10/19/16 – Martha Mundy – The Scott Horton Show

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This is Scott Horton Show.
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And introducing Martha Mundy, she is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the London School of Economics, and she's the author of the book Domestic Government, Kinship, Community and Politics in North Yemen, where of course America has been at war really for the last seven years, but especially for the last year and a half here, 20 months or so.
Welcome back to the show, Martha.
How are you doing?
Thank you very much.
I'm happy to be back.
Good.
Good.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And after we spoke last time, you had brought up, this was sort of one of the kind of regular factoids that people were passing around.
Most few paying attention to the Yemen war at all, that the state of Yemen is already the poorest country in the Arab world, and that they imported something like 80 to 90% of their food.
So as soon as the war started and the blockade was instituted, people like yourself and Oxfam and the NGOs, they were in a panic because they already understood the situation and started really kind of flipping out and saying, you know, we've got to do something to make sure that these people still have food because they're going to just be dropping like flies here.
And all indications are that they are.
From what I understand coming out of Yemen, talking with Nasser Araby, for example, one journalist I know there who talks about the people just dying of deprivation.
They don't get counted as war casualties, but they certainly are.
Yes.
So the thing is, is at the end of that interview, you had explained that, in fact, the reason that the Yemenis had to import so much of their food in the first place, it wasn't because they were so rich with oil money that they just were able to build up this big population buying food from elsewhere.
It was because of international government programs instituted by the IMF and the World Bank had destroyed their agriculture.
And I tried, I mean, not that hard, but I did try really looking around to try to see if I could read up about that.
And I really couldn't find anything that explained that very well.
So I was hoping that you could, you know, give us some background on how it is the Yemenis got so dependent on foreign import food imports in the first place there.
Yes, I think it's an exaggeration.
I mean, these figures are always bantered around that they were 90 percent dependent on imports.
They were 90 percent dependent on wheat and rice imports, but not on everything else.
So and in a country like Yemen, there is, thank God, a certain proportion of the food that's produced that passes under the radar of being measured.
So it's not quite as horrific as, you know, the figures that are bantered around.
Before I get into the background, I wanted to bring to the attention of your listeners a wonderful report that was done for Channel 4 by the journalist Krishnan Gurumurthy called Yemen Britain's Unseen War.
And in that he shows, just to be speaking about the present before we go backwards, in that he shows very clearly how systematic it was to hit the cranes in the port of Hodeidah to delay the ship so that even when they brought stuff in, it had already gone bad.
And I mean, it's a very moving and yet respectful report by that good journalist and which can be found on YouTube and so forth these days.
I want your, you know, those who are really interested to look at it because it's by far the best thing I've seen that's been done on essentially the not, the rather deliberate attempt to use economic war and starvation as one of the ways of putting pressure on those who have a modicum of control in Sana'a.
Now, I'm sorry, let me break in for just a second because your line actually cut out for just a moment and I want to make sure that I understood you right and that everybody understood you right.
You were saying that they had deliberately hit the cranes at the port that are used to take the shipping containers off the ships?
Yes.
Okay.
Yes.
And, you know, and Krishnanguru Murphy in this Channel 4 report also interviews owners of factories down in Hodeidah, an owner of a factory down in Hodeidah who describes and who produced 40% of the cooking oil of the country.
There's been a clearly a targeting of the food processing factories across Yemen too and our accounts from Sana'a describe today the dependence on imported and imported largely from the Gulf processed foods for those who have the money to buy them.
But let's go back and pick up on your question.
It is the policies that were put in place really from the 1970s first and this is something on which I have published two articles together with agronomists, a Yemeni and a French agronomist, both of whom are in fact in Yemen today as I speak.
In the 1970s it coincided with the dumping of really cheap American wheat on Yemen and then from the 1980s when the major world agencies really got going, that is the World Bank.
Actually DFID was pretty good and the British were pretty good in the 1970s, early 1980s and sometimes fought with the others but that went the way of general neoliberal policy whereby if Yemen couldn't produce wheat in particular, first you change the character of the diet from sorghum which was the basic grain crop and is far more adapted to the relatively arid conditions of Yemen.
So you undercut that with massive imports of wheat, cheap wheat in the 1970s and 1980s at the same time as Saudi Arabia imported Yemeni labor.
So you strip the male labor, I mean it wasn't done all deliberately but it's the net result of policies that privilege a highly globalized world food system wherein also American farmers in those years were getting important subsidies to produce whereas no subsidies are ever allowed, no support is ever allowed for basic food production in a place like Yemen.
