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Watching Yemen deteriorate: Journalist Jane Ferguson reflects on a decade covering the Middle EastOctober 22, 2018 1:00pm (UTC)This article was co-produced with Original Thinkers, an annual ideas festival in Telluride, Colorado that brings speakers, art and filmmakers together to create new paradigms. ,,,,That reminds me of what you wrote about for the New Yorker about this idea of hunger as a weapon. How would you describe that idea?Food has always been used as a weapon in war. It's highly illegal, we know that the Geneva Conventions in the Rome Statutes make it highly illegal to withhold food from civilian populations. What we're seeing more and more — and it's not just me, many journalists are seeing this whenever they're covering conflict — when you look closely, you're seeing manmade famines are making a comeback. That is a devastating fact. When we say manmade, I just think it's so important that we let viewers and the public know what that means. That means that wars are causing economies to collapse, often on purpose.One side will want the economy to collapse for people living in a certain area they see as sympathetic to or aiding a rebel group or their enemy. If that economy collapses, people starve. I've seen it in the last 18 months from South Sudan to Yemen. It's also happening in northern Nigeria. These manmade famines are a result of war.It's really important for people to understand the real impact of war. We see these devastating images out of Yemen, of children on school buses killed or a hospital gone… and those are awful and highly illegal war crimes, but millions more are at risk of dying of starvation. Tens of thousands are dying of starvation and the law doesn't reach far enough to make it clear who is culpable. It is about culpability and if there's no culpability, will militaries take seriously the impact of their actions on the population when it comes to economic collapse and starvation?Read more at: https://www.salon.com/2018/10/22/watching-yemen-deteriorate-journalist-jane-ferguson-reflects-on-a-decade-covering-the-middle-east/
