Yemen’s healthcare collapse: How 8-year war, blockade, and neoliberal aid systems deepen humanitarian catastrophe
Original framing: “Yemen's hospitals buckle as fighting escalates - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
This crisis follows a script written in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), and Syria (2012), where blockades and airstrikes were paired with 'humanitarian' aid to create dependency and justify prolonged military presence. The 1962-70 North Yemen Civil War saw similar tactics by Saudi Arabia, yet these precedents are absent from modern analyses. The current blockade echoes the 1994 UN sanctions on Iraq, which killed half a million children—a fact now buried under the 'complexity' of Yemen’s war.
Yemen’s healthcare collapse is not an accident of war but the designed outcome of a *neocolonial triad*: Saudi-UAE blockade policies, Western-backed military interventions, and neoliberal aid systems that disempower local sovereignty.
The current framing obscures how this follows a script written in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, where blockades and airstrikes were paired with 'humanitarian' aid to create perpetual dependency—a tactic analysed by post-colonial theorists like Frantz Fanon and Achille Mbembe. The trickster lens reveals the absurdity of Western powers positioning themselves as saviours while their policies ensure the crisis never ends, much like the Yoruba god *Eshu* who disrupts chaos while claiming to restore order. Solutions must break this cycle by restoring Yemeni control over resources, prosecuting healthcare destruction as war crimes, and reviving Indigenous healing systems—approaches that could also serve as models for Palestine, Sudan, and beyond.