Fatima, 12, pays price of war in Yemen
DISPLACED by war, starving and living under a tree, 12-year-old Fatima Qoba weighed just 10kg when she was carried into a Yemeni malnutrition clinic.
“All the fat reserves in her body have been used up, she is left only with bones,” said Makiah al-Aslami, a doctor and head of the clinic in north-west Yemen. “She has the most extreme form of malnutrition.”
Fatima’s slide into starvation is typical of what is happening in much of Yemen, where war and economic collapse have driven about 10million people to the brink of famine, according to the UN.
Aslami said she was expecting more and more malnutrition cases to come through her door. This month she is treating more than 40 pregnant women with severe malnutrition.
“So in the coming months I expect I will have 43 underweight children,” she said.
Since the end of 2018, she said, 14 deaths from malnutrition had occurred at her clinic alone.
Fatima, her 10 siblings and father were forced from their home near the border with Saudi Arabia and forced to live under a tree, said her older sister, who is also called Fatima.
She said they were fleeing bombardment from the Saudi-led coalition, which intervened in Yemen in 2015.
“We don’t have money to get food. All we have is what our neighbours and relatives give us,” the sister said. Their father, in his sixties, is unemployed. “He sits under the tree and doesn’t move.”
“If we stayed here and starved, no one would know about us. We don’t have a future,” she said.
After trying two other hospitals that could not help, a relative found the money to transport Fatima to the clinic in Houthi-controlled Aslam, one of Yemen’s poorest districts with high malnutrition levels.
Lying on green hospital sheets, Fatima’s skin is papery, her eyes huge and her skeletal frame encased in a loose orange dress. A health worker feeds her a pale mush from a bowl.
Aslami said the girl needed a month of treatment to build up her body and mind.
The UN is trying to implement a ceasefire and troop withdrawal from Yemen’s main port of Hodeidah, where most of Yemen’s imports come from. But violence continues to displace people in other parts of the country, and has cut access routes for food, fuel and aid.
There is food in Yemen, but severe inflation has eroded people’s ability to buy it, and the non-payment of government worker salaries has left many households without incomes.
“It’s a disaster on the edge of famine… Yemeni society and families are exhausted,” Aslami said. “The only solution is to stop the war.” THE GOVERNMENT of Burundi has recently seized cars and other belongings of Handicap International, one of the foreign NGOs that have decided to close doors following the government’s move to control the humanitarian industry.
Foreign Affairs Ministry states that the government’s decision to seize cars and other NGO’s belongings was motivated by the violation of the agreement that stipulates that when an NGO ceased its work, its belongings, (cars included) must be given to a local organisation that is in the same domain.
It all started in September when the National Security Council’s permanent secretary-general Major Silas Ntigurirwa announced that foreign NGOs must stop their work in Burundi until December 31, in order to re-register and comply with Burundi’s laws.
In fact, the Burundi government wants foreign NGOs to add to their staff compliment workers from a Hutu background, as it accuses NGOs of recruiting among the Tutsi minority only.
The government also wants NGOs to keep their funds in the central bank and sign new agreements with Foreign Affairs and the Interior Ministry. Until January 2019, only 84 foreign NGOs have registered to follow the government’s obligations on a total of 120 NGOs.
Handicap International, RCN Justice et Démocratie, Lawyers Without Borders, are among those who rejected the government’s plan.
According to sources inside the industry, workers have been recruited without taking into consideration ethnic background but their intellectual competences.
Burundi which is facing hunger in some districts needs more help than ever, according to Dr Didier Makwaza, a political analyst.
Last year, the humanitarian industry in this landlocked country announced that more than 3 million people needed emergency food and other support due to extreme poverty.
According to Dr Makwaza, the country’s humanitarian industry is facing extraordinary pressure from the government which tries to control not only staff recruitment but also the industry’s coffers.
Sources inside the humanitarian industry say that the country could lose $280 million (R3.98bn) over pressure on the industry.
Agency (ANA)