If Yemen Had Oil to Offer or Cameras to Fear, Maybe the World Would Care. But It Has Only Truth, and That’s What Got It Killed

There are wars that make headlines, and there are wars that make ghosts. Yemen’s belongs to the latter. For more than a decade, this country has bled beneath the weight of political indifference — a tragedy so vast it has become invisible. The world’s response has not been silence born of ignorance, but silence chosen for convenience.

In 2025, as the global community convened to debate climate policy and trade corridors, Yemeni journalists were being abducted in the night. Women Journalists Without Chains, a press-freedom organization founded by Nobel laureate Tawakkol Karman, reported that activist Mohammed Mohammed Saleh Al-Yafa’i was seized in Dhamar by Houthi authorities for the crime of urging citizens to raise their national flag. The message was simple: even patriotism is forbidden if it questions power.

Not long after, the home of journalist Fouad Al-Nahari was raided following his complaints about threats tied to his reporting. His whereabouts remain uncertain. In Houthi-controlled areas, disappearance has become a sentence in itself — one that requires no trial, no paperwork, only silence from those left behind.

Under international law, these acts are clear violations. Yemen is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, whose Articles 9 and 19 guarantee freedom from arbitrary detention and the right to expression. The Convention Against Torture prohibits exactly what human-rights monitors now document in Sana’a’s detention centres. Beatings, isolation, humiliation, and denial of medical care. The United Nations knows this. It has known it for years.

And yet, nothing changes. The UN’s resolutions read like epitaphs, eloquent, sorrowful, and entirely without consequence. Each new report arrives with the same vocabulary of “grave concern” and “urgent calls” that never translate into protection. Meanwhile, journalists vanish, and the machinery of bureaucracy hums on, detached and immaculate.

The uncomfortable truth is that Yemen’s suffering persists not because it is hidden, but because it is tolerated. The world’s most powerful nations condemn violations in statements while continuing the trade that fuels them. Arms contracts are renewed under the language of “strategic stability.” Diplomats speak of “complex regional dynamics.” In plain terms, morality has been outsourced to paperwork.

For years, coalition airstrikes have reduced homes, schools, and hospitals to rubble. Yet even this catastrophe competes poorly for attention against conflicts with greater geopolitical stakes. Western democracies that lecture about press freedom have sold the very weapons used to silence it. Their signatures are etched on the shrapnel buried in Yemeni soil.

The Houthis, in turn, invoke sovereignty as a shield for repression. They detain writers, torture activists, and execute opponents under the banner of resistance, a word emptied of its dignity and filled with control. We claim to seek peace. In the middle, civilians bury their dead beneath slogans.

International organisations often describe Yemen as a Humanitarian crisis, as though famine were a natural phenomenon. But starvation is not weather, it is policy. The siege of cities, the blockade of ports, the obstruction of aid are all deliberate instruments of power. And every time the world debates rather than intervenes, that policy is validated.

For journalists trapped inside Yemen, truth has become an act of suicide. The UN Plan of Action on the Safety of Journalists declares that “no story is worth a life.” In Yemen, the opposite is true, every story costs one. Those who persist do so with the understanding that their reports may never leave the country. Or that they may never leave it alive.

The global media, too, bears a quiet complicity. Once the coverage window closed, editors turned elsewhere, citing fatigue and danger. The absence of foreign correspondents has allowed propaganda to become the dominant record. The few who still write about Yemen rely on second hand testimony, voices trembling over encrypted calls, their faces unseen.

And readers, perhaps without meaning to, have learned to scroll past the suffering. Yemen has no viral imagery, no televised urgency, no celebrity campaigns. It has only statistics, and statistics rarely provoke empathy. The world claims compassion, but only when cruelty is convenient to witness.

If the measure of humanity is not how loudly it speaks, but how honestly it listens, then Yemen stands as proof of our failure. The United Nations was built to prevent precisely this, the erosion of conscience through procedure, yet it has become the stage upon which indifference performs legitimacy.

Yemen’s silence is not natural, it is manufactured. It is the outcome of political caution, economic interest, and moral fatigue. And until that silence is broken, until the disappearance of a single journalist matters as much as the rhetoric of a summit, the world’s declarations of human rights will remain what they are now: eloquent hypocrisies.

Because if Yemen had oil to offer, or cameras to fear, perhaps the world would care. But it has only truth. And in this century, that is precisely what gets you killed.