Lots of folks have been asking a rather pointed question these days. As Ukrainian refugees are welcomed with open arms to Europe, as NATO nations give billions of dollars in aid and sanction Russia, other war-torn nations around the world are saying, “What about us?”
And they’re not wrong. Racism and white supremacy are at the heart of much of these decisions, even as people making them may not be aware of their biases. War torn nations in Africa, the Middle East, South and Central America, and Asia have been ignored by the Western public for decades.
There are other factors in play here - Russia is a nuclear power, which makes it a much larger risk to the rest of the world than a regime with conventional weapons of war. This is a clear cut case of one sovereign nation invading another - in other war-torn nations, civil war, ethnic conflict, and other, messier battles are harder for foreign nations to justify intervening. But there are some parallels that bear examination - mainly, the Saudi-led war in Yemen.
Human rights activists have been trying to get the attention of powerful Western nations for years about the dire situation in Yemen. When the authoritarian president Ali Abdullah Saleh was deposed in 2012, the resulting political upheaval destabilized the country and by 2014-15, a rebel group called the Houthis took over the capital. Although the crisis in Yemen is officially considered a civil war, neighboring Saudi Arabia, originally with support from the United States, UK, and France, intervened in an attempt to prevent the Shia Muslim Houthis from consolidating power. The Houthis are backed by Iran, and Saudi Arabia worried about the security of their shared border, instituting a coalition attack on the Houthis in 2015. But even before the conflict, Yemen was the poorest nation on the Arabian Peninsula. And the attack, which was supposed to last only a few weeks, has lasted for years.
The UN reported that since 2015, over 230,000 people had died from the conflict, almost half of which were from indirect causes like famine, lack of access to medical attention, and infrastructure issues like sanitation. More than 10,000 children have been killed by the fighting, with an estimated 2.3 million children under age five more experiencing famine conditions. Four million people have been made refugees in their own country.
And yet, despite the suffering and violence and intense need for humanitarian aid, Yemen is largely ignored by the media. When President Joe Biden took office in 2020, he ceased the flow of arms and intelligence support to Saudi Arabia. And although the United States is providing aid and funding, the scale of aid to Yemen is dwarfed by American aid to Ukraine. Since 2014, the United States has provided $4 billion in aid to Yemen - which breaks down to about $570 million per year over the course of seven years. But Congress just approved $13.6 billion in emergency aid to Ukraine - after only two weeks of war. And the Biden Administration just announced even more aid. Meanwhile, aid to Yemen is forced to compete with Ukraine, as outlined in the PBS headline above, “U.N. raises $1.3 billion for Yemen, less than a third requested, in effort shadowed by Ukraine war.”
Competition for Aid in the First World War
A similar situation happened during the First World War. When Germany invaded and occupied neutral Belgium on its way to France, its armies ignored treaties and engaged in war crimes. German troops considered Belgian civilians to be guerilla troops, and civilians were routinely executed as the military moved through. The initial invasion came to be known as “The Rape of Belgium,” and there is evidence that the violent military invasion was accompanied by significant numbers of actual rapes. Over the course of the war some 60,000 civilians died - exceeding military deaths by a third. 1.5 million Belgians were displaced and made refugees. And 120,000 people were used as forced labor, including being deported to Germany to work in labor camps and prison factories (sound familiar?).
Belgian women, children, and the elderly were often the subjects of many calls for charitable aid. Government-sponsored foreign aid was not yet a thing. Most nations, especially the United States, were fairly isolationist. Few could justify spending taxpayer dollars on other countries. But Belgium helped change the landscape. Mining engineer Herbert Hoover was living in London at the outbreak of the First World War. An orphan who became a self-made man, Hoover was wealthy, talented, and motivated. He organized the Commission for Relief in Belgium, a volunteer charitable organization, and convinced the British that the aid he was providing to Belgians wouldn’t be seized by the Germans, and convinced the Germans that the aid wasn’t going to support the resistance or the Belgian army. In the United States, he helped publicize the effort through posters.
Although much of the propaganda using Belgium as a tool to drum up support for the war, charitable donations, and anger toward Germany was somewhat condescending (“Brave Little Belgium,” etc.), Belgium was positioned as a wronged party, a neutral nation that was invaded through no fault of its own, by a more powerful and violent aggressor.
Contrast this with the plight of Armenia. The Ottoman Empire was allied with Germany during the First World War, but used the war as an excuse to commit genocide. I wrote about the Armenian genocide last year, but suffice to say that while Americans did eventually engage in charitable efforts to help Armenians, Syrians, and Greeks within the Ottoman Empire as they were displaced, deported, and murdered through mass executions, death marches, and famine, there was little government effort to protect or assist civilians in the theater of war. The Middle East was considered poor and backward by most American and European government agencies - a product of white supremacy and technological arrogance. Between 1.5 and 2 million people were murdered in the Armenian genocide, an estimated 90% of the total Armenian population. And yet, the United States never declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
On August 1, 1920, the New York Times published an article entitled, “50,000 Armenian Children Fed Daily,” which outlined the work of the American Relief Administration in Armenia. The U.S. “raised” more than $20 million for Armenia, but it’s unclear whether those dollars were charitable or taxpayer-funded. The impetus for the article is noted in a sub headline, “Hoover and Haskell Quit” - Colonel William N. Haskell was the High Commissioner to Armenia. Hoover is quoted in the article, “The authority centred [sic] in the High Commissioner as joint representative of the several allied powers gave him then powerful support which he required to overcome those racial and political antagonisms, the natural outgrowth of the birth of new States, which were threatening the total annihilation of the Armenian people. The work of this mission was also to ascertain and provide requirements up to the point when the succeeding crops would render general contributions of foodstuffs from overseas unnecessary; to take over and extend the charitable work of the Near East Relief in caring for refugees, orphans, and destitutes; to represent the American Relief Administration; to administer the charitable relief from all other countries; to assist in re-establishing stable conditions in the Republic of Armenia.”
The quote continues, explaining that all relief work is being turned over to Near East Relief - a private charitable organization chartered by Congress in 1919 - and that with Haskell’s resignation, the American Relief Administration was shutting down all military and government programs and pulling staff out. Sadly, in retrospect the article has a “heckuva job, Brownie” feel to it, as the genocide continued, including the 1922 Burning of Smyrna.
Although European nations agreed that the Ottoman Empire had committed war crimes, the government collapsed post-war and no one was ever prosecuted for the genocide. Hitler referenced the lack of international response to the Armenian genocide as an excuse for his invasion of Poland, writing in 1939, “Who, after all, today speaks of the annihilation of the Armenians?”
While Belgium fully recovered from both its World Wars, Armenia still today feels the aftereffects of the genocide. Will it be the same with Ukraine and Yemen? And who decides how aid is allocated? Will we allow the same prejudices of a century ago to continue to effect our actions today?
Ukraine is deserving of every bit of aid, but so are the people of Yemen, and Syria, and Afghanistan, and Libya, and Somalia, and El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Honduras, and all the other nations where civilians are killed as innocent bystanders or pre-meditated targets, and ordinary people walk for miles and take only the clothes on their backs or a suitcase or two to escape violence and persecution and war. Why are Ukrainians celebrated as they walk across the borders of E.U. nations, but Central Americans who cross into Mexico and the United States, and North Africans and Syrians who board overcrowded boats to cross the Mediterranean are not?
A lot of Ukrainians have talked about how this war feels like reliving World War II. And it should. But many Europeans seem to think that war was a thing of the past - that Putin’s actions are shocking because they seem unusual. They aren’t. They’re just unusual to people whose wealth and power have provided them with decades of domestic peace and democracy. And very short memories.
If anything good is to come out of this conflict, I hope it is a wakeup call to fight for peace. Not just in Europe, but around the world. We clearly haven’t learned the lessons of the past. Let’s hope future generations will.
Further Reading:
I wrote about the WWI Armenian relief efforts last year.
Visit the Armenian Genocide Museum
For more on the food of Armenia, check out Lavash: The bread that launched 1,000 meals, plus salads, stews, and other recipes from Armenia, published in October, 2019, plus a review from Saveur.
If you’d like to donate to support Yemen, consider supporting Save the Children’s efforts. Save the Children has a 4/4 star rating on Charity Navigator and has been working in Yemen since 2015.
Yemen has a very distinctive food culture - different from other Middle Eastern nations. Yet only one Yemeni cookbook has been published in English in recent years - Sifratna by Amjaad al Hussein, who was born in the US and raised in Dearborn, Michigan. Here’s an interview with her including some recipes from the cookbook.