War Turning Yemen Into Broken State, Beyond Repair: UN

The war in Yemen is turning the impoverished country into an “unviable state” that will be almost beyond repair, a top UN official warned ahead of a donor conference aimed at averting a famine.
Tens of thousands of people have been killed and millions have gone hungry in the six-year conflict, in what the United Nations describes as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Schools, factories, hospitals and businesses have been destroyed or shuttered, depriving hundreds of thousands of their livelihoods. Countless children have been denied an education and some have been recruited to fight.
With so much damage to its infrastructure, Yemen is now witnessing “the worst development crisis in the world”, Auke Lootsma, the United Nations Development Programme’s country director, told AFP in an interview.
“Yemen has lost more than two decades of development progress… and is definitely one of the poorest, if not the poorest country in the world at the moment, given the negative development indicators that we see,” he said Sunday.
“If you continue like this, Yemen as a country will be very difficult to rebuild. If more assets get destroyed and people become poorer and poorer, then it will become almost like an unviable state.”
“The war has to stop now. Yemenis have suffered enough,” said Lootsma, urging donors to rapidly provide financial aid at Monday’s conference hosted by the UN, Switzerland and Sweden.