 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. Today we have with us Professor Ajaz Ahmed and we are going to discuss the brutal blockade of Yemen that Saudis and the Emiratis have imposed. Ajaz, how do you see the blockade in Yemen developing particularly the last port now is also under blockade and this puts at risk nearly 8 million people who are in the what called the Houthi dominated areas. How do you see this developing because the world seems to be completely silent on this issue? My sense is that they have been preparing actually foreign assaults since December and they have been fighting and capturing villages and territories all along the Red Sea coast on both sides together. They are now even on the outskirts of the city and this blockade means that the city is surrounded from all sides and the supplies are entirely dependent on Emiratis and Saudis letting them go in. It aggravates the humanitarian crisis enormously. The speculation is that it seems from Pompeo and other people who have spoken about it is that implicitly the Emiratis already have US go ahead for the full scale attack on the port even though the Houthis have already offered to let the UN take control of the port. It's only the only thing that they're saying is that they are not going to completely disappear. From the access to the port they want access to the port but for the rest they're willing to concede. The control of the port to the UN. I think part of the objective of this blockade is to in fact prevent the UN from taking control of the port and to bring unbearable pressure on the Houthis because not only the city but the all the internals of northern Yemen depend for the supplies of medicine, food and so on all the necessity of the world for import through this one city. So on the other hand I think a lot of the western powers are very afraid of the level of the humanitarian crisis. I mean the humanitarian crisis in the Yemen is already the worst in the world according to the United Nations but it'll increase dramatically if they actually bomb the airport they're talking about bringing in all kinds of humanitarian aid and so on and so forth. But at the moment I think it's a sort of war of nerves putting the pressure on the UN envoy to say we are here we are ready to move please this is your last warning get the Houthis to surrender. I think it's that moment that we are seeing unfortunately I'm afraid that the Americans have already given them to go ahead. So that is I think the immediate situation that there is of course a much larger all kinds of much larger issues involved. So do you think that the Houthis are going to surrender? Well I mean I won't you know this is a guess they might withdraw from the port but then what they're facing is really an encirclement of their entire presence in all of North Yemen and the starvation of vast numbers of people who will be trapped, who will be surrounded, who will be denied everything and this Saudi Emirati combined backed by Britain and the United States certainly the quartet as they called all the four of them collectively that is what the Houthis are actually at the moment facing. If their supplies continue they can last in the hinterlands forever. There is no way these mercenary armies can break through the Houthis strongholds in the highlands. So it's a very very critical moment. What the Houthis are going to do at this moment is anybody's guess. Two questions one let's start with the issue of the human scale of the humanitarian crisis. What we have seen is that we have had more than a million cholera cases something which is unheard of today when you have the ability to provide decent water supplies, drinking water to the people which of course has collapsed completely in Yemen. We have had rise of various communicable diseases, no schools, no hospitals, no medicine and a complete silence in the global media on this while the slightest thing that happens in Syria for example gets global attention about the barbarity of Assad and so on. How do you see the global media or the global in fact the entire community of nations be so silent on such a humanitarian crisis on the scale that we haven't seen before at least recent times. When in Syria whatever the Syrian government did got greatly magnified in the western media but not what the jihadis and so on but all of them did the impression in the media was given that everything was being done by the Syrian government but I think here the real parallel is with Palestine. Any rocket falling from Gaza into Israel becomes an international event but killing of thousands upon thousands of Palestinians in broad daylight as went on for weeks gets hardly any headlines in the west. The same thing happens if the Houthis manage to send some little rocket into Saudi Arabia the western media starts playing it up as the barbarity of the Houthis. But what happens to the population of the Yemen the coverage is extremely sporadic. I mean the reason why there is this scot-ra epidemic is simply that the Saudi Emirati alliance has bombed all the power stations and so on so sewerage systems cannot function water purifying systems cannot function they have even banned the import of saline tablets into Yemen to clean the water. So this epidemic is the creation of this quartet and Americans are very much a part of it. It is in certain senses you could even say that there is a whole chain of you know sort of proxies fighting for proxies. A huge mercenary army has been recruited with the under the supervision of Eric Prince the notorious you know American corporate fellow commanding huge numbers of mercenaries all over the world. They have come in and created an army of mercenaries which is fighting in the Yemen. These people are being given all kinds of support refueling you know the imagery from the satellites and so on from the United States the US and the UK are fully involved in this war and none of it is in the point media. The alliance that is fighting the Houthis who are really in that in the sense relatively virtually no resources as it were and against them we have the United States refueling as you said providing strategic support the UK doing the same mercenary armies you talked about Derek Prince Blackwater fame and also the his sister is now in the US cabinet the education secretary. So this is also now you have mercenaries recruited from Columbia to various parts of Africa so you have a huge mercenary army which is being deployed. So this this is something which nobody wants seems to be wanting to bring up or resist because if you see Syria at least there was a resistance force Yemen we don't really seem to see that kind of resistance support from outside partly is it because it's landlocked or strategically that the Houthis were relatively shall we say not in you know in alliance with anybody in spite of the fact that the US keeps on talking about Iran and so does Saudi Arabia. Yeah but I want to tell you this issue of Iran you know this is everywhere I was creating the other day the report by the international crisis group which is supposed to be this neutral independent body the entire report is written from the point of view of the Emiratis and again Iran comes up all the time and the pretense is that Houthis are proxies for Iran because they are sheer. Now first of all the in the sectarian map of Islam Houthis are not the same or anywhere near the kind of the Athanashari Islam that is Athanashari Islam that is in Iran. The real problem here has nothing to do with Iran American knows it Americans are pretending that they're supporting all these people Saudis and Emiratis against the Houthis because this is part of their struggle to continue Iran. It's actually open the Saudis want to turn Yemen into a dependency of Saudi Arabia whereas Yemen has even territorial claims on the eastern part of Saudi Arabia. It is a Saudi initiative to destroy any independence political force in Yemen. The Houthis are opposed to all of that's project of the Saudis and the fight is really between the Houthis who want both to protect themselves as well as to protect the Yemeni sovereignty on the one hand and the Saudi project of turning Yemen into a total dependency but Saudi Arabia it is nothing at all to do with Iran. Any last thoughts on how you see the things develop in Yemen or is it going to be bleak as it is now? At the moment I think whatever happens the picture is going to remain very bleak precisely because there is absolutely no will in the among the major powers in the world to bring the Saudi and Emiratis on to the table of some discussion of a negotiated settlement of this and Sweden asked at the United at the Security Council asked for a presented resolution asking the Saudi Emirati Alliance to have a ceasefire in place so that the negotiator appointed by the United Nations can do his work. His resolution was opposed by the U.S. combined. There is no will there to to reach any kind of settlement or to pause in the war and deal with the humanitarian situation so my sense is that the moment that it is really very bleak here and partly because at the moment Saudi Israeli American alliance is now so tight that whatever constraints the U.S might have put upon Saudi Arabia in the past are not possible because of this very tight tripartite alliance in which Saudi Arabia is facilitating the Israeli project of total occupation of annexation virtually for the Palestinian in annex and how these are in the eyes of that strong so my I'm very for the worst probably I'm very for the worst thank you rather bleak note but that's the situation that we see in Yemen that's all the time we have today do keep watching news click and also look at our webpage and YouTube video