Even the most hard-core aid workers would have struggled to watch the initial images out of Yemen from a horrific airstrike on a school bus after a missile struck a crowded marketplace in broad daylight.
Among the dozens of slain and injured children -- reportedly aged 6 to 11 years old -- was a young boy, screaming in pain, as medical workers struggled to remove the blood-soaked UNICEF backpack he was wearing.
It appears the boy did not want to part with his backpack. Probably because, around the world where I and many other UNICEF aid workers have distributed these coveted back-to-school items, children take them as a symbol of protection.
We shouldn t blame them for thinking so: according to International Humanitarian Law, warring parties are prohibited from targeting places of learning and play. And yet, on August 9, the day of the attack, this law on armed conflict was ignored with impunity by the US-backed, Saudi-led coalition that is pummeling Yemen with daily strikes.
(For its part, Saudi Arabia called it a legitimate airstrike against Houthi-led rebel fighters.)
With the Yemen crisis now into its fourth year, 22 million people are in need of aid and protection. Along with a dozen or so other conflicts that have been raging for months or years with no end in sight, the current landscape makes for the grimmest World Humanitarian Day, happening on August 19, on record.
America s silence makes it complicit in Saudi bombing of Yemeni children
For the past 15 years, it has been a day designated to recognize the millions of civilians caught in conflict and to rally support for the 450,000 or so people who work in the aid business. But there seems little cause for hope: Conflicts are lasting longer, are more complex and are packing a more lethal punch as they tend to migrate into congested urban areas. With the Yemen images still fresh in our minds, those of us with a relationship to the aid industry hang our heads low in shame at the deafening silence from major humanitarian actors who once spoke up to such acts of barbarism.
Normally, such horrific acts of violence would spark widespread outrage, an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council and calls for both sides to lay down their arms, commence negotiations and end a conflict that has killed at least 10,000 people.
But in this particular incident, aside from harsh words from the UN and aid agencies and the US calling for an investigation, most of the world s capitals have had a muted response. Notable among them were the United Kingdom, Canada and France -- all influential humanitarian actors -- but also with billions of dollars of arms sales to Saudi Arabia on the books. With an eye on one of the two rotating seats on the UN Security Council, my home country of Canada had added reason to stay silent: upsetting certain influential UN member states countries may cost it votes in the 2020 vote. It s also still licking its wounds from an ongoing diplomatic dispute with Saudi Arabia.
Even the chief of UNICEF, Henrietta Fore, who leads a UN agency which calls itself the world s most influential child rights organization, managed to avoid mentioning either party by name in her statement condemning the attack -- even though by UNICEF s own count nearly 2,400 children have died in the conflict since 2015.
"Our silence on this is deadly for Yemeni civilians," said Mark Kaye of Save the Children UK. "It basically suggests to the Saudi and Emirati-led coalition that they can continue to do whatever they want with total impunity. So far, from the UK Government, all we ve had is a solitary tweet from a Minister of State saying, We express concern about the deaths of 29 children. And that s a disgrace. We should be out there condemning this."
Given its enormous role in the conflict, some have suggested that if Riyadh can t stop the bombing, at least it should bring relief to civilians caught in the world s worst humanitarian conflict.
"Saudi Arabia should fund 100% (of the needs) of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen," said David Beasley, the American executive director of the World Food Programme. "Either stop the war or fund the crisis. Option three is, do both of them."
On World Humanitarian Day this year it s probably safe to assume that many people in the business feel frustrated with the seeming inability of warring sides and intermediaries to bring an end to the major conflicts, whether they be in Yemen, Syria, South Sudan or eastern Ukraine. And as they drag on, with it they kill, injure or bring other harm to humanitarian aid workers. Lack of access for aid and aid workers is another factor which limits the ability to bring relief to civilians caught in conflict.
The question that also has to be asked is, with humanitarian aid work becoming one of the most dangerous professions in the world -- almost 4,400 humanitarian aid workers have been caught in major attacks over the past 20 years, with one-third of them killed -- will skilled people bother to view it as a career choice?
On Sunday, I will be thinking of people such as Hanna Lahoud, a Lebanese national working for the ICRC in Yemen, who was killed in April in Yemen when a group of armed men attacked the car he was in. Shortly afterwards the Geneva-based organization pulled 71 international staff out of the country.
When you sign up with the aid business, you do so with the belief that you ll be able to perform life-saving work without fear of being killed, injured or kidnapped. But clearly we have reached a point where world leaders and even some aid agency heads cannot be counted on to call out the world s most egregious violators of basic standards of decency. Words matter.