So essentially you had from the 70s through the 80s a massive decline in basic grain production and the abandonment of what have been really millennia of building of terraces on a very difficult landscape and of extremely eco-wise, labor-intensive irrigation systems as well.
So that kind of transformation lies behind the growing dependence of Yemen over the last four decades on imported food.
Yemen had, particularly in the 1990s, a fair amount of oil production that allowed it to buy food.
The former president of the country, Ali Abdullah Saleh, he and his family took over some of the major food importing and food processing, particularly food importing companies that had belonged to the army and so had no interest in reducing dependence on imported food.
This wider transformation is something on which I, along with Amin al-Hakimi and Frederic Pellat, have written and in fact we have Arabic translations of the two pieces up on the website www.athimar.org but because of copyright I haven't put up the English version so it's perhaps not very useful out in West of America but for your Arabic reading listeners.
Well and there are some too.
So when you talk about the Americans dumping all this wheat, I assume that it wasn't just the American corporations making an offer but the American government making an offer to the Yemeni government that they couldn't refuse, is that right?
Yes, it was the P40 wheat programs that also went massively into Egypt in the same period but the world price, even if it was commercial, because it was very heavily subsidized at the American end in those years was also, I mean even the world price undercut anything so there was a shift in types of diet as well as a devaluation in a kind of cultural sense too of the sorghum based diet.
I was just going to say, I'm sorry, the people who came up with the price support subsidies for wheat in America in the first place who thought they were doing such a great thing, who among them ever thought that yeah years from now we'll be talking about all the people killing each other in Yemen over the second and third order effects of our intervention in wheat supplies right now because they subsidized the creation of wheat and then now they've got to figure out somewhere to sell it because otherwise the price in America will go too low, right?
So they've got to go kick down some doors in other people's countries and force them to accept our wheat at the expense of their entire ability to feed themselves.
I mean, it's absolutely horrifying.
This is a story over several decades.
I mean, it's not quite as crash bang as you describe it.
Well, no, I mean that's what I meant, right?
This goes back to the 30s or 40s or 60s, 70s, you know?
It really goes back to the late 60s onwards, not in the 30s and 40s.
Well, World War II.
World War II is when they decided we're going to have a permanent policy of forcing the world to accept our grain exports ever since then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, but for Yemen and Egypt and these countries, it came rather later into the ballpark, but given the ecological fragility of a place like Yemen, then the importance of maintaining these enormous traditions to actually be able to produce in such a place and to produce well and in a sustainable manner, then it hit them very, very hard because of the whole integration into the oil production system through Saudi Arabia.
Then the labor is thrown out, etc.
But even today, if you look at what the World Food Program, i.e. the major humanitarian feeding program, right, which is operating in Syria and Yemen, in Syria it doesn't matter because that's a wheat-based diet historically, but in Yemen it's still 100% wheat-based supplies and so fortunately sorghum continues because it has a double use also as a fodder crop for animal racing because it what's called technically ratoons.
It gives a second growth after you've made the first cut.
It's a bit as though corn could come back, so to speak.
So there still is, and I trust that some of the people who are just surviving also can be accessing cultivation, but I was reading the only report that's been done by the international agencies.
Today, one's getting coverage of Yemen of a much more serious kind than when we first spoke just about a year ago, right?
One is now getting serious debate about Yemen.
You've had the very articulate Senators Chris Murphy and Rand Paul in the U.S. Senate calling for suspension to Saudi arms sales in a vote that didn't make it, but nevertheless they, but it's taken, so to speak, over a full year of this war to get, and the same in Britain.
You've had the committees on international development and the committees on arms sales both opposing the government and being overridden by the foreign affairs committee in Britain.
I'm simply mentioning this to say that, so to speak, a year after I spoke to you, it's taken about that time.
We finally are having a debate on the consequences of the actions of the U.S. and the U.K. in particular in supporting this war.
I think I kind of lost the train of thought there.
No, that's okay, and it's a very important point, Martha.
I mean, if you look back at 2011, I mean, I'm not exactly sure about all the British coverage, but in 2011 they pretty much covered the start of the Libya war, but then not so much.
There was a little bit of a debate in Congress in the early summer, but then there were a lot of people, and I've had people say to me, we had a war in Libya?
They never even heard of the thing.
It wasn't even a part of their 2011.
They don't even know it, and this case in Yemen has been far worse than that in terms of blackout.
