Bringing the fight to al-Qaida is one thing; having to shoulder the burden of a country in a state of collapse is quite another
If there is one constant in a crisis-strewn world, it is that the humanitarian situation in Yemen just gets worse. This time last year, Yemen's dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh was beating a long rearguard retreat against his eventual ouster. Oxfam had just issued a report saying that one third of Yemenis suffered from hunger and chronic malnutrition.
Today, Saleh is out and his relatives are in the process of being prised from the key positions he put them in. Shortly after al-Qaida's attack on a rehearsal for a military parade on Monday, from which over 100 soldiers have now died, two of Saleh's relatives were demoted from the central security forces and the interior ministry, including Saleh's nephew Yahya. In April, it took 19 days of defiance, before Saleh's half brother, General Mohammed Saleh al-Amar resigned his command of the Yemeni air forces. If anyone is in charge of Yemen these days its most likely to be the US ambassador who regularly heaps praise on the man they made president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
But whether Hadi turns out to be his own man or another Hamid Karzai makes little difference to the general suffering. This week, seven aid agences (Care, International Medical Corps, Islamic Relief, Merlin, Mercy Corps, Oxfam and Save the Children) said that 44% of the population – 10 million people – were going hungry. One quarter of them were in need of urgent emergency aid. Wherever you turn, another red light flashes. The UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ocha) said that nearly a million children under five were suffering from acute malnutrition and over one quarter of them could die. In Hodeidah and Hajjah, child malnutrition rates were double the emergency level.
Kelly Gilbride, Oxfam's policy adviser in Sana'a said:
"The difference this year is the scale and scope of the crisis. Yemen has conflicts in both the north and the south. They create high levels of displacement. What we have seen is that the food crisis has expanded across the country. Food is in the markets, but people just can not afford to buy it."
This is the time of year when no food can be harvested and Yemenis are expected to get by on their reserves. Now they cannot any more. Farmers have either stopped production, or are about to, having run out of credit. The younger the men are, the more they are likely to flee the war-plagued state and search for work in Saudi Arabia.
"The whole of the country has run out of water", says Gilbride. "So that in the rural areas there are two scenarios. We have those who have water delivered, but can not afford to pay the 20,000 Yemeni rial bill, (almost £60). Or in Bura'a, women head for the few water points in the mountains and fall into them or off them, because of the danger of the paths."
No one is oblivious to this. To buy food in the markets, agencies like Oxfam hand out cash. Based on the overall basket of food prices they aim to provide one third of the total food bill, which is between £15-£40, per family, per month. But like last year, aid agencies are only getting a fraction of the funds they were promised. Britain, which chaired the Friend of Yemen conference in Riyadh, has promised £28m. Since October 2011, the United States has given $73m (£47m) in humanitarian assistance, including $47m in emergency food assistance
With two conflicts carrying on simultaneously, that of the Houthi Shia in the north and the secessionist movement in the south, the militarisation of Yemen and the primary US focus on it as another battlefield in which to engage al-Qaida, is only set to continue. And yet in the past two months alone over 95,000 people have been forced to leave their homes as a result of the fighting from all the conflicts raging in the country. If this continues, the humanitarian crisis will become a challenge not just for aid agencies on the ground but for Washington's foreign policy in Yemen itself. Bringing the fight to al-Qaida with drone attacks is one thing; having to shoulder the burden of a country in a state of collapse is quite another. It is different but the road that Yemen is travelling has been gone down before. Somalia comes to mind.