The New York Times editors express hope that a proposed cease-fire in Yemen might hold:
Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to meet soon with foreign ministers of gulf Arab nations. If he can make sure they go forward with the cease-fire, there may be a chance of ending a conflict that has slaughtered civilians, tarnished America’s standing and diverted resources from fighting the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen has created one of the greatest humanitarian crises in the world. The crisis has been described as “catastrophic,” and that is not an exaggeration. Sajjad Mohamed, Oxfam’s country director in Yemen, has described it in even more stark terms:
A brutal conflict on top of an existing crisis, a catastrophe on top of catastrophe, has created one of the biggest humanitarian emergencies in the world today—yet most people are unaware of it.
The AP reports on the starvation of Yemen and its terrible effects:
The spread of hunger has been the most horrific consequence of Yemen’s war since Saudi Arabia and its allies, backed by the United States, launched a campaign of airstrikes and a naval blockade a year ago. The impoverished nation of 26 million people, which imports 90 percent of its food, already had one of the highest malnutrition rates in the world, but in the past year the statistics have leaped.
When last we checked in on Djibouti, the tiny east African nation of 900,000 people that shares a border with lawless Somalia to the south, and is separated from war-torn Yemen by just 13 miles of water across the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, China had just announced that the country would play host to Beijing’s first overseas military outpost.
Nearly 5,000 miles from the Chinese capital, Djibouti is situated in a highly strategic, if exceedingly dangerous part of the world.
To mark the one-year anniversary of the start of the Saudi-led war on Yemen, The Wall Street Journal obligingly gave the Saudi ambassador a platform to repeat his government’s propaganda: