Yemen: Britain’s Unseen War

In this extraordinary reportage on a Yemen ravaged by civil war, Unreported World’s journalists – a programme broadcasted by Channel 4 – uncover the catastrophic effects provoked by the Saudi-led coalition bombings pursued with weapons sold by the British Government for 3.3 billion GBP. These bombing attacks, along with the naval blockade imposed on the main Yemenite ports, are causing an extremely serious humanitarian crisis with millions of people being threatened with starvation. The reporter Krishnan Guru-Murthy and the director Patrick Wells have managed to enter the country, and their crew has been the first to film the rubble of Al Hudaydah’s port, through which, until not long ago, 70% of the products originating in Yemen were exported: a critical point for a nation importing 90% of the food consumed by the population. The pictures speak for themselves: while on the one hand, in the damaged warehouses sacks of flour that could have fed up to 45.000 families for a month, lie idle, on the other hand, only a few kilometres away, there are villages where 70% of children suffers from severe malnutrition. The economy is in tatters and the newborn children in the over-crowded paediatric hospital of Sana’a, the capital city, are in desperate conditions. According to United Nations data, there are 375.000 children at risk of dying.