It's taken these at least supposed missile strikes and the bombing of the funeral and some of these things that are just so far out of control and out of the norm and things that they can try to spin as an Iranian plot and a Gulf of Tonkin crisis and this kind of thing to even get people to pay attention at all.
I mean, a big part of that is because of the Trump and Hillary campaign going on here and everything, but I think this is not good.
Let's not discuss.
No, no, no, we won't, but this is a world historical level blackout by Western supposedly free countries with free medias on a war.
I mean, when the New York Times ran their big story about the White House and the war on Yemen, it was notably one year into the war on Yemen, more like 15 months or something before the New York Times ever wrote one big article about it.
I mean, that is incredible.
It's Guinness Book of World Records something.
I don't know, but it really is notable in its own right as its own news story.
As we discussed earlier, the Saudis have also controlled anybody going into Yemen.
So any journalist that went in had to go in by sea, couldn't fly in through Sanaa.
So, I mean, I put the blame to some extent on journalism, but when I've looked at it also, Yemen, because of the decline in food production and as part of the whole world division of labor and kind of quasi-government of Yemen, had a huge aid industry present.
And essentially from the beginning of the war, with the exception of Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty and maybe Christian Aid, there have been some very outspoken, very, very outspoken NGOs.
But essentially the big agencies that are linked through the UN and the World Bank shut down their offices and refused to deal with the ministries, so that there was a blackout in terms of the kinds of reports that you would also expect to be coming out of the international organizations.
And I think that's because the journalists do report on that kind of stuff to some extent.
It doesn't absolve them.
But I think that the blackout was at an institutional level that is even more shocking in a sense than just the news, than the media, than just the media.
Because they were extremely present on the ground, too present.
They're part of the whole problems in the policy that led to the kinds of policies that didn't support basic food production in the name of, well, the Yemenis can't do it as cheap as the world market, right, over the years.
Yeah.
Well, and we have a development now, too, where the government in exile, really the Hadi government is insisting on shutting down the central bank, which has been allowing financial, has been kind of impartial and allowing, participating in financial transactions, allowing international financial transactions that benefit both sides in the war.
And now they're closing that down.
Maybe they already have closed that down or moved it down to Aden.
And Nasser Arabi, this Yemeni reporter that I've been speaking with about weekly for the past few months here, he was just absolutely predicting the worst form of catastrophe from that.
Basically, the central bank was the only saving grace at this point for them being able to still participate in commerce at all.
And now they're just.
That is, you know, that kind of stuff is absolutely a war crime because you cannot starve a population like that.
And even behind the scenes, the governments are going along with it.
But I haven't seen any official endorsement because it is so scandalous from the US or the UK for that.
What often happens with this stuff, and it was happening before, was that the banks are run by the risk assessment industry, which says because I was trying to send money to a friend in Yemen over the summer, I couldn't do so from France, whereas you could do so from London and you could do so from New York and you couldn't do so from Lebanon.
The only explanation for that was that because of US lawsuits and US pressure, because of other issues, you remember the BNP was fined a huge amount, it had something to do with Iran.
And Lebanon is, of course, under very considerable pressure because of Hezbollah from the banking, the US banking regulations.
Somehow they have managed to shut down even before this scan, I mean, truly tragic attempt to move the central bank to Aden by the Hadi government, which shows incredible lack of concern for nothing's new by that section of the elite for their own population.
Even before that, it was getting very difficult to get money into Yemen because the banks, either out of fear of prosecution from the US or through private channels that persuaded them that this was going to happen sooner or later anyway, I don't know.
We're shutting down the ways of getting money into Yemen.
And Yemen, of course, as you know, from the States has a big diaspora, which was sending money.
Otherwise, the country would have starved earlier.
So it was very unequally, the suffering was very unequally distributed.
Anybody who had somebody outside was living on what was being sent through the banks.
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Well, you know, and they're all friends and neighbors and helping each other to to survive there as best they could anyway.
But let me ask you this, since we know that there's no chance that the Saudi backed Saudi led coalition, as they call it, can possibly put Hadi in power in sauna ever then.
And yet that's still their avowed goal of this war.
It seems like there's really nothing that could stop it other than America, the U.S. government insisting to the Saudis that they stop the war.
And yet the Americans just continue it on.
I don't know for how long they're willing to go along with this, but apparently indefinitely.
And but I wonder what you think.
You know, what's your best guess about the position of the Houthi movement inside Yemen and inside sauna?
I mean, do they have you know, they rule sauna and they will from now on.
The Houthis have come out of the north and the capital now belongs to them.
Or this really is reversible somehow.
