Records are maintained to mark the pages of history. The Yemeni Coalition to Monitor Human Rights Violations by the Houthis has toiled hard for over a year to be able to document the incidents of violence, atrocity and heinous criminal activity that has prevailed in the country and spilled over its borders. These scholars have searched for the truth often putting their lives on the line and going right into the battlefield so they get their facts right.
With over 3,000 people victims of cold blooded murder, as high as 7,000 individuals wounded and maimed by indiscriminate shelling and nearly 6,000 people abducted without cause, the list of incursions against human dignity and the conventions of war continue to build. And it is not yet over.
But these figures speak eloquently to the world because each of them can be verified, not just in terms of names and places but with details of the cruelty involved. If the timings are not always available it is because of the risk factor in researchers making forays to the frontline or being turned into victims themselves by exposure. They are an international panel and have brought to bear on this prickly issue transparency, honesty and a new awareness of truly how bad things are and why the military coalition has to keep at it even though it would want to bring the war to an end and restore peace in Yemen.
Keeping in mind the final objective the report is an adequate indictment as it stands and has to be more than just required reading for the rest of the world. It must be the core of future concerted action to move against the perpetrators and compel them to disarm and end this bitter conflict. The moral compass is so against the Houthis after the presentation of these facts that even the most tolerant or neutral nation on the planet has to say, this is a massacre of human rights and must be stopped.
One cannot look upon these figures as mathematical statistics. They are men, women who have been torn from the roots, killed, maimed and displaced in the Houthi hunt for power.
New options, spurred by the knowledge that they have to be stopped, will be considered. And despite the several occasions on which the offer of a cease-fire on humanitarian grounds has been rejected it will still be on the table as a right thing to do and to signify the beginning of the end of the blight.
