Medea Benjamin: Catastrophic US-Saudi-UAE Attack on Yemen Port City Hodeida Could Trigger Mass Famine

SANAA, June 17 (YPA) – We have been worrying about this assault on Hodeida for a long time now, trying to stave it off, getting Republicans and Democrats to speak out about it. And now it is happening before our eyes, Medea Benjamin co-founder of the women-led peace group CODEPINK and the co-founder of the human rights group Global Exchange said.

This came in a telephone call with democracy now show, that discussed the Saudi-led coalition assault on Yemen’s Hodeidah.

She said that the United Nations is meeting today on this. And as you said, this is already such a catastrophic situation. The numbers are mind-boggling. But I think when Americans get to see, which we rarely do, a picture of one Yemeni child already starving, I mean, this is not just the brink of famine. This is people starving every single day. And when you think that this port is the entry port for now over 70 percent of the food that comes into Yemen, Yemen is totally dependent on outside sources for food. It’s a nation that was already poor before the fighting began in 2015.

“This is a disaster. And it is such a shame that the international community has not been able to stop this attack on the port and that the U.S., despite protestations to the contrary, where Mike Pompeo acts as if the United States is not supporting this attack. The attack would never happen were it not for U.S. weapons, U.S. bombs, and U.S. diplomatic cover that’s been going on for the past three years,” she added.

She continued: saying that “We have been trying to get our members of Congress to say, one, you have the responsibility, not the executive branch, to declare war. The U.S. has been involved in this war now for three years. It’s time to tell the executive, i.e. Donald Trump, that he is not authorized to do this. The other is to say that we have been selling these weapons to the Saudis [from] the time of the Obama administration bragging about the hundred billion dollars in weapons sales, and then Trump coming in with his first trip after he got elected, going to the capital of Saudi Arabia to glow about how many more weapons sales he was going to receive.”

She said, “what we’ve been doing is trying to stop not only the U.S.’s assistance for the refueling, the U.S. involvement in the logistics but to stop the weapons sales.”

Medea Benjamin confirmed that “It’s been very hard for reporters to get into Yemen. And this is precisely because the Saudis and their allies are controlling the airspace, controlling the waterways. And the reporters, some of them who get in are getting in because they are allowed in by the Saudis. And so they’re getting the Saudi perspective on this. So the reporting has been very difficult. It also, I think people have to put it in context of this has become one of the proxy wars that the U.S. is involved in, supporting the Saudis.”

E.M