Don't be fooled by US calls for Yemen ceasefire. It's PR spin for more war

The UK appears now to be gearing up towards authoring a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Yemen, following years of blocking any resolutions on the issue.

The UK has been the official "penholder" on Yemen, meaning that it has been up to the UK to table resolutions, which it has steadfastly refused to do, while simultaneously blocking anyone else's attempts to do so.

The US and UK could end the war tomorrow, simply by threatening to cut off military supplies, intelligence and training to the Saudis until the air strikes stop 

The apparent about-turn is a response to last week's statements by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Defence Secretary James Mattis calling for a ceasefire in Yemen within 30 days, to be followed by UN-facilitated peace talks. 

The UK dutifully followed suit shortly afterwards, expressing support for the initiative. This was somewhat ironic given that Alistair Burt, the minister of state for the Middle East - obviously not privy to the seeming about-turn - had just spent the day providing MPs with excruciatingly contorted explanations of why calling for a ceasefire was not a good idea. 

“Passing a ceasefire resolution risks undercutting the UN envoy’s efforts to reach a political deal and undermining the credibility of the Council,” he told the House of Commons on 30 October. Yet, within 36 hours, Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt was telling Newsnight that the US call for a ceasefire was “an extremely welcome announcement because we have been working towards a cessation of hostilities in Yemen for a long time.” 

Riyadh’s belligerent position

In the parallel universe of British double-speak, it is of course natural that unrelenting support for what is fast turning into a war of national annihilation gets recast as "working towards a cessation of hostilities".

Yet, this latest call does appear to be at odds with the hitherto existing strategy; it was only in June, after all, when the US and UK torpedoed a Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in the face of impending famine.

Many commentaries have suggested that the US is taking advantage of pressure on Saudi Arabia after the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi to push the kingdom towards a less belligerent position in the disastrous Yemen war. 

The 'call for a ceasefire' is little more than yet another rebranding exercise - a cynical attempt to whitewash escalating carnage with the rhetoric of peace

The ever-more desperate humanitarian situation is giving the war a bad name, and - so the story goes - the US is now keen to end it. David Miliband, former UK foreign secretary and now president of the International Rescue Committee, even called the US announcement "the most significant breakthrough in the war in Yemen for four years".

Unfortunately, it is likely to prove nothing of the sort. Far from representing some kind of Damascene change of heart, the "call for a ceasefire" is little more than yet another rebranding exercise - a cynical attempt to whitewash escalating carnage with the rhetoric of peace. 

With every passing day, the war in Yemen becomes harder to defend. The air strike on a bus full of schoolchildren in early August briefly caused international outrage, but it was sadly not exceptional; indeed, at least 55 civilians had been killed during the bombardment of a hospital and fish market just the week before, and the bus itself was but one of more than 50 civilian vehicles targeted by Saudi air strikes during the first half of this year.

For most of the war, around a third of coalition air strikes have hit civilian sites; according to the Yemen Data Project, this ratio reached 48 percent in September.

Escalating death toll

More grim news emerged on 29 October, when a detailed research project concluded that more than five times as many people have met violent deaths in the conflict than previously estimated.

For years, the media have consistently claimed a death toll of 10,000, but the true figure is closer to 56,000 since the start of 2016, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, as the earlier estimate only covered deaths reported to official medical centres. The death toll from the start of the bombing campaign until the end of this year could lie between 70,000 and 80,000.

Yet even this number, horrific as it is, is dwarfed by the deaths from starvation and disease, the coalition’s weapon of choice against the populations of Houthi-controlled areas.

The bombing of water treatment systems, fishing boats, roads and bridges, along with the naval blockade of the country’s imports and the coalition regime’s decision to stop paying salaries to health and sanitation workers in Houthi areas two years ago, have combined to create mass starvation and the world’s biggest cholera outbreak since the end of the Second World War. 

An average of 130 children die of disease and malnutrition every day, according to Save the Children. “They are not starving,” noted a tweet from the Norwegian Refugee Council. “They are being starved.” Just last year, some 50,000 people are thought to have died from such causes, and this aspect of the conflict is set to deteriorate exponentially.

On 15 October, the UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, Lise Grande, warned that Yemen could face the world’s worst famine in 100 years if the air strikes did not stop, with 12 to 13 million people at risk of starvation. Later last month, the agency’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, Mark Lowcock, said the risk was actually worse than previously predicted, with 14 million facing a serious threat of famine - half the country’s population. 

Lowcock noted that the UN was currently only able to feed eight million of these, although they too would be at risk if the country’s main port of Hodeidah - responsible for more than 70 percent of imports - was attacked by the coalition.

Massing for attack

Earlier this week, just as Mattis and Pompeo delivered their soothing words, 30,000 troops began massing to launch precisely that attack. The problem for the war’s backers in London, Paris and Washington is how to justify the holocaust this is almost certain to unleash on Yemen’s population in the delusional pursuit of reimposing an impotent and discredited quisling.

Rather than demanding the offensive be halted or delayed, the 30-day call eggs it on

The ceasefire announcement, then, is about providing cover for the impending attack. Just at the moment the aid agencies have been warning against its devastating consequences and calling for an immediate end to the bombing, the “ceasefire proposal” gives the Saudis a month’s free pass to conduct their famine-inducing operation on Hodeidah. 

Rather than demanding the offensive be halted or delayed, the 30-day call eggs it on. Nor is the 30-day timeframe any kind of limit on the operation. Pompeo stated that “the time is now for the cessation of hostilities, including missile and UAV strikes from Houthi-controlled areas into the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Subsequently, Coalition air strikes must cease in all populated areas in Yemen”. 

Call for unconditional surrender

The term "subsequently" is crucial, implying that the Saudis' continued bombardment - including in "populated areas" - would be perfectly justified unless the Houthis implemented a unilateral ceasefire first. This is little more than a call for unconditional surrender by the Houthis, dressed up as a peace initiative. By the same token, it sets the scene for laying all the blame for any continued fighting at the door of the Houthis.

The reality is that the US and UK could end the war tomorrow, simply by threatening to cut off military supplies, intelligence and training to the Saudis until the air strikes stop - a point made by Jan Egeland of the Norwegian Refugee Council to a UK parliamentary select committee earlier this week. 

Yet, the US is precisely not calling for an end to the bombing, nor threatening to use its leverage to bring it about. Instead, this so-called initiative is yet another cynical PR exercise designed to justify, rather than to reign in, this brutal war.

- Dan Glazebrook is a political writer and editor of stopstarvingyemen.org. He is the author of Divide and Ruin: The West's Imperial Strategy in an Age of Crisis, and blogs at danglazebrook.com.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

Photo: Soldiers loyal to Saudi-led coalition forces gesture as they guard ships docked in the southern Yemeni port of Aden on 29 October 2018 (AFP)