Members
of Congress have largely avoided speaking out about the famine and
cholera epidemic in Yemen, even as aid organizations, celebrities,
and late-night TV hosts sounded the alarm this past week.
But
one U.S. senator is breaking the Senate silence — and even going
further, explaining how U.S. support for the war has enabled the
world’s largest humanitarian crisis.
Connecticut
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy spoke out about the crisis on the Senate
floor Tuesday, while showing pictures of starving Yemeni children.
His remarks went much further than those of most public officials,
not shying away from the reality that the cholera epidemic could
never have taken place without U.S. support.
For
U.S. officials, the difficulty in publicly addressing the crisis is
caught up in U.S. complicity, given that the disease and starvation
in Yemen is not the result of a random hurricane or an earthquake,
but the expected result of deliberate actions taken by the United
States and its allies in the Gulf.
Murphy’s
speech, delivered on the Senate floor Tuesday, had been viewed later
that day by fewer than 200 people.
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