{"id":27557,"date":"2018-12-31T17:22:40","date_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:22:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27557"},"modified":"2018-12-31T17:22:40","modified_gmt":"2018-12-31T17:22:40","slug":"bahrains-high-court-upholds-five-year-sentence-against-activist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=27557","title":{"rendered":"Bahrain\u2019s high court upholds five-year sentence against activist"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

\nTAIZ: Day after day Nabil Al-Hakimi, a humanitarian official in Taiz, one of Yemen\u2019s largest cities, went to work feeling he had a \u201cmountain\u201d on his shoulders. Billions of dollars in food and other foreign aid was coming into his war-ravaged homeland, but millions of Yemenis were still living a step away from famine.
Reports of organizational disarray and out-and-out thievery streamed in to him this spring and summer from around Taiz \u2014 5,000 sacks of rice doled out without record of where they\u2019d gone . . . 705 food baskets looted from a welfare agency\u2019s warehouses . . . 110 sacks of grain pillaged from trucks trying to make their way through the craggy northern highlands overlooking the city.
Food donations, it was clear, were being snatched from the starving.
Documents reviewed by The Associated Press and interviews with Al-Hakimi and other officials and aid workers show that thousands of families in Taiz are not getting international food aid intended for them \u2014 often because it has been seized by armed units loyal to the internationally recognized government.
\u201cThe army that should protect the aid is looting the aid,\u201d Al-Hakimi told the AP.
Across Yemen, factions and militias on all sides of the conflict have blocked food aid from going to groups suspected of disloyalty, diverted it to front-line combat units or sold it for profit on the black market, according to public records and confidential documents obtained by the AP and interviews with more than 70 aid workers, government officials and average citizens from six different provinces.
The problem of lost and stolen aid is common in Taiz and other areas controlled by the government. It is even more widespread in territories controlled by the Houthi militias.
AP\u2019s investigation found that large amounts of food are making into the country, but once there, the food often isn\u2019t getting to people who need it most \u2014 raising questions about the ability of United Nations agencies and other big aid organizations to operate effectively in Yemen.<\/p>\n

\n

\n\u201cThis has nothing to do with nature. There is no drought here in Yemen. All of this is man-made. All of this has to do with poor political leadership which doesn\u2019t put the people\u2019s interest at the core of their actions\u201d\u00a0 – Geert\u00a0Cappelaere, Middle East director for UNICEF<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nThe UN\u2019s World Food Program has 5,000 distribution sites across the country targeting 10 million people a month with food baskets but says it can monitor just 20 percent of the deliveries.
This year the UN, the United States, Saudi Arabia and others have poured more than $4 billion in food, shelter, medical and other aid into Yemen. That figure has been growing and is expected to keep climbing in 2019.
Despite the surge in help, hunger \u2014 and, in some pockets of the country, famine-level starvation \u2014 have continued to grow.
An analysis this month by a coalition of global relief groups found that even with the food aid that is coming in, more than half of the population is not getting enough to eat \u2014 15.9 million of Yemen\u2019s 29 million people. They include 10.8 million who are in an \u201cemergency\u201d phase of food insecurity, roughly 5 million who are in a deeper \u201ccrisis\u201d phase and 63,500 who are facing \u201ccatastrophe,\u201d a synonym for famine.
Counting the number of people who have starved to death in Yemen is difficult, because of the challenges of getting into areas shaken by violence and because starving people often officially die from diseases that prey on their weakened conditions. The nonprofit group Save the Children estimates that 85,000 children under the age of 5 have died from starvation or disease since the start of the war.<\/p>\n

\n

\n\u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace, criminal, it\u2019s wrong, and it needs to end\u201d\u00a0– David Beasley, executive director of the UN\u2019s food program<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nIn some parts of the country, fighting, roadblocks and bureaucratic obstacles have reduced the amount of aid getting in. In other areas, aid gets in but still doesn\u2019t get to the hungriest families.
In the northern province of Saada, a Houthi stronghold, international aid groups estimate that 445,000 people need food assistance. Some months the UN has sent enough food to feed twice that many people. Yet the latest figures from the UN and other relief organizations show that 65 percent of residents are facing severe food shortages, including at least 7,000 people who are in pockets of outright famine.
Three officials with the government told the AP that they would provide replies to questions about the theft of food aid, but then didn\u2019t provide answers.
Officials at the agency that oversees aid work in Houthi territory \u2014 the National Authority for the Management and Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs \u2014 did not return repeated phone calls from the AP.
UN officials have generally been cautious in public statements about the Houthis, based in part on worries that the militia might respond by blocking UN agencies from access to starving people. But in interviews with the AP, two top UN relief officials used strong language in reference to both the Houthis and their battlefield adversaries.
\u201cThis has nothing to do with nature. There is no drought here in Yemen. All of this is man-made. All of this has to do with poor political leadership which doesn\u2019t put the people\u2019s interest at the core of their actions,\u201d Geert Cappelaere, Middle East director for UNICEF, the UN\u2019s emergency fund for children, said.
David Beasley, executive director of the UN\u2019s food program, said \u201ccertain elements of the Houthis\u201d are denying the agency access to some parts of Houthi territory \u2014 and appear to be diverting food aid.
\u201cIt\u2019s a disgrace, criminal, it\u2019s wrong, and it needs to end,\u201d Beasley said in an interview Sunday with the AP. \u201cInnocent people are suffering.\u201d
The Houthis and the coalition forces have begun peace talks in recent weeks, a process that has led to a reduction in fighting and eased the challenges of getting food aid into and out of Hodeida, the port city that is a gateway to the Houthi-controlled north. But even if donors are able to get more food in, the problem of what happens to food aid once it makes landfall remains.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

TAIZ: Day after day Nabil Al-Hakimi, a humanitarian official in Taiz, one of Yemen\u2019s largest cities, went to work feeling he had a \u201cmountain\u201d on his shoulders. Billions of dollars in food and other foreign aid was coming into his war-ravaged homeland, but millions of Yemenis were still living a step away from famine.Reports of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":27558,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27557","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/27558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}