By Diane Abbott
After repeated claims that Britain’s reloading of the Saudi Arabian Royal Air Force’s bomb bays does not mean Britain is at war with Yemen - where its ordnance are dropped - the Government has finally conceded that it is.
In a tense exchange with parliamentarians in a debate on the British sale of arms to Saudi Arabia, Alan Duncan, the government’s Special Envoy to Yemen, said: "We are in conflict for a reason".
Duncan’s admission officially confirms of what every sensible person has known since March 2015, when Saudi Arabia intervened in Yemen’s civil war with an air campaign made possible by British planes and British bombs, and for which UK arms companies made £2.8bn in revenues in the first year alone.
But while NGOs and MPs in several parliamentary committees have been sharp in their criticism of the Government for continuing to fuel this war, the Government does nothing, meekly claiming over and over again there is no evidence of Saudi war crimes in Yemen and that Britain regularly "seeks assurances" from Saudi Arabia that it is not committing those crimes.
In March, the UK director of Human Rights Watch told the arms export control committee that he has personally handed evidence to the Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond, complete with GPS coordinates, of Saudi air strikes on civilian targets. This month Amnesty International sent photographs of British-made BL-755 cluster bombs partially exploded in recent months discovered in farmland near the village of al-Khadhra in northern Yemen.
In a letter sent to Defence Secretary Michael Fallon this week, Amnesty International accused the Government of "wildly implausible claims" to wriggle out of claiming responsible for UK-licenced cluster bombs killing Yemini civilians.
The Government is wriggling because, under Britain’s own arms export laws, it is illegal for it to sell arms to a state that is at a "clear risk" of committing international humanitarian crimes. Acknowledging the chorus of evidence of Saudi war crimes in Yemen would be tantamount to admitting Britain’s complicity in them.
The truth is that the arms trade of a handful of private arms companies with Saudi Arabia is simply off limits to our country’s democratic apparatus as well as its civil society.
This week, Saudi Arabia successfully strong-armed the UN to remove them from a child rights blacklist, which also contained all the other parties to Yemen’s civil war, reportedly threatening to pull its humanitarian aid to Yemen. (The Saudi Government claims that suggestion is "wildly exaggerated".)
Source: The Independent, Edited by Website Team
