Local Editor
If it wasn't so sad and tragic it would almost be laughable. Credible commentators, including a leading German analyst, have said last week's bombing of a school bus in Yemen probably doesn't qualify as a war crime because the Royal Saudi Air Force is so incompetent the odds are it just made a mistake.
That "mistake" killed at least 43 people, 29 of whom were school children under the age of 15, and wounded between 43 and 63 more.
The bus, which is reported to have been taking a group of children to summer camp, was travelling through the crowded Dahyan market in Saada, the capital of Saada province. The region is the traditional homeland of the Houthi revolutionaries … who rose up against the Saudi-backed Yemeni regime … in 2014.
It is just over a year since the Saudis, the leaders of a coalition which includes the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Senegal, Sudan and Tunisia, declared the entire city of Saada, home to more than 50,000 people, a military target.
Despite this, and the hundreds of deadly attacks which have slaughtered tens of thousands of non-combatants since the "proxy" war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen began, both the United States and Britain continue to sell billions of dollars worth of weapons a year to the Saudis.
The two nations also provide major training, intelligence and logistical support.
The Australian government approved four military exports, the nature of which has been kept under wraps, to Saudi Arabia in 2017.
Yemen is currently the world's worst humanitarian crisis. At least 10,000 people have been killed over the past four years and an estimated two million have been forced to flee their homes. Another 230,000 have been wounded.
The Saudis, who say the Houthis are a proxy force for their arch enemy, Iran, launched the military aggression … to support the Yemeni regime in 2015.
The Kingdom's most significant achievement so far has been to demonstrate the inability of its military, which are among the best armed and equipped in the world, to take the fight to poorly armed rebels.
Thursday's tragic strike was the latest in a long line of incidents which suggest that either the Saudis, even with the active assistance of the Americans and the British, can't differentiate between hospitals, schools, orphanages and school buses on one hand, and missile launching sites on the other, or they just doesn't care.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the original dispute that sparked Yemen's civil war, the conflict is at a point where it must not be allowed to continue. The easiest way to stop it would be for Saudi Arabia's enablers, particularly the US and the UK, to stop selling weapons and withdraw their logistic and other support.
Given the well-publicised failings of the Saudi military it is unlikely the Kingdom would be able to keep its hi-tech weaponry in the field for more than a few weeks or months.
President Trump has recently demonstrated a willingness to tell his friends, including NATO, Canada, the UK and Germany what they should and should not do.
If his administration does care about the slaughter of innocents then he should also stand up to the Saudis. Or are some innocents more equal than others?
Source: The Canberra Times, Edited by Website Team
