Schiller Institute on YouTube Schiller Institute on Facebook RSS

Home >

Ending the Geopolitical War on Yemen
with a Strategy for Peace & Development

by Ulf Sandmark
August 2016

The following speech was delivered by Schiller Institute representative Ulf Sandmark to a two-day conference in London to support the Yemeni people against the Anglo-American-Saudi imperial war. He was also interviewed for the conference, which was aired on Yemen TV.

I want to thank the organizers of this conference. I consider this a milestone conference in aiding Yemen to ascertain its sovereignty, especially as it coincided with the astounding 4 million demonstration in Sanaa yesterday. I am so impressed with the courage of the Yemeni people to risk demonstrating under the direct threat of the Anglo-American-Saudi bombardment.

It was the most heroic manifestation of the sovereignty of the Yemenite nation under its new governing council and its elected parliament. What we see, is a people who has stood up to liberate itself from the most brutal aggression. With this manifestation they have already made themselves a free people in their minds.

Yemen now could join the ongoing world revolution organized by the BRICS countries and their expanding number of allies. It is more than half the world population who have liberated themselves mentally from the Western globalist economic and military domination. The BRICS have set out to supersede the Anglo-American old world order, and started to build the world in a frantic pace. BRICS is realizing visionary infrastructure projects that was put on the agenda already by the Non-Aligned Movement in the 1960s and the Bandung conference. The centerpiece of these projects is the New Silk Road [Silk Road Economic Belt], connecting Eurasia overland, and the [21st Century] Maritime Silk Road, from China passing Yemen on its way to the New Suez Canal.

The BRICS does not wait. They build their own financial institutions, security organizations, infrastructure systems, industrial centers, technology and science. This means that the peace movements have a new way to stop all the geopolitical wars like the war against Yemen. We can make Europe and the U.S. join the New Silk Road project. This would make Europe and the U.S. into allies with BRICS and allies do not fight wars. The war-hawks can be bypassed and rendered impotent. At the same time, this giant project can put all our unemployed youth to produce the machines and other means necessary.

I am here to help found an international coalition to stop the war against Yemen, as we discussed yesterday in the workshop. The idea of my organization, the international Schiller Institute led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, is to expand the ways to operate for peace with a policy for economic development. Building the New Silk road is the biggest peace project ever, building the peace by connecting nations in practice, physically with railroads, highways, canals and all kinds of infrastructure.

We want to supersede the geopolitical wars with a new paradigm of world relations, a multipolar world instead of the dying world under Anglo-American domination and financial bubbles. The new paradigm is formulated with the "win-win" concept of the Chinese President Xi Jinping, which is a concept for peaceful cooperation based on the revival of the wisdom of Kon Fu Tse [confucius]. It is opening the Silk Roads for a renewed dialogue of civilizations on the highest standpoint of philosophy, art and science, a dialogue where Yemen "the land of Wisdom," will feel at home.

In only the last months, have Japan and the Philippines been recruited away from the war-hawks who have been pushing for nuclear confrontation in the South China Sea. Japan will start cooperating with the BRICS in giant projects in Russia's Far East, in India and Indonesia. Turkey is being recruited by Russia and is stabilizing relations with Egypt, Israel, the Caucasus, the Turkish speaking Central Asia and probably with Syria. Russia also, very importantly, just blocked a new Saudi resolution in the UN Security Council against Yemen. Several Eastern European countries and also Greece are orienting to the New Silk Road and the BRICS, just like most of Africa and Ibero-America. Even here in London, the City wants to join in the Chinese currency trading and therefore there is a resistance here to those war-hawks who are risking nuclear war.

World Land-Bridge
View full size

This World Land-Bridge map describes how the New Silk Road plans to reach out to all continents. The link under Bering Strait will become a direct link between Russia and the U.S. to cement their peaceful cooperation and link the Americas to the New Silk Road. Together with the linking of Africa we will have a World Land-Bridge. And Africa can be linked both in Egypt, with Spain and Sicily, but most importantly for Yemen, under the Bab El Mandeb strait to Djibouti. This map has been compiled by the Schiller Institute out of different development and peace projects we have worked with during the last 40 years. It is part of a Special Report called The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land Bridge. This year we published the expanded Arabic translation of this report.

The Outstanding Fight For Hope in Yemen

Without hope there is no future. With a plan for the reconstruction of Yemen, the hope is made concrete to realize the potentials of the people of Yemen, its productive powers, its science and its rich heritage. The Schiller Institute is in contact with outstanding fighters in Yemen who are doing this in spite of the Anglo-American-Saudi bombardment. They have founded the Yemen Committee for the Coordination with BRICS. Each Tuesday they are courageously gathering in meetings in Sana'a to study and develop the plans for the reconstruction of Yemen.

Their leader Fouad Al-Ghaffari sent a video film as a greeting to the Schiller Institute conference in Berlin just two months ago. The video was the most moving display of courage and optimism of fighting for the highest values of mankind. I would like to end my presentation by sharing this video with you, showing his report of what they do to mobilize the hope and dignity of Yemen.

The Schiller Institute Berlin conference was deeply moved by this video and adopted the following resolution:

The conference of the Schiller Institute in Berlin on June 25-26 sends the most heartfelt greetings of support to the great nation of Yemen and the study group of Fouad Al-Ghaffari. Your courageous intellectual leadership, literally under the bombardment of satanic forces, has been an inspiration to thousands of people in the US, Latin America and Europe. We make a solemn oath to fight for the extension of the New Silk Road for the reconstruction of Yemen, so that the lives of the many men, women and children, who have been murdered, will be honored in a Renaissance of Yemen, which also will reconstruct the beautiful ancient cities and architecture. Yemen must and will become a pearl among the nations of Southwest Asia and the world very soon!

Thank you!