10/02/15 – Martha Mundy – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Our first guest today is Martha Mundy.
She is an anthropologist who worked in North Yemen from 1973 to 77.
Her book, Domestic Government, Kinship, Community and Politics in North Yemen, 1995, is a contemporary classic.
Reads her counterpunch bio.
She is now working on the political economy of food in Yemen, which is going to be my first question other than, hi, how are you today?
Martha, welcome to the show.
Hello, I'm fine.
Delighted to be on your program.
Very happy to have you here.
Now, I want to ask you to rehearse everything about who's who in this fight.
This audience is pretty well versed on it and anybody who missed it can go back and hear a really great summary with Jason Ditz on the show last week.
So I don't want to waste too much of the interview just on the basic breakdown because I think pretty much everybody's caught up on that.
But my first question, the most important question, I want to get right to.
It's about the political economy of food in Yemen.
We've heard it reported that the Yemenis as a nation import between 80 and 90 percent of their food from outside.
And we know they've been under full blockade for half a year straight now.
And while the war is going on, of course, that means that all the local distribution channels are disrupted.
Gasoline is either prohibitively expensive or completely unavailable for trucks to bring food to market and these kinds of things.
And yet we hear so little coverage of how many people are actually starving to death when it must be thousands and thousands and thousands by now.
Well, it's very difficult to know, even though I have a very close colleague working on the ground with one of the major organizations.
It's very difficult to know the full picture.
Organizations such as Oxfam, which has long been involved and Médecins Sans Frontières.
These, but particularly Oxfam in the very early part of this war, produced an important statement condemning the blockade.
People who are very.
There was a major letter in The Times of London a couple of months ago, and they were trying to get a second letter in.
It was diplomats and aid people simply calling for relief to the fuel and food embargo.
But none of these voices have been listened to at all.
And I gather that some food now is coming in from the south, but into the north somehow.
But people are suffering at a level that is simply unimaginable.
But the actual documentation of that is lacking, is very poor.
And people such as my colleague who's working with an organization in Yemen.
But he's not, you know, he's not empowered to be producing reports about that.
We also know that such aid is getting through even through the UN agencies is being subject to a veto by the Saudis, which is incredible.
It's against the UN Charter.
But I can't actually answer your question as to how, how, because we don't have from the outside, nor even from the inside, I would imagine, because that requires a coverage over the whole country that will be lacking.
Well, and of course, the only solution is the war and the blockade must end, because if it's just a matter of UN or Red Cross or some kind of food aid coming into Aden, that's never going to make it to the population in the north.
Maybe the Houthi army might get some of it, but that's not going to make it to the people who need it the most.
Yes, I mean, I entirely agree.
And the World Food Program, which is, of course, one of the big suppliers of food aid and is itself subject to, I mean, after they destroyed the port of Hodeida and they and they have also bombed systematically food convoys going up to Thais trying to go up to Sana'a.
And at present, in classic fashion, over the last two weeks, they took out all the bridges on the road between Hodeida and Sana'a.
So trying, even if you had petrol, even if you had trucks, and of course, the truckers are scared after the amount of shelling of them, that it would be very physically difficult to move food up to Sana'a.
All right.
Now, in terms of the battle on the ground, are the Saudi and allied forces within any kind of reasonable range of actually taking the capital city and driving the Houthis back into the north?
Or, you know, as far as the status quo, assuming there are no real talks or negotiations and things continue as they are, does that look like it's attainable and within any kind of period of time that you could predict?
Well, there are two things to bear in mind.
One, aerial bombardment, which is the main, I mean, yes, there is there are ground forces now in Mareh, right?
But aerial bombardment has been the key signature of this war.
And clearly, somehow, the Saudis and the Emiratis were at first persuaded that that was going to miraculously, you know, turn the war around, whereas it doesn't.
I mean, it destroys the country, it harms the people, but it never can deal with movement on the ground, really, by organized forces.
It's important to remember that most of the Yemeni army went over to the Houthis.
The Houthi militias, which are the military arm of a political movement called Ansar Allah, are integrated now at present into the Yemeni army.
Of course, according to the manner in which Saudi Arabia speaks of it, it's not the Yemeni army, but it still is the bulk of the former Yemeni army into which the Houthi militias, who themselves, after six wars with the central authority in the last one in 2009, was also involved with also against the Saudis, are themselves a highly trained military.