Or I'm not trying to take the Saudi side and I'm just trying to see any kind of end in sight.
You know what I mean?
Yes.
And it's a difficult question.
I know.
But I see here you wrote a book about North Yemen.
So that's why I asked.
Well, clearly, the Saudis are banking upon the populations, you know, starting to starve more widely and going out in the streets rioting because of not having been paid.
I'm sure Nasser al-Arabi will be will have been talking to you about those kinds of fears.
That is what they haven't achieved by bombing the country, you know, into the into the ground, so to speak.
They hope to do so by simply forcing the population in the north to react in that way.
I think probably then the those who have a modicum of control, that is not just the Houthis, but also the General Congress Party, who are in alliance with them and who is not just Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Maybe they have to start printing their own money or something.
It's not as easily done as I say it.
But in order to, you know, create a separate a separate kind of currency at this stage, I really don't I don't I don't know the answer to that.
But what would satisfy the Saudis?
I truly think they won't surrender.
They don't.
And the only thing that it is now important that moves within the US and the UK by civil parties, including politicians.
And I'm not saying that is a kind of dirty word.
But I mean, people like the senators, Murphy and Paul, and the rest of us really try to make it very, very uncomfortable for our governments to now be participating in what has finally come to be recognized as a as using starvation, essentially, as one of the tools of war, which is, of course, explicitly a war crime under the 1977 protocols, which both Saudi Arabia and Yemen signed, by the way, but not the US of A which are the later protocols of the Geneva Conventions.
So, so I, perhaps it is beginning to hurt Saudi Arabia enough in terms of its budget, that modicum of pressure from the US and the UK, as we've seen after their discomfort, their small discomfort expressed after the funeral bombing, where indeed the the death toll may go up to 200, but which was particularly noteworthy for the clarity of the images that, as you will have discussed, I'm sure with Nasser al-Arabi, that allowed no denial.
But and the Saudis speaking of Hadi, what did the Saudi, the Saudis were asked to investigate?
And what did they come up with, they came up with blaming their allies, that is to say, people closely part of Hadi's team for having provided them with false information.
Now, none of that holds up, but it certainly does indicate that they're willing to treat their own Yemeni allies rather harshly in order to get off the hook.
So perhaps that can reflect a more general move whereby the arguments that were put in place with 2216 of lovely constructive ambiguity, so as to allow this war to proceed in the name of the legitimacy of that Yemeni government may come under certain stress.
So that the Saudis would not simply demand full surrender, but would come to some form of negotiation.
And it's not a very satisfactory answer.
But the question is not one that's easy to answer.
As you said, I mean, this war has gone on a very long time now.
Well, now one thing that I hadn't understood for a long time with all those years of Saleh, when he was still the president, quote unquote, backed by the United States, and the US was arming him supposedly to fight al Qaeda, he kept turning around and fighting the Houthis.
And so years later, I come to find out he's a Zaydi.
The Houthi political movement comes from the Zaydi Shia from the north, and he's one of them.
He's just had political problems with him, that kind of thing.
And then once Hillary eased him out with her big fake one man election regime change for Hadi in 2012, Saleh just said, Oh, yeah, well, I'm taking my army with me.
And he went and made his alliance with the Houthis.
I don't know exactly how long it took to work things out with the Houthis.
But I wonder now whether maybe a better frame of reference to look at this is really a war by Saleh to put himself back on the throne.
And the Houthis at this point are his useful helpers.
But the army divisions belong to him more than they belong to the Houthi movement, right?
Yes.
I mean, when the Houthis came in, essentially, their main demand was to have their units be integrated into the national army.
They weren't asking to rule Yemen in the early stages.
Now, partly, they get used to ruling Yemen.
There's one line of interpretation that regards Saleh as the complete puppeteer of all of this, which you've just, in a sense, echoed.
It wouldn't be to put himself on the throne, it would be to put his son on the throne, who is apparently still happily in the Emirates, believe it or not.
And it is also not clear.
I mean, they never went for his money earlier, until they finally in the course of this war started, you know, saying, well, he's got this bank account.
It's like the Panama Papers here and there, in the tax havens.
But of course, the powers of this world knew that perfectly well from a while back.
So at one level, it was possible to imagine that it's Saleh who's pulling all the strings.
But I think too many people have died and this war has gone on too long.
And I find it very hard to believe that armies fight as hard as these people have had to fight just for the white of the eyes of Ali Abdullah Saleh anymore.
I think you must have had, I mean, this would require a different person than myself, because I'm not on the ground to to, you know, to have used that.
