We fuelled Yemen's 'failure'

[StarfarerBill]

By Anthony Milroy, Guardian/UK

Kneejerk is the new diplomacy. Within days of a failed Nigerian bomber's claim that "in Yemen there are hundreds more being trained, like me, to blow up planes", that impoverished and previously ignored Arab backwater has suddenly become – in the words of Hillary Clinton – "a top concern" and "a threat to regional stability and even global stability".

If Yemen is a failing state, western countries have been – and remain – implicated in this failure. Britain, the US and their allies have funnelled billions of dollars over the past 40 years to Yemen's government, largely via the World Bank, IMF and UN agencies. This aid money usually funded capital-intensive development initiatives on the specific recommendations of western (and therefore technocratic) consultants. Through ignorance and arrogance, these highly paid strangers utterly failed to understand Yemen's traditional, tribal culture and farming expertise, evolved over 6,000 years to suit the harsh, arid-zone climate and mountainous topography of a nation surrounded by desert.

The projects they devised also required western technical and managerial inputs, perpetuating such a dependency that something approaching 70% of these donor inputs were conveniently "recycled" back to western economies. Simultaneously, those same donor governments and UN agencies recommended, the construction of complex, and thus easily corruptible and always chaotic and dysfunctional "modern, institutional frameworks of government". So Yemen's "failure" is very much our failure too. Over those four decades Yemen's population burgeoned from three million to more than 20 million, while per capita incomes for over half that population hover around $100 a year. Infant mortality is still shockingly high, as rural women remain largely under-educated and without access to the means to limit their family size through birth control.

During that time the provision of imported water pumps and tractors supported a tiny minority of dominant rural landowners at the expense of the poor majority. This hastened the depletion of scarce and irreplaceable groundwater resources, most of it for the growing of the drug qat. This "industry", which now represents over 60% of Yemen's GDP and 80% of its agricultural water usage, is dependent on extensive use of imported pesticides (many banned in the west), which are now causing major health problems such as mouth, throat and stomach cancers and heart disease. All this further undermined Yemen's unique, traditional husbandry knowledge and local, capacities.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/21/yemen-poverty-terrorism-failure

[Captain Hilts]

1. This ignores the failed state of North Yemen, a Soviet satellite. nt

[StarfarerBill]

2. Actually, South Yemen (the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen) was the Soviet client state,

and it ceased to exist in 1990 with the reunification of divided Yemen.

You might have made a better case pointing out Yemen's 1994 civil war; still, that was fifteen years ago, and outside influence/interference since then has had as much to do with Yemen's continuing abysmal state.

[Captain Hilts]

3. Yes! Thank you! The West is most certainly not innocent. But it's a case

where the two states were used as footballs between the West and the Soviet bloc.

[StarfarerBill]

4. True, but the Soviet Union ceased to exist almost twenty years ago;

while their machinations in the PDRY had much to do with that part of Yemen's poor health at the time, the bulk of blame for poor outside influence since must rest on the West.

[Captain Hilts]

5. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the West lost focus on Yemen. I continue

to be amazed by what Saudi Arabia does NOT do for Arabs in the region. Especially its neighbors in Yemen.

[StarfarerBill]

6. Good point. Saudi Arabia is certainly doing something *to* Yemen now:

pressing a war against Houthi insurgents into Yemen itself...which I'm sure Saleh doesn't care that much about, as it relieves some of his need to suppress the insurgency.

Only if Saudi troops occupy parts of his country will the Yemeni president start to worry.

[Captain Hilts]

7. Yes. They are and the shift in Saudi's posture has my antennae up. nt

[bemildred]

10. You can trace Yemen's troubles all the way back to the British Empire

and it's clumsy colonial policies, which we (the USA) seem doomed to emulate over and over.

Saudi Arabia has it's own internal troubles, about which we hear little, and does indeed bear watching.

[JCMach1]

11. The long civil war was a huge drain...

[naaman fletcher]

8. Is there any problem that is not our fault? /nt

[bemildred]

9. We have had a lot of power for a long time.

It makes perfect sense that a lot of things are our fault.