In Yemen a third of children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition with almost 50,000 dying last year from extreme hunger and disease. And the situation has worsened since then, with a humanitarian co-ordinator saying nearly 14 million people are in danger of famine which was “much bigger than anything any professional in this field has seen during their working lives.”
Yemen has been devastated by a conflict that escalated in 2015, when a Saudi-led coalition sent by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman intervened, after the rebel Houthi movement seized control and forced the President to flee abroad. A partial blockade by the coalition has left 22 million people in need of humanitarian aid, creating the world’s largest food security emergency, and it led to a cholera outbreak that has affected 1.1 million people.
The Yemen Republic chart 22 May 1990 has been under acute pressure since the tr Uranus square tr Pluto started to move in hard aspect to its Uranus and Neptune in Capricorn from 2012 onwards, worsening when their Neptune was devastated around the time of the Saudi intervention. There’s nothing that looks cheerful in the immediate future. Tr Pluto will sextile the Mars in 2019/2020 for more brutality; tr Pluto is also moving across the midpoints to Saturn in Capricorn for hardship and deprivation up till late 2022/23.
If the furore over Jamal Khashoggi’s murder does nothing else one might have hoped for a change of attitude from a humbled Saudi Arabia. They didn’t start the civil war but everything that has been done since 2015 has made a bad situation irretrievably worse.