In short, they're not all that different from an army, and they are presently integrated with the Yemeni army.
Now, given that, in a sense, half the world or most of the world is pitched against them, I presume that eventually, if this madness goes on, that the coalition, which is heavily backed, I mean, the United States, that is said by the Washington Post and similar distinguished newspapers, not the opposition, so to speak, that the U.S. is refueling the Saudi and Emirati planes in the air.
There's clearly a unified operations room in Saudi Arabia and in the Emirates in which the Americans and other powers are heavily involved, because you can't refuel a plane in midair without knowing where they are, right?
Of course, yeah.
Well, and the Wall Street Journal and the L.A. Times have both also, again, prominent publications, not the opposition, as you say, have reported that the U.S. is actually helping to pick the targets and basically coordinate the entire war as well.
Yes.
And so I think that one of the reasons we hear so little about it, one of the reasons that, for example, it took months and months and months for the BBC to have, as it finally had on Newsnight, some serious coverage from the areas that are under bombardment, is exactly the deep engagement of the French, the British and the Americans in this whole operation.
And that's why it is very, very silent.
And the latest proof of that is what happened just this week in the U.N. Human Rights Council.
Now, I'm sorry.
Hold it right there.
That's a great place to pick up this argument, this discussion on the other side of this break, the United Nations and what didn't happen this week.
We're talking with Martha Mundy.
She's got this very important piece at Counterpunch.
Please go read it.
Yemen as laboratory.
Why is the West so silent about this savage war?
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Talking about the most important story that no one else to talk about for whatever reason, I don't know.
With Martha Mundy, she is Professor Emeritus.
I did not give her a proper introduction here.
Professor Emeritus in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and author of this very important piece at Counterpunch, Yemen as Laboratory.
Why is the West so silent about this savage war?
And we're going to get back to that media silence in a second.
Okay, so the headline at Antiwar.com today is UN to let Saudis investigate themselves on Yemen war crimes.
Saudi objections kill resolution calling for international probe.
And I think that's what you were about to let us in on here when we had to go out to break there, Martha.
What is extraordinary is the manner in which, first of all, the United Kingdom traded with Saudi Arabia so that they both get on the UN Human Rights Council.
And after the Dutch finally, and the Dutch have been very big in aid to Yemen, by the way, finally put something before the council.
And on the basis of a report by Prince Ra'd al-Husseini, who himself, of course, hails from the Hashemite Kingdom, which is a party in this war, by the way, but he acted very professionally and produced a report on some of the alleged war crimes.
After both the Dutch and the report to that council, they have managed to get it withdrawn, and a Saudi completely watered down internal investigation of the war crimes is all that was agreed in Geneva, was it a day or two ago.
This is just as usual, but the problem with doing something like that is that ultimately you are destroying any reference.
I mean, you cannot, any legal reference that is to govern wars.
This could next happen in a nuclear war.
This could happen in any kind of war, and there would be absolutely no legal reference.
So, because it's Yemen, and because everybody has gone in there, they seem to be happy to allow this to go on, but the problem of legal orders is that they are precedent, and not to call anyone on this.
That's how you can get Prince Ra'd of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan actually producing a report is because he is in his capacity as head of that council representing a legal tradition.
And this is to treat law as absolutely nothing.
Now, we know all wars violate, but in this very systematic, internationally protected manner, this may be a first, because every time Israel does it in Gaza, the world starts shouting, and correctly so.
Whereas in this, nobody's shouting practically, except for the Yemenis themselves who tried to shout in the early part of this conflict by producing reports, human rights structured reports from the human rights agencies inside Yemen that all exist on a website called, what is it called, yemenspring2005.wordpress.com.
You can find all these reports that somebody put up.
And so, what do you attribute that silence to?
I mean, obviously, you know, Christiane Amanpour, we know that she just says what the State Department wants her to say, etc., but you're referring to the European governments and the NGOs and the whole, you know, left liberal civil society of Europe, I think.
Well, as I said in the earlier part of the interview, Human Rights Watch did produce some things.
Amnesty finally has produced a big report.
But it was striking that there must have been pressure on Amnesty because an earlier piece by actually their, one of their major people on the Middle East, who had been down in Yemen, was not published by them, but was published independently.
By her in a website.
And that also I took as a sign that Amnesty itself must have been under pressure.
