S Arabia should fund aid to Yemen: WFP

ADDIS ABABA: A top United Nations official said Saudi Arabia alone should fund steps to tackle widespread disease and hunger besetting Yemen, where the kingdom has been leading a military campaign for two and a half years.

Comments by David Beasley, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, were unusually forthright for such a UN official in criticising one party in a conflict. Calling for an end to the coalition’s campaign, he accused the Saudi-led coalition of hampering provision of aid.

"Saudi Arabia should fund 100 percent of the needs of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen," he said, speaking to Reuters in Ethiopia during a trip to drought-affected areas.

"Either stop the war or fund the crisis.

Option three is, do both of them."

At least 10,000 people have been killed in the war while widespread hunger and an unprecedented cholera epidemic have led aid agencies to describe Yemen as one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

A spokesman for the Saudi-led military coalition fighting in Yemen did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment on Beasley’s comments. Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman donated $66 million in June to the United Nations Children’s Fund and the World Health Organisation (WHO) to help combat the cholera epidemic there.

The kingdom says hundreds of millions of dollars it has pledged to humanitarian programmes has benefited civilians on both sides of Yemen’s conflict.

The conflict pits Yemen’s internationally recognised government backed by the coalition against the Iran-aligned Houthi movement, which seized control of the capital Sanaa in 2015 and continues to control the country’s main population centres in the north and west.

The coalition has launched thousands of air strikes in a so far unsuccessful bid to dislodge the Houthis from power and have imposed a near blockade on Yemen’s ports, borders and airspace. Saudi Arabia and its allies say they aim to prevent arms shipments to the Houthis, but aid groups say the curbs have deepened the suffering of millions. —Reuters