Solidarity with Yemen

Wyatt Miller, a member of the Anti-War Committee gave this speech on 12/23/2018 at the “Send an anti-war message for the holidays – Stop Endless Wars” action in Uptown, Minneapolis.

A few weeks ago, Congressman Collin Peterson — who is a Democrat from Minnesota — voted to block a measure that would have ended US support for Saudi Arabia’s attacks on Yemen.

When Representative Peterson was asked why he provided such a crucial vote to continue the war on Yemen, he said, “I don’t know a damn thing about it.”

Unfortunately, this “don’t know a damn thing about it” attitude is prevalent in American politics. There’s this idea floating around that Yemen is a small country, that it’s somehow less important, and that the war there is just a footnote to wars in places like Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

In fact, 28 million people live in Yemen. It’s the second largest country on the Arabian peninsula, and if you take away Saudi Arabia’s millions of poorly treated foreign workers, Yemenis are the most populous nationality on the Arabian peninsula. But the bigger point, of course, is that Yemen, like all countries, has its own rich national and cultural history. Yemen did not invade anyone. Its people should be free to determine their own future.

Instead, Yemen is under attack. The US-Saudi bombings and blockade are creating conditions for mass famine. The United Nations estimates that 18 million Yemeni people will be “severely food insecure and at risk of starvation” in the coming year. The shortages and destruction have also caused the worst cholera outbreak in history, according to the WHO. These are war crimes.

The United States is directly complicit. The US provides weapons, fuel, intelligence, and political cover to the bombings, and literal US warships enforce the blockade on Yemen. The same US politicians and corporations that demanded the Iraq invasion, see any challenge to US-Saudi dominance of shipping lanes through the nearby Red Sea as a threat. Faced with a rebellion against their growing control over Yemen’s internal politics, the US and Saudi Arabia jointly have resorted to what is, essentially, collective punishment on an unprecedented scale.

But in American politics, the war on Yemen gets sidelined and ignored. It shows how things like Trump’s Muslim travel ban — which was designed to make specific countries the target of dehumanizing, anti-Muslim bigotry — helped to normalize mass death and trauma inflicted on ordinary people in Yemen.

We need to demand that our politicians completely end the weapons sales, blockade and bombings. So let’s make it clear that US policies of systemic dehumanization, imperialism and endless war, are an attack on all.

When the people of Yemen are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!