(Photo: Alisdare Hickson/Creative Commons)
It is more than three years since the Saudi-led coalition intervened in war-torn Yemen. As early as March 2015 the first victims have included innocent civilians. Air strikes targets have reportedly relied mainly on US intelligence reports and surveillance images.
In May, the coalition justified targeting schools and hospitals (which they claimed were used as weapon storage sites) even when the then UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Yemen, Johannes Van Der Klaauw, said that these bombings constituted a war crime. The casualties mounted and by October 2016 the UN reported that 4,125 civilians had been killed and 7,207 wounded in Yemen, the majority by coalition air strikes.
Accusations of war crimes in Yemen continue and it is within this context that the latest damning UN report is published. It confirms air strikes have hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, detention facilities, civilian boats and even medical facilities. It spelled out that “the Governments of Yemen, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are responsible for human rights violations, including unlawful deprivation of the right to life, arbitrary detention, rape, torture, ill-treatment, enforced disappearance and child recruitment, and serious violations of freedom of expression and economic, social and cultural rights, in particular the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to health.”
As is often the case with US’s forays abroad, there is a serious British dimension to the catastrophe in Yemen. The UK and the US is providing the Saudi-led coalition with intelligence, liaison officers and technical support. The UK has blood in its hands supplying a significant amount of weaponry, including military aircraft, that to its biggest arms market.
Shamefully, Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, left it to Middle East Minister, Alistair Burt, to defend Britain’s record arms deal with Saudi Arabia following the publication of the latest UN report. This is despite being told to “refrain” from providing arms that could be used in the conflict. “The coalition acted in support of a legitimate Government; they are currently having missiles fired at civilian targets in their own state and I do not see the political justification for withdrawing our arms,” Burt argued.
Instead, the minister effectively praised the admission by the coalition’s own investigative mechanism in the latest atrocity in the bombing of a school bus in Yemen in which dozens were killed including at least 26 children. “The report produced by the Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT) is almost unparalleled in terms of admitting error and pointing out where that error was. I think that the hand of the UK can be seen in the work that we have done with the coalition over time in order to ensure that should things go wrong, there is proper accountability.”
Unfortunately, Britain is by no means an innocent bystander in the devastating bombardment of Yemen, with the destruction creating what the UN General Secretary has described as the ‘world’s worst humanitarian crisis.’
In January 2016, Saudi Foreign Minister, Adel al-Jubeir, said, “We have British, American officials and officials from other countries in our command and control centre. They know what the target list is and they have a sense of what it is that we are doing and what we are not doing,” he told journalists in London after meeting British ministers and US secretary of state, John Kerry.
UK Ministry of Defence said that the military officials were not directly choosing targets or typing in codes for the Saudi “smart bombs” but confirmed that they were training their counterparts in doing so.
“We support Saudi forces through long-standing, pre-existing arrangements,” a spokesman said, adding that the purpose of the training was to ensure “best practice” and compliance with international humanitarian law. “UK military personnel are not directly involved in Saudi-led Coalition operations,” a spokeswoman said.
But to commend its arch Arab ally for causing just “collateral damage” is beneath contempt. The JIAT only suggested that the attack should not have taken place when it did rather than its complicity in killing children.
Human Rights Watch found that the coalition’s JIAT has failed to carry out credible investigations since its establishment in 2016 as a public relations mouthpiece. It has been charged with failing to meet international standards regarding transparency, impartiality, and independence of its claimed investigative work. Like Israel, Saudi Arabia and its allies cannot hide behind its own mouthpiece with the collusion of the UK.
