Iona Craig writes:
If you were told that British fighter jets and British bombs
were involved in a Middle Eastern war which has left thousands of civilians
dead, you could be forgiven for assuming this referred to Iraq, or perhaps the
more recent UK aerial campaign extended to Syria.
What is less likely to spring to mind is another,
forgotten conflict in the region – a war sponsored by the UK that is rarely
talked about.
For the past nine months, British-supplied planes and
British-made missiles have been part of near-daily air raids in Yemen carried
out by a nine-country, Saudi Arabian-led coalition.
In this conveniently hidden
campaign, thousands have died. Bombardments by the Saudi coalition accounted
for 60 per cent of the 4,493 civilian casualties in the first seven months of
this year.
Saudi Arabia waded into what began as a domestic political power
struggle between the country’s incumbent president, Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi, and
his predecessor of 33 years’ standing, Ali Abdullah Saleh.
The marginalised,
predominantly Shia Houthi militiamen, viewed as an Iranian proxy by the Sunni
kingdom, joined forces with Saleh’s loyalists in the military to seize swathes
of territory over the past 18 months, eventually forcing Hadi into self-imposed
exile in Riyadh earlier this year.
A month after the aerial
intervention began in March, the Saudis boasted that the coalition had dropped
at least 1,000 bombs in up to 125 strikes a day.
With Britain as the number one
supplier of major weapons to the Saudi kingdom last year, and scores of
British-made fighter jets currently being flown by the Saudi royal air force,
along with British technical support, UK involvement is irrefutable. For anyone
that has been on the ground in Yemen since the conflict began, it is obvious
that civilians are bearing the brunt of the conflict.
Over five months spent in Yemen since the civil war
began, I have witnessed numerous air strikes and visited the sites of scores
more bombings across the country.
The mounds of rubble I clambered over in
recent months include the remnants of schools, hospitals, markets, food stores,
civilian homes and public buses.
Many of these were “double-tap”
strikes, where first responders were attacked as they tried to rescue the
victims of an initial bombing.
The evidence I collected from witnesses and
survivors clearly indicated that civilians are, at best, being indiscriminately
killed and, in some cases, targeted.
Despite a strong likelihood that British
weapons are being used – Britain exported more than 1,000 bombs to Saudi in the
first six months of 2015 – to target civilians and civilian infrastructure, the
UK government refuses to recognise its complicity in clear breaches of
international humanitarian law.
While our government appears more
than happy to sell our collective morality along with bombs and fighter jets to
the Saudi kingdom, we should not be.
We are playing a significant role.
The
Foreign Office insists that it has “assurances” from the Saudi-led coalition
that its bombing campaign is adhering to international law. These are of little
comfort to now orphaned four-year-old Rashid Othman.
I saw his father’s ashen body
wedged underneath the bus he was travelling in to find food after it was hit by
at least two air strikes in the sands of Lahij province.
At least 30 passengers
died. There were no conceivable military targets in the vicinity.
Similarly, the Saudis assured me
– after I had spoken to half a dozen witnesses about the double-tap strike –
that the coalition was not responsible for the death of at least 50 civilians
killed at a goat market in July, even though no one else is carrying out air
strikes in Yemen.
Equally, they say they had nothing to do with the bombing in
October of a Médecins sans Frontières hospital.
Saudi promises are one thing.
But, last week, a group of eminent lawyers determined that British arms sales
to Saudi are unlawful and called for an immediate halt.
The Government invites
us to admire the £98m in overseas aid for Yemen in the current financial year.
It is small change compared with the £1.7bn worth of UK export licences to
Saudi in the first six months of 2015.
David Cameron’s compulsion to
keep supporting Saudi’s war can, in addition to the arms trade benefits, be put
down to a previous warning given by the Saudi royals.
After the aborted Serious
Fraud Office probe into alleged corruption surrounding the British-Saudi
Al-Yamamah arms deal in 2006, it emerged that the Saudis had threatened to stop
passing on intelligence about potential terrorist threats if the investigation
continued.
Perhaps we should also ask what the Government’s exchange rate is
for British lives saved to Yemeni civilians, thousands of whom are already
dead.
But this Saudi threat raises
another contradiction.
The main, and arguably only, beneficiaries of the
current war are al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the country’s fledgling
Islamic State offshoot, who have flourished as a result of the conflict.
And,
as long as it continues, it will only fuel their rise.
On top of all this, UN agencies
have warned of mass famine, brought on by the blockade of Yemen’s sea and air
ports imposed by the Saudi coalition, which is preventing vital food, fuel and
medical supplies from entering the country.
Aid agencies say Yemen’s
humanitarian crisis is now the worst in the world, with more than 21 million
people in need of some form of humanitarian aid.
The combined threats of air
strikes, a ground war and famine are likely to contribute to the already
overwhelming European migrant crisis.
More than 2.3 million Yemenis
have been internally displaced by the war, many forcibly by the bombings, while
more than 160,000 people have arrived in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Oman, Saudi
Arabia, Somalia and Sudan to escape the conflict.
The majority took the
treacherous journey by boat across the Bab-el-Mandeb strait that separates
Yemen from the Horn of Africa.
The British government may choose
to stay silent and ignore the evidence against it, even when raised by lawyers.
We, too, may wish to claim ignorance, but Yemenis will not.
As long as the UK
keeps sponsoring Saudi’s war, civilians are going to continue to die from
bombs, bullets and a blockade, doing so in the full knowledge that we are
supporting their suffering.
If we fail to ask the Government questions about
British involvement, our inertia makes all of us complicit.
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