UN food boss to Yemen fighters: ‘Children are dying because of you’
OTTAWA — David Beasley was drawn to the tiny feet protruding from the blanket that a young mother was folding into a swaddle in the Sanaa hospital.
The head of the United Nations World Food Program was on his most recent trip to war-torn Yemen in mid-November, and as a father of four, Beasley couldn’t resist giving the feet a tickle. He figured he’d “get a little smile or something” from the child. But it was “like tickling a ghost.”
“There was no smile, no reaction, no nothing,” Beasley said in an interview in Ottawa earlier this month, where he briefed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
The suffering of children is the rule, not the exception in Yemen. Beasley said that’s what drove him to deviate from the polite requests that leaders of his organization usually make to open up access for food and other relief supplies. He met with all sides in the four-year-old war that has essentially destroyed Yemen’s economy and pushed its already poor populace to starvation.