HUMAN WRONGS WATCH

Human Wrongs Watch

While very busy covering French president and British prime minister visits to Libya, and talking about the day when Libyan oil will feed again cars and industries, mainstream media has nearly ignored the continuing killings in Yemen and the growing hunger of which more than 7,5 million Yemenis are victims.

Image: Bernard Gagnon | Wikimedia Commons

“Yemenis have been protesting peacefully for the fall of the regime since February, making this the longest-running of the “Arab Spring” protests. Yet Yemen has been largely absent from the international media agenda,”  writes Abubakr Al-Shamahi, a British-Yemeni freelance journalist and the editor of Comment Middle East, a platform for young people to write about the region.

“The Western focus on the Arab world in recent months has been on Libya and Syria, with Yemen an unsexy brother in the background,” he adds. “Yemen has only garnered an article here and there when news of Yemeni President Saleh’s “imminent” return is leaked, or when anything al-Qaeda-related emerges.” 

Herein lies one of the major problems that Yemenis face in attempting to draw attention to their uprising. There is a fundamental lack of understanding of Yemen, and this has severely affected the media narrative, explains Al-Shamahi in his opinion-article published by Al Jazeera.

“For example, al-Qaeda. To Yemenis, this is a small and largely irrelevant group, seen as having links to the Yemeni government and largely aiding the government’s foreign policy goals,” he says.

Human Wrongs Watch

Militias and some units of the new US-backed Afghan Local Police are committing serious human rights abuses, such as killings, rape, arbitrary detention, abductions, forcible land grabs, and illegal raids by irregular armed groups.

This what Human Rights Watch (HRW) has reported from Kabul, stressing that the Afghan government and the U.S. “should sever ties with irregular armed groups and take immediate steps to create properly trained and vetted security forces that are held accountable for their actions.”