But you must have a certain folding in.
And that was, that was certainly enacted, if it was all a show, hats off.
But it was certainly enacted when the Houthis came into Sana'a, by the manner in which sections of the army went over to them, rather than Ali Abdullah Saleh just blowing the whistle.
And then they all did.
So I think it is, but this you really would need a Yemeni political journalist who's able and willing to speak, who's been through all of this on the ground to answer that question.
But I think I find it hard to read him as Saleh, as the puppeteer of everything.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I could certainly paraphrase Nasser Araby as saying that he's a secularist, which I take to mean, you know, more from the socialist movement of Sunnis there.
But he said, Hey, we're all Zaydis now, right?
Just like Randolph Bourne said, war is the health of the state.
There, this guy Hadi, wants to be the president, but he's allied with a foreign power to wage war against his own country to put him back in power, which means every single person in Yemen hates him.
And the Houthis, even though they typically don't necessarily represent the entirety of the people of Yemen, since they're the ones leading the resistance against the Saudis, everybody loves them.
It's like George W. Bush had an approval rating of 90% after 9-11 kind of a thing, right?
Everybody rallies around the leadership, whoever it is.
And then did I really hear you right that Saleh's son is hiding out in the UAE, which is part of the coalition government fighting the war against his father right now?
I think he's still there.
Yes.
I mean, you would need to check it.
But I think so.
Yeah, that would figure, I guess.
And now, okay, so let me ask you one more thing, too, because here's something that that Nasser Araby taught.
And again, we recognize that you're in the UK and not on the ground there.
But he actually, I mean, you're in Beirut.
I'm sorry.
You're not in Yemen, I should say, as you just pointed out.
But he really makes a lot of, and I could see why he would either way, really.
But I think he is an honest guy.
But he really makes a lot of the advances of what he calls al Qaeda ISIS as one term, because he said, actually, he elaborated that the Americans have killed so many old al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan and in Yemen over the last few years of drone war, that really now it's all the young bucks, and they don't really have all these old ties to old al Qaeda.
And the Islamic State is the better brand name for them now.
So al Qaeda is kind of becoming the Islamic State.
There's not really a fight between the two there.
They sort of are just one is morphing into the other, the way he explains it makes a lot of sense.
And he's saying, of course, we've been having this low level drone war against AQAP there for a long, long time.
But now we're fighting against their worst enemies in the Houthis.
And Nasser says that they are making incredible gains in this war.
And in fact, Rand Paul, who you cited, actually, I saw on TV say, we have to stop and ask ourselves, if we can get the Houthis out of Sanaa, who's going to replace them?
It might be al Qaeda.
Do we have somebody besides al Qaeda ready to take power in the event that we succeed in our mission as it's defined so far?
So I wonder whether, you know, how overblown or underblown or properly blown do you think that is?
Well, I think that's, that's very real for the militias and auxiliary forces that have been patronized by Gulf money in the course of this conflict down in the south of Yemen.
It was reported in the very first weeks of the, but in the Arabic press, it was reported that Saudi sent boats into Makala with these kinds of Salafi guys.
It has been reported that they're moving some of the guys from southern Syria, who don't have anything much to do, although they may try to revive that front, down to southern Saudi Arabia to fight on the border with the Yemenis.
They have brought, this also is another divide and conquer tactic.
They have brought some of these kinds of guys up to from South Yemen, up to the southern Saudi Arabia, to fight in media and to fight on the border posts against fellow Yemenis, i.e.
Houthis, battle hardened Salafi, I'm calling them Salafi, so it's not that.
But in that kind of alignment, and which you've created, and you've created some, I mean, not you, but the Saudi money has built up over very many years.
Why did the Houthi movement arise?
It arose as a Zaydi statement against Wahhabization, let's call them, so to speak, Wahhabi, some of these guys, rather than Salafis.
There was a big center, Damash, where also, you know, what was he, the printer, the guy who tried to, it was claimed, set up printers to bomb airplanes, and the fellow who blew his shoe up or whatever in the air, all of these guys had studied in these institutions in Damash, and this Wahhabization was what sparked, as well as economic marginalization, is what sparked off the Houthi movement in the first place, but in ideological terms, it was that.
So there's been a long play, and in this war, it's these auxiliaries who have been the object of Saudi patronage.
