On May 29, 2020, Yemeni Health Minister Dr. Nasser Baum gave a televised speech assuring viewers that his country was free of the novel coronavirus and was ready to confront the pandemic. In fact, the virus was already spreading and Yemen was badly unprepared to stop it. While estimates are difficult because testing was so spotty, a recent study showed that Yemen’s COVID-19 mortality rate was a staggering 27 percent, five times greater than the global average. The problems were not just medical or economic, due to the deteriorating healthcare system or grinding poverty, but equally political and military. The internationally recognized Yemeni government in which Baum served governed only isolated pockets within the country. The task of dealing with the pandemic — equipping and guarding hospitals, enforcing quarantines, and maintaining basic services — instead fell to the armed non-state actors that ruled on the ground. Provincial governors and local strongmen set up roadblocks, closed down crowded markets, and curbed qat-chewing circles at their own initiative. Without oversight or authorization from the central government, they often seized the opportunity to further their own political agendas in the process. Repeated calls for humanitarian ceasefires went unheeded. Houthi forces blamed the disease on Saudi Arabia and used it as pretext to clamp down on political oppositionin Sana’a and the north. Separatist militias in the south, ostensive allies to the Yemeni government, hijacked medical equipment from the Aden docks, trying to compel the international community to acknowledge their bid for independence.
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