Humanitarian catastrophes and the world's forgotten conflicts

The U.S. House of Representatives got its act together last week and passed legislation that provided $95 billion in military aid to Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan and the wider Indo-Pacific region.

It was an important moment — some would say “Churchillian” — and House Speaker Mike Johnson and the representatives that voted for the bills deserve applause for doing the right thing. (That sentence says volumes about the state of U.S. politics. Ponder it.)

Big crises such as Ukraine and Israel and big concerns such as Taiwan and the wider Indo-Pacific mark this historic moment. Unfortunately, sadly and tragically, there are other catastrophes that, by virtue of their longevity, their steady devolution and their distance — both geographic and conceptual — from us, have sunk into the background, unable to command attention despite their size and scale. I want to flag three today.

The first is Ethiopia, which is struggling to recover from a civil war that has been called the worst armed conflict of the 21st century. The war claimed the lives of more than half a million soldiers and as many as 360,000 civilians. While the government in November 2022 reached a cease-fire with the main rebel force, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front, a second insurgency continues, another rebellion has broken out and armed militias dot the country.

The result is a looming humanitarian catastrophe. The United Nations estimates that nearly 30 million people, or about a quarter of the population, need emergency food aid. The U.K. government warned that more than 3 million people face acute hunger in the north of the country.

This is not unprecedented: Forty years ago, Ethiopia faced a similar crisis, described by the BBC as “a biblical famine in the 20th century” and “the closest thing to hell on Earth.” Aid groups warn that the dark situation “could pale in comparison” with the current “unfolding famine.”

(The response then was a little different. Those reports prompted musicians Bob Geldof of The Boomtown Rats and Midge Ure, a journeyman of ‘70s and ‘80s bands, to write and record the celebrity single “Do They Know it’s Christmas?” and arrange the Live Aid series of concerts. Those shows were held simultaneously around the world on July 13, 1985, reaching some 1.9 billion people in 150 nations, or about 40% of the world’s population. The jury’s still out on the effectiveness of those efforts to raise awareness of the crisis and address it. This week’s column suggests that the verdict is not a good one.)

Second on my list is Sudan, where another civil war erupted after a democratic government was unable to stabilize the country when longtime President Omar al-Bashir was removed in a coup. The conflict has become increasingly violent, resulting in nearly 16,000 deaths in the last year — the U.N. estimates casualties at 14,790 — and forcing 8.6 million people to flee their homes, 1.7 million of whom have fled to neighboring countries. Aid agencies call it “the world’s biggest internal displacement crisis.”

Those agencies say that 25 million people are in desperate need of aid with 18 million Sudanese facing severe food insecurity and almost 5 million on the brink of famine. About 3.8 million children under the age of 5 suffer from malnutrition.

Third is Yemen. Nine years of civil war have decimated its national infrastructure and the economy, and estimates of the number of people that need some form of assistance range from 18.2 million to 21.6 million (of a population of 34.5 million). An estimated 4.5 million people have been displaced; half the population (17.3 million people) suffer from high levels of acute food insecurity; and 6 million are reckoned to be on the brink of famine.

Malnutrition rates among Yemeni women and children are among the highest in the world, with some 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under the age of 5 suffering acute malnutrition.

Other countries suffer their own humanitarian crises. No list can omit Afghanistan, wracked by 46 years of civil war (although others might trace the turmoil still further back in time), Syria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Myanmar and Haiti. Common to each, including the three I highlighted, is an enduring, intractable conflict that global powers have avoided direct involvement in — Afghanistan being an obvious exception — although they frequently back proxies.

They fell off the radar of Western media, primarily because there is no direct involvement of Western forces as well as that distance mentioned earlier. The existence of other, more immediate conflicts, pushes them out of the spotlight, too. A quick search of the Japan Times database turned up just one story about Ethiopia’s situation in the last year, none about Yemen (although there were dozens that mentioned it in the context of the Israel-Hamas war) and 10 about Sudan. The Japan Times isn’t alone. A similarly search of the Financial Times found two articles about Ethiopia, dozens about Yemen — none addressing the famine — and a handful about Sudan. To its credit, an FT editorial did call the conflict in Sudan “the forgotten war.”

Not surprisingly, efforts to address those crises are invariably underfunded. The U.N. has said that it needs $2.7 billion to aid Sudan this year, but it has raised a mere 6% of that amount. It needs $3.4 billion for Ethiopia and has raised about a quarter of that amount, the vast majority of it being pledged after an emergency meeting earlier this month. The U.N. wants $2.7 billion to help civilians in Yemen this year, an amount that is a third more than the shortfall in last year’s needs.

Pretending this grievous state of affairs isn’t our problem won’t work. The moral case is obvious. Such suffering among civilians, especially by children, is inhumane. Yet, despite that seeming imperative, that hasn’t been enough to prompt meaningful action.

So, the more powerful argument has to be self-interest. That case is strong. Instability and disorder in these countries are dangerous. They create a black hole, sucking in opportunistic countries that seek to extend their own influence and recalibrate the regional balance of power.

More worrisome is the inevitable spillover of tensions. This has been especially clear in the case of Yemen, where the Houthi insurgency, backed by Iran (seeking to expand its influence, proof that the previous point isn’t hypothetical), has become a force of regional disorder, disrupting shipping in the Persian Gulf and sending shock waves through supply chains that traverse that vital maritime domain. While there is little reporting on the situation in Yemen, the trouble stirred up by Houthi rebels as they plunder ships has become daily fodder for the international press.

I’ll leave the policy recommendations to regional specialists; I won’t presume to encroach on their turf. But it is too easy to lose sight of these tragedies as other crises demand our attention. We cannot afford to forget or ignore them.