By Kaamil Ahmed
The war in Yemen has been our blind spot. For a while now, we have apparently struggled to form a moral reaction to a conflict unbound to the patterns of past interventions in Muslim countries, regardless of the depths it descends to.
Western powers may have been involved, as weapons suppliers or advisors, but this has very much been Saudi Arabia’s war and Saudi Arabia’s decision over past weeks to block all aid to a population already struggling with hunger and disease.
Yet we have no response.
The crimes committed by the Houthi rebels or the question of who the aggressors were and where alliances lie should not matter — too many of Saudi Arabia’s actions have punished ordinary Yemenis.
The UN has warned thousands will die because of the Saudi blockade on Yemen’s ports which has left medical and food supplies stranded. This is in a country where Save the Children say 130 children are already dying a day because of malnutrition and there have been more than 800,000 cases of cholera.
So why do we hear so little outrage about it from Muslim communities when we are often so quick to point out the selective empathy of media outlets that choose to cover disasters in countries they relate to but not those more distant?
Those double standards are worth pointing out and, not living within the same neat compartments within the West often used to define how audiences relate to a story, we are in a good position to make those points. But we also have our own blind spots, especially in causes not directly linked to Muslims or the ideas many of us have of where Muslims are. Yemen is not about that but it does show how our reaction is muddled when the culprits are Muslim.
Part of that might be about the media coverage, which is limited, especially because of Saudi Arabia’s restrictions on journalists from entering, but it’s also not non-existent — we do know a lot of what’s happening in Yemen. The international reaction has also been muted; Muslim governments offer almost nothing because they are either directly involved or wary about upsetting allies. The rest of the international community has offered little more, unsurprisingly.
But since when have we been tied to what governments say, Muslim or not? An advantage of what can often feel like a rootless diaspora existence is the ability to also observe things with a bit of distance. That might be why we are good at raising money for emergencies, though we fall short when it comes to working out how to get the money to right places or when the problem cannot be eased by throwing money at it.
Many of us might disagree about where to stand on the wider conflict but when it comes down to the suffering of an innocent population, we should have no hesitation in showing our opposition. Our support with should be with people not governments. Even if you believed Saudi Arabia was justified in its action against the Houthis, the reality is most Yemenis suffering are not Houthis. We do not struggle with this when it’s a Western power intervening — the Saudi coalition should be no different.■
*The views in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily represent Convivencia’s position.
Where’s the outrage for Yemen? was originally published in Convivencia Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