So yes, if you bring these types of forces in, in alliance with the party that was the favorite party of Saudi Arabia, which was a kind of tribal version of the Muslim Brotherhood called Islam, and which is what really lost its shirt, and its elites lost their shirt with the taking over by the General Congress Party, Ali Abdullah Saleh and the Houthis, is the Islam party, who first, it was fell out of favor with Saudi Arabia, as part of Saudi Arabia, no longer liking the Muslim Brotherhoods, and Qatar was backing them.
But then there's been, you know, where they're useful, there are various kinds of bridges and links to the Saudi oil dollar machine.
So that's a complicated picture.
But basically, I'm totally backing what Nasser Arabi was saying, which is that these are the people who will be poised, and as I was just describing, moving down from Southern Syria, no less, it's reported having first been brought into McCulloch, this, this mixture of militarized Islamists, let's call them Wahhabi, violently anti anything that could be Zaydi, or Shiite, or whatever, who are who are in alliance with, with the coalition, there's no question.
And who but who actually fight on the ground, because that was what happened after the first three months of the war was it was pretty, it became very obvious that neither the Emirati nor the Saudi had the troops on the ground that could withstand this kind of fight.
So it's, it's been managed much more by those by developing those kinds of forces in a very, very messy mixture, because it's messy, even for the Emiratis down south.
Yeah.
I want to make sure I just heard you right there, that you're saying that there are even Syrian jihadis as in the Al Nusra Front, or Islamic state types are coming down from Syria who have been spotted fighting against the the Houthis for the coalition inside Yemen.
What was reported in some of the in the law bar in particular, the Arabic press was that they are that they were beginning to I don't know whether they they have not I have not seen any reports of them actually fighting on the ground.
But that they it was to be coordinated through the joint office in Amman to move some of those people down to aid the Saudis on on the border with Yemen.
That is what I've No, I have not seen any report that whereby one of these characters, you know, turns up, so to speak dead with his ID on him.
Yeah.
And also, they are not necessarily Syrians, right?
Because a lot of people fighting in Syria who are not necessarily Syrians.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very good point.
And then of course, we only got to go back not very far we find where there's Afghan jihadis who said, man, we don't want to fight the American Army anymore.
Let's go fight for them.
And they went off to Syria to go fight on the USA side against Assad for a little while.
Little change of scenery there.
Yeah, yeah.
Amazing stuff.
All right.
Now, listen, I'm sorry, I've already kept you a little bit over.
But we really should wrap up on on the main point that we started with, which is the humanitarian situation.
So I'd like to give you an opportunity to just say what you think is the most important for the audience to understand about was the situation for the average civilian in sauna right now or in Yemen right now.
Okay, the most important is to stop is to stop the blockade to stop this war.
I mean that.
Otherwise, there is mass starvation on the cards.
And we are already seeing all the signs of it.
And I mean, the aid agencies were warning from it becomes like a broken record.
People won't believe it anymore.
But now you're beginning to really see the images of what this represents.
Now, there is a line that says this is a good way to frighten the working population of the world that if you're not obey, we're going to do this to you.
But for that reason, the working population of the world needs to absolutely have solidarity against those who do this.
And so that the legitimate there is no legal basis for this blockade that should be quite as much as as demanding this, the end of the end of arms sales, right, because that it's got quite a lot of already lined up.
So this is where I would leave it.
Obviously, we need to demand that the big aid agencies go in feed people.
But in the longer run, the aid agencies just create another form of dependence.
And what needs to be developed between the Yemenis themselves is another vision of how to rebuild production inside in a manner that can be sustainable.
But that's much that's down the line right now, people need the killing through the lack of medical supplies, through the lack of food, all of that needs to stop immediately.
And it is the US, UK and French governments, which have been backing this stuff.
It's not like just one more war for diamonds in the middle of nowhere.
There's no no, nowhere.
I mean, the Congo is the worst of all of these.
These are natural resources wars, just as the Yemen one is a war about who's going to control global shipping through Bab el-Mendeb eventually.
There's always a stake.
It's not just something that just happened or because you have the ally called Saudi Arabia and Israel.
There's a reason that these governments are involved.
But essentially, the lesson is that if you if they are able to starve whole populations, your turn comes next.
And there is nothing not being in the US not being, you know, a privilege that really stops that degradation of human life unless we all show solidarity across the board.
Thanks.
All right.
Thank you very much, everybody.
That is Martha Mundy.
She is Professor Emeritus, an anthropologist from the London School of Economics.
She worked in North Yemen from 1973 to 77.
She's the author of the book Domestic Government, Kinship, Community and Politics in North Yemen.
You can find her at Counterpunch on this subject and in your Google News results there as well.
And that's the Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, everybody, very much for listening.
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