A Death Sentence for Millions of Yemenis; UN Officials Warn of Repercussions of US Move Against Yemen’s Ansarullah

Senior UN officials have expressed concern over the potential impact of the decision by the United States to designate Yemen’s Ansarullah a terrorist group, the Security Council heard on Thursday.

On Sunday, the United States announced it will designate Ansarullah a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) under domestic law. The head of the World Food Programme (WFP), David Beasley expressed serious concern over this prospect.

Briefing the online meeting, Beasley gave a blunt assessment of the prospects, stressing that the Yemeni famine is man-made, so Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries should bear their financial consequences and stop them immediately.

“We are struggling now without the designation. With the designation, it’s going to be catastrophic. It literally is going to be a death sentence to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent people in Yemen,” he said.

 “This designation, it needs to be re-assessed, it needs to be re-evaluated, and, quite frankly, it needs to be reversed.”

Beasley added that Yemen is among several countries facing famine, and the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these crises.

The WFP chief called for Gulf States “to pick up the humanitarian financial tab for this problem in Yemen”, and urged the Council and world leaders to apply pressure on the warring parties to end their fighting.

The UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths expressed serious concern over this prospect.

“We fear in my mission that there will be inevitably a chilling effect on my efforts to bring the parties together. We all hope to have absolute clarity on far-reaching exemptions to be able to carry out our duties”, he said.

Yemen remains the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Some 16 million people will go hungry this year, and 50,000 are already essentially starving to death, due to aggression and siege.

Preventing a massive famine is the most urgent priority, the UN Humanitarian Affairs chief and Emergency Coordinator told ambassadors.

For his part, United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs Mark Lowcock called for the FTO designation to be reversed, which Griffiths also supported, outlining its potential impact on aid relief in a country that overwhelmingly relies on food imports.

He explained that humanitarian agencies provide food vouchers or cash to needy Yemenis so they can shop at markets.

 “Aid agencies cannot, they simply cannot, replace the commercial import system,” he stressed.  “What this means is that what the commercial importers do is the single biggest determinant of life and death in Yemen.”

“Some suppliers, banks, insurers and shippers are ringing up their Yemeni partners and saying they now plan to walk away from Yemen altogether”, he said.  “They say the risks are too high. They fear being accidentally or otherwise caught up in US regulatory action which would put them out of business or into jail.”

Meanwhile, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it feared that the US designation would lead to a “chilling effect” on delivering vital aid to sick and starving civilians.

ICRC director of operations Dominik Stillhart said that the independent agency has urged states imposing such measures to consider “humanitarian carve-outs” to mitigate any negative impact on populations and on impartial aid.