More recently, as part of the buildup to what went on in Geneva this week, Amnesty finally did produce a major report.
But we're talking about six months into the war.
Human Rights Watch was very concerned, produced something early, but then very little thereafter.
And those are the, you know, the two big international names.
So the level of pressure and also the level of pressure on the Dutch must be really quite ferocious, all I can assume, because you have professionals who have been trying to do work and then suddenly going silent or coming online as with Amnesty, you know, six months into the story.
Well, now, so, you know, I think that there are material, as I set out in the counterpunch article, I think there are big geopolitical attempts to plan for something quite amazing that strikes me as on the ground, relatively unrealistic.
But I set that all out in the latter part of the counterpunch article.
And so I think it's probably better said there.
But that there was for planning that this was to lead to Saudi Arabia taking control of important quantities of oil, building links with, you know, having the peace with Israel, all kinds of things that are really quite amazing.
But which have been said by Saudi spokesmen.
And just again, last week, Prince Turkish Faisal was meeting with someone more, I mean, Yair Lapid in New York as part of the UN meetings.
In short, somehow this whole thing has been bundled into a much wider geopolitical, you know, fantasy almost, or aim, but I suspect partly fantasy that the Saudis are to be and the Emiratis signed up to.
And in the counterpunch article, the web links were stripped out, but I of course have all the web links, you know, to the UN staff.
And the transcript that I cite in the later part is on the website of the Council on Foreign Relations when former General Eski spoke last June.
So this stuff is increasingly in the public domain, but you really have to look for it.
The reason that people were interested in the counterpunch article is I put it together.
But you can trace stuff and I'm happy to supply the web links to anyone who wants them.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, it is very good article.
And again, it stands almost alone.
And that is why it's so valuable is because there's so little coverage and especially with real context the way that you provide it.
But if I could just ask you one more thing to go back to your point before about how the Houthi movement, they've been attacked and survived and gotten stronger.
They've been attacked over and over again.
And they are a real army.
They're not just some militia.
They're a real army of their own.
And they're now allied with at least huge portions.
I think you even say the majority of the actual, you know, quote, unquote, professional army of Yemen and including the former dictator, Saleh, who used to attack them, attack them all the time is now allied with them.
And so this is, I think, what you mean by fantasy is that these guys have, you know, these daydreams about how this is all supposed to work out.
But them in what army?
All they're doing is bombing from the air and you can't defeat them from the air.
And whatever, you know, ground forces you referred earlier to the small size of what UAE has put on the ground there seems like this is going to be a long, hard slog if they just keep going the way they're going now.
Well, I do think so.
And the answer, Allah, which is the political wing, and I want to emphasize that, you know, the media coverage in the West always talks about the Houthis and Saleh as though these were two militia groups.
Now, the important point is that these are both the General Congress Party.
I mean, Ali Abdullah Saleh is no longer alone, okay?
And the General Congress Party, which is his party, and the Ansarullah political movement are desperately trying to negotiate a settlement.
Whereas it is the coalition and the Saudis who refuse to deal.
There's no reason, logically, that you have to, you know, produce another series of spectacularly large massacres and continue the starvation and destruction of Yemen in the present form as opposed to politically negotiate.
Over a year ago, under UN auspices, you had an agreement called the Peace and National Participation Agreement, which was overseen by the UN, but it was not to the pleasure of the Saudis and their friends.
And so, essentially, the government was encouraged to run away and Hadi and Bahar and so forth.
And then it became the call for legitimacy.
But what form of legitimacy can you have if you don't have political negotiations that brings in all the different parties of Yemen?
That's where the problem started.
That's why the Ansarullah were unhappy that they weren't in the original transition discussions properly.
And similarly, the southern separatist so-called Hirak movement, okay?
So, I mean, to my mind, we should absolutely, as progressive people, not be talking about, you know, when can they take Sana'a.
We should be talking about why will our governments not support political negotiations to end this crisis in the interest of everyone?
It won't be easy.
But are you telling me that the further destruction and taking Sana'a by force will be easy?
What you just said is indeed it won't be, right?
It will be extremely bloody.
With colleagues, I've published two analyses of the problems of internationally-led agricultural policy in Yemen, which I'm not saying that the population growth wouldn't have meant they needed to import some of their food.
But the entire policy that led to the destruction of dry land, Yemeni agriculture, was something that the international organizations, I actually took a stand against part of this stuff in the 1980s, led by the World Bank and the international, you know, the kind of stuff you hear about for other parts of the world.
