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UN Experts Condemn Yemen’s Houthis for Hampering Aid Delivery

A commercial container ship anchored in the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea, which is controlled by the Houthis. (Reuters)
A commercial container ship anchored in the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea, which is controlled by the Houthis. (Reuters)
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UN Experts Condemn Yemen’s Houthis for Hampering Aid Delivery

A commercial container ship anchored in the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea, which is controlled by the Houthis. (Reuters)
A commercial container ship anchored in the port of Hodeidah on the Red Sea, which is controlled by the Houthis. (Reuters)

A report published by the UN Panel of Experts revealed that Houthi militias have collected more than 270 billion rials during the truce in Yemen from oil, taxes, and other levies, an amount sufficient to pay the salaries of public service employees in the militia-controlled areas for 10 months.

“The Houthis continue to control legal and illegal sources of revenue, namely customs, taxes, zakat, non-tax revenues and illicit fees,” the Panel said in a report addressed to the President of the Security Council, adding that the militias have levied a one-fifth tax on many economic activities, including in the mineral, hydrocarbon, water and fishery sectors.

According to the report, the beneficiaries of the new levy include the Houthi family and several of their loyalists.

“The customs authorities in Aden have calculated the loss of customs revenue for the Yemeni government to approximate 271.935 billion rials for the period between April to November 2022,” the Experts said.

They added that this loss to the Yemeni government equates to a corresponding gain by the Houthis during this period, as the said amount is not being spent for paying salary to the public service employees.

Despite receiving these tax revenues, the Panel said Houthis continue to earn illegal fees through their network of dealers, and sometimes fabricate artificial scarcities of fuel in order to create opportunities for their traders to sell oil on the black market and collect illegal fees from such sales.

Sources at the Finance Ministry in the legitimate government told Asharq Al-Awsat that the fortunes collected from oil revenues in the port of Hodeidah covers the salaries of employees in militia-controlled areas for a period of 10 months.

They said the monthly entitlement amounts to 25 billion rials while the government spends a similar amount as monthly salary expenses for more than half of the civil service employees.

According to the sources, the revenues collected from taxes, customs and other levies, in addition to the revenues of the Hodeidah port are enough to continuously cover the salaries of employees in Houthi-controlled areas. “However, the militias pocket these sums to pay their fighters and their influential leaders,” the sources said.

They added that since allowing fuel ships to enter Al Hodeidah port, customs revenues in the port of Aden have decreased significantly while the Houthis are still calling on the government to pay the salaries of employees in the areas under their control, including employees of the two defense and interior ministries.

In their report, the Panel of Experts said real estate generates significant revenues for the Houthis.

Also, the telecommunications industry in Yemen has been a major source of revenue for the Houthis since the conflict started, they stated.

“The Panel has received information that the Houthis are using the telecom services in sending millions of messages to the subscribers soliciting support and financial contributions for their war efforts,” the Experts said.

In addition, the Houthis continued their campaign of indoctrinating children and of recruiting and using them in their forces, including as combatants, contrary to their legal obligations and the action plan signed with the United Nations in April 2022 to prevent and end recruitment and other grave violations against children.

Also, violence against humanitarian personnel, movement restrictions on humanitarian workers and operations and interference with humanitarian activities by the Houthis and government-affiliated groups continued to hamper the delivery and distribution of humanitarian assistance to millions of civilians in urgent need of assistance or protection, the report said.

The Experts then condemned the widespread and indiscriminate use of landmines and unexploded ordnance, mostly in front-line areas, continued to inflict high casualties on civilians, mostly women and children, as well as restrict humanitarian access and impede aid operations.

They found that violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law remained widespread and systemic during the reporting period.

These violations included indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and torture, with no mechanisms for accountability or support for survivors or remedies for victims’ families.

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Arab World

As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”