By The Editorial Board
The Saudi-led coalition waging a bombing campaign in Yemen has once again been named in a United Nations draft report as the major culprit in the deaths and injuries of children in that war-ravaged Arab state. The Saudis are already said to be privately campaigning to change the report and keep its coalition off the list of armies that kill and maim children. Last year they succeeded. That should not be allowed to happen again.
The civil war that has engulfed Yemen, one of the Arab world’s poorest countries, for almost three years has created one of the worst humanitarian crises on the globe. Almost three million Yemenis are internally displaced; the numbers of acutely malnourished children and people in dire need of food assistance are the highest in the world; health services have been devastated; and a cholera epidemic has killed nearly 2,000 people and infected more than half a million in just three months. Yet a blockade by the Saudi-led coalition since 2015 has reduced humanitarian aid to a trickle.
And there’s the bombing. Since the Saudi coalition entered the fray in March 2015 to push back Houthi revolutionaries … and restore the resigned government, more than 7,600 people have been killed and 42,000 wounded, most of them in coalition airstrikes. Saudi Arabia insists its planes avoid civilian targets, but hospitals, schools and other civilian sites have been struck. On Wednesday, the United Nations reported that at least 30 civilians had been killed in Saudi bombing runs around Sana.
Last year, threatened with inclusion on the United Nations blacklist of forces that harm children, Saudi Arabia threatened to withhold financing from major humanitarian operations, and Ban Ki-moon, then secretary general, reluctantly struck the coalition off the list. But he made the episode public, effectively acknowledging that the coalition (which includes Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates) did belong on the list.
That should have put Saudi Arabia on notice. But leaked drafts of a report for 2016 by the special representative for children and armed conflict, Virginia Gamba, who was named by Mr. Ban’s successor, António Guterres, said the coalition was responsible for more than half of child casualties and three-quarters of the attacks on schools and hospitals in Yemen last year. The rebels, Al Qaeda and ISIS, which are also embroiled in the conflict, were held responsible for the rest.
The civil war, which ostensibly pits the regime … of President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi against Houthi revolutionaries …, is a tangle of religious and tribal rivalries, in which no side is innocent of atrocities. Saudi Arabia’s main motive for joining the fighting was to prop up a Sunni government against what it saw as an Iran-backed assault by Shiite rebels.
But the war is at a stalemate, and the Saudi coalition — and its American enablers, who provide military equipment, aerial refueling and targeting — simply cannot be allowed to continue killing civilians and destroying what little is left of Yemen. That is why it is imperative to publicly identify the unconscionable slaughter of innocents for what it is, and to hope that this will shame Saudi Arabia and its American backers to search for a humane end to Yemen’s hell.
Source: The New York Times, Edited by Website Team
