Global Research, January 19, 2016
Region: Middle East & North Africa
There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent
people. (Howard
Zinn, 1922-2010.)
Britain’s aiding and abetting of the brutal, head chopping, summarily
executing, flogging regime of Saudi Arabia continues unabated.
In spite of a “Letter before action sent as threat of legal action over
arms export licences to Saudi Arabia increases …” (1) by London law firm Leigh
Day, acting on behalf of Campaign Against the Arms Trade: “ … challenging the
government’s decision to export arms despite increasing evidence that Saudi
forces are violating international humanitarian law (IHL) in Yemen … “, it
transpires that UK military advisors are also “working alongside Saudi bomb
targeters.”
According to the Daily Telegraph:
“British military advisers are in control rooms assisting the Saudi-led
coalition staging bombing raids across Yemen that have killed thousands of
civilians, the Saudi Foreign Minister and the Ministry of Defence have
confirmed.” (2)
Briefing the Telegraph and other journalists the Saudi Foreign Minister,
Adel al-Jubeir, said that the UK and other countries in the control centre: “ …
are aware of the target lists.”
The “target list” would seem to have included five attacks on schools, disrupting
the remaining shreds of normality for 6,500 children. “In some cases the
schools were struck more than once, suggesting the strikes were deliberately
targeted”, states a report by Amnesty International. (3)
“In October 2015 the Science and Faith School in Beni Hushayash, Sana’a
was attacked on four separate
occasions within the space of a few weeks. The third strike killed
three civilians and wounded more than 10 people.” The only school in the
village, it provided education for 1,200 students.
In the village of Hadhran, the Kheir School: “also suffered multiple air strikes causing extensive damage,
rendering it unusable.” In the same village two civilian homes and a mosque
were bombed, two children were killed, their mother injured, with one man killed
and another injured whilst praying in the mosque.
The director of another school in Hodeidah city, the al-Shaymeh
Education Complex for Girls, which catered for some 3,200 students described
her horror after the school came
under attack twice within
a matter of days in August 2015 killing two people. No students were present at
the school during the attack, but a man and woman were killed. (All emphases
added.)
“I felt that humanity has ended. I mean, a place of learning, to be hit
in this way, without warning… where is humanity … “ she asked.
The al-Asma school in Mansouriya, was destroyed in a bombing in August.
However, these horrors barely scrape the surface of the criminal and
humanitarian outrage.
Yemen’s Ministry of Education showed Amnesty data revealing more than
1,000 schools inoperable, 254 completely destroyed, 608 partially damaged and
421 being used as shelter by those displaced by the Saudi led, UK assisted
onslaught.
The UK is subject to the Arms Trade Treaty which entered in to force on
the 24th December 2014 and which Britain has both signed and
ratified (2nd April 2014) which prohibits arms transfers: “ …
if they have knowledge that the arms would be used to commit attacks against
civilians, civilian objects or other violations of international humanitarian
law.”
Britain “have knowledge that … arms would be used … against civilians or
civilian objects” – it is seemingly also helping to plan them, with the US also
providing arms and “intelligence.”
The targets for which the UK surely share responsibility also include
three medical facilities supported by Medecins Sans Frontieres, the latest on
10th January, a hospital in Saada in the north of the country
resulting in six deaths by the 17th January, in which eight
were also injured, two critically.
“This is the third severe incident affecting an MSF health facility in
Yemen in the last three months. On 27 October Haydan hospital was destroyed by
an airstrike … and on 3 December a health centre in Taiz was also hit”, with
nine people wounded.
The exact co-ordinates of the facilities had been given to the Saudi
led, British advised coalition, as they had when the US bombed the MSF hospital
in Kunduz, Afghanistan on 3rd October 2015.
It seems giving details of humanitarian facilities to trained killers is
interpreted as an invitation to become target practice.
Other potential war crimes have included destruction of the Al-Sham
water bottling factory, killing thirteen workers about to head home from the
night shift and: “markets, apartment buildings and refugee camps … eleven
people in a mosque.” (4)
Also destroyed last September was formerly one of the country’s largest
employers, the ceramics factory, where Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch stated they had found definitive proof a UK made Marconi Cruise Missile
used in the destruction.
Amnesty also stated that they had: “found evidence of apparent war
crimes in connection with thirteen airstrikes around the north-eastern Saada
region, which killed about one hundred civilians including fifty nine women and
twenty two children.” (Guardian 25th November 2015.)
Some population centres are so comprehensively decimated that survivors
wonder if they are finally safe, since there is nothing left to bomb.
Doctor Natalie Roberts, working with MSF, told the New York Times (see 4) of
women giving birth in caves, feeling them the safest places.
The human cost, as ever, defies imagination: “Omar Mohammed al-Ghaily,
28, sat in the center of town, near the ruins of his clothing store … The
strikes killed Seif Ahmed Seif, who owned an umbrella store. Mr. Ghaily kept
Mr. Seif’s identity card, maybe to return it one day to his daughter, who lives
far away in Taiz. He kept coming to the rubble, he said, because he had ‘no
place to go.’ “
Elsewhere, when locals tried to dig the barber from the rubble of his
shop: “We found only his legs.” Bombs being dropped range from 250 pounds to
2,000 pounds. Yet last September the US was: “finalizing a deal to provide more
weapons to Saudi Arabia including missiles for its F-15 fighter jets. Yemen’s
population is just 24.41 million (2013 figure.)
Between March and September 2015, Britain issued thirty seven arms
export licences for arms transfers to Saudi Arabia, pointed out a correspondent
to the Guardian, noting: “The UK boasts that it has ‘one of the most rigorous
and transparent export control regimes in the world.’ If this really is the
case, the government needs to immediately suspend all arms transfers to the
conflict and launch an investigation into how these weapons have been used.”
(5)
Whilst the Ministry of Defence continues its mantra of having one of:
“the most robust arms export control regimes in the world”, unease is growing
amongst government legal advisers, with one from the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office telling the Independent (27th November 2015): “There are
many Elizabeth Wilmshursts around here at the moment. Not all are being
listened to”, referring to the senior government legal advisor to the Foreign
and Commonwealth Office who resigned in March 2003 because she was convinced of
the illegality of the proposed attack on Iraq. She had worked with the
Department since 1974.
It can only be hoped that some of the “many Elizabeth Wilmshursts” will
publicly call time on David Cameron’s government’s collusion in atrocities in
Yemen and that Leigh Day and the Campaign Against the Arms Trade legal
initiative bears fruit. Justice for so much in the region has been long delayed.
Notes
- http://www.globalresearch.ca/britain-and-saudi-arabia-collusion-in-barbarism/5500661
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/12102089/UK-military-working-alongside-Saudi-bomb-targeters-in-Yemen-war.html
- https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/12/bombing-of-schools-by-saudi-arabia-led-coalition-in-yemen/
- http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/world/middleeast/airstrikes-hit-civilians-yemen-war.html?_r=0
- http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/17/yemen-and-the-scandal-of-uk-arms-sales-to-saudi-arabia
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Felicity Arbuthnot, Global Research, 2016
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