneuverability which is unattainable by the Saudi coalition and this belief stems from their control of the northwest and an almost certain victory over Hadi government’s last stronghold in the north - Marib. This has renewed Houthi confidence in holding onto power in Sanaa while the Hadi government tries to hold on to the political legitimacy that it receives from international recognition if not territorial presence. This rightly points out why the Kuwait framework from 2016 does not work in 2020 and more localized negotiation is required between the parties at war. The earliest steps to this would be realising that maximalist aims of complete military victory on either side are a far stretch in the age of guerilla warfare and unlimited resources that the Saudi coalition will be able to generate in the recovery phase of the pandemic.
This peak of the pandemic is a curse on the humanitarian end but the silver lining of peace exists and the window to act is quickly closing. United Nations and other international partners need to persuade the warring factions to negotiate a new deal based on new ground realities while allowing aid to flow while making efforts to reduce the costs in order to maximize the same.
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