This week’s column is an embarrassed response to a riveting reader’s comment from last week, where I lamented that Israel’s success in derailing all attempts at ceasefire meant that “bombs, bullets and white phosphorous will write the next chapter of Palestinian history with the blood of its innocent women and children”. Down in the comments section, though, an observation by a reader going by the name “Rapid Fire” reminded me that the death toll from the Yemen war, which still rages, is much, much larger.
“Now note this for context – Approx 350,000 have been killed in Yemen as a result of the war brought upon by Saudi Arabia and UAE. Can we assume at least 200,000 were innocent women and children? Has there been ONE article in this newspaper condemning this?” went the comment.
I understand that Pakistanis hold a special place for the Palestinian struggle from the days when, in the 1980s, the dispossessed from the West Bank and Gaza Strip were a regular sight on the streets of Lahore and Karachi; studying, working, telling tales and collecting donations in Pakistan. Drawing a parallel between the Palestinian and Kashmiri occupations was an integral part of General Zia’s larger Islamisation drive, after all, and my childhood was full of the song and dance about the Ummah finally freeing both territories, with Pakistan somehow playing the lead role.
But my personal understanding of the Palestinian story changed dramatically when I started working in the Arab press, just when Hezbollah was in the thick of its 2006 war with IDF (Israeli Defence Forces), and the Lebanese militia broke the myth of Israeli military invincibility in the ground war that followed the aerial blitzkrieg. I also learned that Hezbollah, along with Hamas, Iran and Syria formed the principle anti-Israeli resistance.
This was before the so-called Arab Spring, so Hamas hadn’t decamped from Damascus, in support of the anti-Assad Syrian uprising, only to rue its decision and return to the fold after a few years in the wilderness. Hamas was the only Sunni element in the otherwise Shi’a-Alawite bloc that resisted the Israeli occupation beyond mere rhetoric.
Yet another lesson was that Iran-Syria-Hezbollah, an integral part of George Bush’s axis of evil as he went on his war-on-terror rampage, were also the main rivals of the Sunni GCC group, and the two played out their rivalry in bloody proxy wars up and down the Ummah. That’s why I understood, and grieved, when GCC countries happily poured money, arms and al Qaeda hordes into the US-EU-Turkey project to spread civil war in Syria, degrade the resistance’s military capability, decapitate the Assad regime, and solve Israel’s biggest problem forever.
That’s also why I understood what hell would follow when in 2014 Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels took control of the capital, Sana’a, demanding lower fuel prices and a new government. Sure enough, Saudi Arabia and friends stitched together their own coalition of willing countries – Pakistani parliament did not allow then PM Nawaz Sharif to bow to his benefactors in Riyadh – and rained death and destruction, with US and EU blessing and arms, on the poor, miserable people of Yemen.
The UN estimates that the bombing campaign, which went on for at least seven years, had killed more than 377,000 people by the end of 2021 (more than Rapid Fire’s conservative estimate of 350,000). More than 60 percent of these deaths were from “indirect causes like food insecurity and lack of accessible health services”. More than 11,000 children are known to have been killed. 21.6m people are in desperate need of aid, 11m of them children, and at least 4.5m are displaced. The war has also triggered one of the largest cholera outbreaks ever recorded, with 2.5m suspected cases and about 4,000 related deaths since 2016.
Just like Israel, the Saudi coalition, headed by a celebrated former Pakistani army chief, used “double tap” attacks, in which the first strike hits a target and a second one hits the people that gather for rescue. And they did it just as the currency was collapsing and people were driven to hunger and destitution. This isn’t just a modern, regional war, but the continuation of an ancient blood feud that dates back to the historic Shi’a-Sunni schism in what were still the early days of Islam. In the millennium-and-a-half since, Muslims have wasted no opportunity write and rewrite the book on brutality and barbarity, inflicting pain and suffering on their brothers and sisters in the name of religion.
Like everybody else, I’m hopeful that the China-brokered Saudi-Iran détente will end the torture in Yemen, along with all other proxy wars all over the Muslim world. Yet in my heart I know that my unfortunate Yemeni brethren will not be the last people to pay in blood for a fight from almost two thousand years ago, or if their misery will even end with the Riyadh-Tehran embrace that has yet to move beyond headlines and exchange of ambassadors.
I understand Rapid Fire’s skepticism that “Muslims if killed by Muslims is OK, I suppose” and I know that a journalist’s best effort – writing an angry column – does nothing for people crying, bleeding, and dying on the ground. But it can address one concern: “So would you pen a piece about this too? Don’t think so…”.
People like Rapid Fire do the unenviable job of putting the spotlight on bitter truths that most people would rather brush under the carpet and get on with business as usual. Last week he reminded me, at least, that while our fury in the face of the world’s impotence over the bloodshed in Gaza is justified and understandable, we conveniently overlook the rot in our own backyard.
I salute him.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023