With the Russia-Ukraine conflict raging on our television screens and across the pages of our media every day, the world is exceptionally focused on Ukrainian migrants and their attempts to flee their homeland in search for safety. European nations, which have been famously closed towards migrants and refugees, have “thrown open” their borders to welcome Ukrainians into their homes and provide them with food, shelter, and a warm welcome1. Meanwhile, however, migrants from countries in the Global South continue to be displaced more and more every day. Families and desperate individuals, mothers and children, are ignored or turned away at national borders, even though they’re no different from migrants from Ukraine: just searching for safety. The question of why their stories are ignored, buried in the latter pages of newspapers while Ukrainians take the headlines, remains to be answered. It is not as though one group of migrants, leaving home in hopes of safety, is inherently more deserving of help than any other- but why are they often treated as such?
In order to discover an answer to this puzzling paradox, we can begin by drawing a direct parallel with what the United Nations Population Fund has dubbed “the world’s largest humanitarian crisis”: the Civil War in Yemen, which has been raging since 2014 and has contributed to over 4.3 million Yemenis being displaced, either internally or abroad2. The first reason as to why these people have been relatively unaided by the international population is surprisingly simple: most people have frankly never even heard of the Yemeni Civil War, as it’s kept out of headlines around the world3. This may be due to the fact that its causes and history are far more complex than the situation in Ukraine and in other places. Ukraine’s predicament, albeit disastrous, is fairly clear-cut: Russia wished to halt their “westernization” and prevent them from joining NATO, and invaded in an attempt to override Ukrainian national identity and reassert the control they once held. In contrast, the conflict in Yemen is more “messy”, involving several outside actors and a great deal of internal unrest.
In 2014, a group of rebels known as “Houthis” attempted to overthrow the incumbent president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and take over his administration. Their reasons for doing so were a combination of economic concerns and tensions between their identification as members of the minority Islamic denomination (Shia Muslims) while most citizens in Yemen and the government consisted of the majority denomination (Sunni Muslims). The friction between Sunni and Shia Muslims has been a leading cause for much of the small-scale conflict occurring in Muslim countries and the Middle East and Africa, but goes relatively unnoticed by the rest of the world’s population. Regardless, the rebels’ attack and near-success in a coup did draw the attention of many world powers. Saudi Arabia and other Gulf States have backed the incumbent government as a show of Sunni solidarity, but Iran and its powerful navy have stood by the Houthis, thus prolonging the conflict4.
As a result of these networks of conflict, the people of Yemen have suffered greatly: over two-thirds of the population (especially women and children) has been forced to leave their homes and flee to different cities or to cross the national border entirely in order to avoid being caught up in rebel-military clashes or air raids2. Many of these refugees are unable to be granted entry or citizenship into safer territories and are instead thrust into refugee camps with conditions so horrible that Human Rights Watch calls them “torture camps”5. Here, they face countless violations at the hands of camp officials who act with utter impunity, raping, extorting, abusing, and trafficking helpless Yemeni individuals as they see fit5. Those who cannot flee are also in a terrible predicament. Yemen’s healthcare infrastructure is lacking and inaccessible, meaning that they cannot seek the aid they need to survive.
Even so, the situation in Yemen feels much more detached from the public eye, unlike more prevalent instances of displacement, such as what’s going on in Russia and Ukraine or, for example, Mexican migrants trying to cross the United States border. This disconnect is not solely due to the complexity of the conflict, but due to secondary factors which set lesser publicized crises like the one in Yemen apart.
For one, the conflict takes place at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula, an area many inhabitants of the Global North may not feel as connected to, in comparison to Ukraine, where many Europeans have family ties; or Mexico, where Americans hear rhetoric about border walls and interact with Mexican immigrants on a daily basis. Yemen has long been considered a “backwater” in Western media, due to its limited contact with the world outside of the Arab Spring4. Even as the United States divests their own military resources to the area, American citizens stay blissfully unaware-or rather, uninformed- of where and how their tax dollars are being spent3.
Aside from this geographic disconnect, there is also a cultural barrier which prevents many citizens from more “developed” nations, especially those in Europe, from feeling inclined to pay any mind to the situation in Yemen. Ukraine, for instance, is undeniably European, despite its ties to Russia: since people in other countries can communicate with them clearly and relate to their customs and traditions, they feel far more comfortable opening their homes and offering aid to a refugee from Ukraine than they may to someone fleeing the fighting in Yemen. Humans naturally tend to feel comfortable with what is familiar, and for Americans, Europeans, and other rich “host” candidates for refugees, they are far more likely to relate to white, middle-class, Ukrainian migrants rather than lower-income Yemeni victims.
Despite all of these salient differences between the conflicts in Yemen and Ukraine they share a commonality that often goes unaddressed in international circles. Both conflicts are rooted in territorial disputes arising from past “Cold War” tensions between neighboring, far more powerful, states or organizations. In the situation with Ukraine, it’s rather clear how these events transpired: the end of the Cold War came with the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation has resorted to violent means in an attempt to seize back power and derail the Westernization that began occurring in Eastern Europe after their fall from power. The story in Yemen is a tad more complicated, again, due to the lack of one clear hegemon–most of their tensions and the current military alliances have arisen as a result of another longstanding conflict– this one between the Saudi and Iranian governments. The interesting thing is, however, is that this conflict too is a remnant of the original Cold War, between the West and Russia; the fact that Saudi Arabia is backed by America and Iran is backed by Russian and Chinese communist powers shows why this conflict has been dubbed the “Middle Eastern Cold War”7. The Western-Russian proxy conflict in Iran and Saudi Arabia has recycled itself, as these powers side with different parties in Yemen and show how difficult it is to overcome historical grudges.
The conflict in Ukraine and the conflict in Yemen are, in the end, not so different after all. Both stem from long-lasting friction between the West and Russia, as these major world powers do their best to exert their influence over all parts of the world. Where they couldn’t be more different, however, is their treatment of refugees. Ukrainian refugees are lauded and embraced by the international community, while refugees from Yemen are subjected to inhumane conditions and ignored by the outside world. The reasons for this are countless, tragic, and somewhat unexplainable: racism, geography, and a general lack of worldly awareness all play a part, but the humanitarian violations the people of Yemen are subjected to are still horrifying and should not have gone ignored for as long as they have.
Endnotes
- Fallon, Katy. “’No Place to Go’: Ukraine’s Neighbours Open up for Refugee Influx.” Al Jazeera, 26 Feb. 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/2/26/european-countries-open-borders-for-ukrainian-refugees.
- “Yemen: The World’s Largest Humanitarian Crisis.” United Nations Population Fund, https://www.unfpa.org/yemen.
- Greene, David. “Why Yemen’s Nearly 3-Year-Old Civil War Remains Mostly out of Headlines.” NPR, 19 Mar. 2018, https://www.npr.org/2018/03/19/594839325/why-yemens-war-remains-mostly-out-of-news-headlines.
- “War in Yemen | Global Conflict Tracker.” Council on Foreign Relations, 4 May 2022, https://www.cfr.org/global-conflict-tracker/conflict/war-yemen.
- “Yemen: Migrants Held at ‘Torture Camps’.” Human Rights Watch, 6 Nov. 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/05/25/yemen-migrants-held-torture-camps.
- Slemrod, Annie. “Why Does No One Care about Yemen?” The New Humanitarian, 16 Apr. 2019, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/2016/02/11/why-does-no-one-care-about-yemen.
- Gause, F. Gregory. “Beyond Sectarianism: The New Middle East Cold War.” Brookings, 9 Mar. 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/research/beyond-sectarianism-the-new-middle-east-cold-war.
