Beyond Fundraising

By Ayesha Nasir, Hamilton, Ontario

The headline from Sky News is jarring: “Coronavirus will 'delete Yemen from maps all over the world'”.

The headline quoted a Yemeni engineer and the rest of the report looked at the rising deaths in Yemen due to COVID-19 and the pre-existing humanitarian crisis due to the war in Yemen.

The United Nations Refugee Agency in Yemen, also quoted in the article, said that “the coronavirus may be the straw which will break the camel's back in Yemen.” The piece made references to donor funding being reduced in the pandemic and the closure of some programs at the UNHCR.

Soon after, NGOs started using the same language to describe how the country was going to be wiped out if donors around the world did not do anything about it. What these NGOs did not add in many of the initial posts was the context to what was going on in Yemen. Charities framed what was happening in Yemen as a humanitarian crisis, with no mention of a war, without framing it as a war that was resulting in a humanitarian crisis.

A country is not a volcano that erupts on its own. Likewise, the conflict in Yemen is not a problem which charitable donations can fix.

Charities often operate in incredibly difficult circumstances where there are like doctors with their hands tied. They are operating in dire conditions and they are unable to publicly name their diagnosis. What they are forced to do instead is name the symptoms they can without getting in too much political trouble for it.

Few, if any, charities are able to name a crisis for what it truly is. They obfuscate the root causes of the death and devastation that they operate with. Take for example the ways charities have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. They will name it. They will do all they can to convince you, their potential or existing donor, that it’s their priority to address it. In fact, one of the charities wrote on Instagram: “As coronavirus spreads, Yemen’s health system has completely collapsed & the country is on verge on famine.”

To make no mention of the war in Yemen or to dilute the impact that ongoing war is doing is a disservice to the work that charities themselves are doing. Take for example the bombing of a hospital by the Obama administration in 2015. Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) took notice that their trauma centre in Kunduz, Afghanistan was attacked and 42 people were killed. They wrote that the airstrike was a “Blatant breach of International Humanitarian Law”.

They made no broader statement on the American military occupation of Afghanistan, but they did not have to. They called out the government for threatening its facilities through this attack, for killing the people it worked to cure, and for labelling them as collateral damage. Dr. Joanne Liu, the organization's international president, said in Macleans regarding the phone call she got from Barack Obama: “President Obama gave his sympathy to the families. One of the things is, I actually never thanked the president. What I said is, I acknowledge that you’re giving sympathy to the people who have lost a loved one, the 42 families, and I will relay the message. And the reason why is, I could not thank someone who killed 42 people, bottom line. So that was it. People were really upset about that. I still think it was the right thing to do.”

May all charities, Muslim or otherwise, have the capacity to say and do the right thing.