So, I have published on that problem.
But in the immediate, clearly food aid is needed, clearly it is illegal under international humanitarian law that we, that that kind of blockade that we, i.e., our governments are supporting, is in effect, it needs to come in.
And the entire policy for food production needs to be reworked.
But it's not going to be simply by reinstalling the same governments without political negotiation, without bringing in, you know, those who are fighting the coalition at present, that you're going to get a rethinking of even agrarian policy.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, in Washington, D.C., they're not even dealing with reality at all.
They're fighting a propaganda point where they're pretending that the Houthis are just, you know, basically Hezbollah or something backed by Iran, and that they're fighting the Iranian Empire, expanding through the region and this and that kind of thing.
So, don't expect any reason there.
Iran wasn't even happy when the Houthis walked into Sana'a.
Iran, at a certain level, there is sympathy.
But the notion that Iran is in there in the same manner that it is in supplying arms for Hezbollah or training and so forth, it's fantasy.
I mean, it really is fantasy.
But Iran, you know, the Houthis have made very clear they have been protecting Babel Mender.
They never threatened the shipping there.
It's a real political dream to, you know, to have absolute control.
But this takes us to the wider problem as to whether, you know, the elites in Washington really care, or are they actually making money on arms sales and control of the dollar and oil, so that they don't care at all if it's complete chaos from Syria to Yemen to Iraq to the entire region.
I mean, I leave that to your listeners, because the European elite should care, because a lot of this is really on their doorstep as the refugee crisis from Syria and the region shows.
Right.
Yeah, you would think that they could understand that.
I mean, what they say around here is that this is a...
By the way, I'm an American citizen, you know, and I'm a British citizen.
So, except we don't have citizenship in Britain, I'm an English subject.
But I mean, I'm an American.
I was born, you know, in the US of A. And I spent much of my early life there, as you can probably gather from my accent.
So, I mean, I'm not talking about this from some outside position, but as a citizen of both these places.
Yeah, well, and here, I mean, they make it pretty clear whenever they talk about Yemen at all, that this is basically a sop to the Saudis for not opposing the nuclear deal too strongly, basically.
Well, I believe it goes well beyond that, okay?
I actually believe it's also about – it's not – that may be the justification, okay?
But I don't believe that this level of planning and silo actually is just a sop.
I believe that our governments are heavily involved in it.
Well, I just don't understand – I guess I don't understand why they wouldn't just deal with the Houthis.
The Houthis don't seem like you couldn't just negotiate with them if it's oil they want or whatever it is they want.
No, of course.
Of course.
I mean, their political wing is highly political.
It's a very – you know, it negotiates politically.
They've signed on to most of the points of the UN Resolution 2216.
You know, they're not al-Qaeda or Daesh, and in fact, it is our side that – I mean, backing the Saudis who brought them first into Mokalla and who patronized those forms of ideology and that kind of militia group, whether it's in Syria or Yemen.
So, I mean, there's something bigger, right?
I mean, there's no earthly reason not to negotiate.
And to go back through Oman – I mean, you know, poor Oman, they actually hit the house of the ambassador in Sana'a the other day.
And Oman described the coalition attacks on Yemen as a threat to regional peace.
And then they said, oh, no, we didn't do it.
The Houthis did it, as usual.
Well, of course they did it.
So, Oman stayed out, and Oman has been a neutral element within this.
So, Oman is where all of the negotiations have been being conducted.
I mean, again, the Saudis, backed by their partners, will not go to negotiate.
All right.
Well, listen, just one final note.
I would love to read what you've written before about the international community destroying Yemeni agriculture and forcing them to be so dependent on imports in the first place.
I'm shocked but not surprised to hear that from you.
I'd love to read up on that, and maybe we could talk about that at some point in the future.
But I've kept you way over time here, but I'm so appreciative of your time today.
Well, thank you so much for having me, and I hope I stayed on topic, and I'll send you the two links.
Okay, great.
Thank you very much, Martha.
I really appreciate it.
Great.
Take care.
Bye.
Okay, everybody.
That is Martha Mundy.
She is professor emeritus in anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and she wrote this thing at Counterpunch that you've got to read, Yemen as Laboratory.
Why is the West so silent about this savage war?
And really important stuff there.
Please check it out.
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