UN chief calls for $3.85 billion to answer Yemen's crisis
02 March, 2021
The head of the UN on Mon called for $3.85 billion for Yemen in response to the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, as a new rebel offensive added to the misery from a six-year conflict.
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told a meeting of key donors that a lot more than 20 million Yemenis need support, with 16 million of them likely to go hungry this season and about 50,000 facing famine-like conditions.
“It really is impossible to overstate the severe nature of the suffering found in Yemen,” Mr Guterres said.
“We should end this senseless conflict nowadays, and start dealing with its enormous effects immediately.”
The UN pledging meeting hosted by Switzerland and Sweden took place as Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebel group advanced on government-held Marib - the latest chapter in challenging that has pushed the country to the brink of famine.
“Four million persons across Yemen have already been forced from their homes,” said Mr Guterres.
“The recent Houthi offensive in Marib threatens to replace thousands more.”
The UN chief said that funding fell for Yemen’s crisis this past year, with the UN getting $1.9 billion, that was “just half of what we needed, and half of what we received the year before”.
Prior to the talks, the UAE on Friday explained it would present $230 million in assistance to Yemen, concentrating on medicines along with food for six million Yemenis, including one million children.
Saudi Arabia on Tuesday decided to fund World Food Program projects on Yemen with $40 million.
UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock has warned that lacklustre funding forced the UN to lessen the number of Yemenis receiving free meals from almost 14 million in 2019 to nine million this past year.
The four million Yemenis who lost their handouts this past year faced the “much time, slower, brutal, painful, agonising procedure for starving to death”, Mr Lowcock told reporters within an online briefing on Wednesday.
Donors met against a good backdrop of renewed fighting in Yemen’s civil battle, with a good Houthi offensive on Marib, some 120 kilometres east of Yemen’s rebel-held capital, Sanaa, the government’s last northern stronghold and a centre for oil development.
In addition, it comes amid hopes that the administration of US President Joe Biden’s attempts to place pressure on its ally Saudi Arabia could revive a good stalled peace procedure and hasten an end to the conflict.
Fighting erupted in the Arab world’s poorest nation in 2014, when the Houthis seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and far of the country’s people centres in the north.
An Arab military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the US and Britain intervened in 2015 on a bid to restore the internationally-recognised authorities of Yemeni President Abdrabu Mansur Hadi to power.
The war has killed about 130,000 persons and displaced millions, according to international monitors, creating what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Source: www.thenationalnews.com