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posted by janrinok on Thursday June 09 2016, @11:28PM   Printer-friendly
from the as-if-we-hadn't-guessed dept.

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 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.

To use the words of the UN envoy to Yemen, the "humanitarian catastrophe" precipitated by the Arab world's richest country bombing its poorest has been almost total.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.

Source: The Independent


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by edIII on Friday June 10 2016, @12:22AM

    by edIII (791) on Friday June 10 2016, @12:22AM (#357566)

    Advanced societies do not involve themselves with the trade, for profit, of military ordnance and equipment.

    It is impossible , with the presence of money and profit, to make any claims of impartiality and unaccountability. It's one thing for an arms manufacturer to sell a handgun, or even semi-automatic rifle, to a citizen, and quite another to be selling military equipment on a large scale with foreign nations. The former can easily be explained as not being primarily for the purposes of violence, but security, while the latter can only be explained as mass violence against others for corporate profits. Even equipping our allies is problematic, as we tend to choose exceedingly poor allies (at least lately). Either that, or every major government is involved in this trend of "humanitarian catastrophes".

    On on another note, nations should not be trading military equipment and ordnance under any circumstances, as that relates to national security. I for one, think all the arms manufacturers are traitorous duplicitous lying pieces of shit that only care about profit, and certainly not our own national security. I'm also a strange bird, in that I think profit in the military industrial complex can only be seen as traitorous to their nation. I'm not interested in fighting wars, or defending my country, just to make some rich fuck richer. That rich bastard wants so much from the rest of us while we are at war? How is that suffering with their brothers and sisters, and not profiting from the suffering of their brothers and sisters? I say we send all the largest shareholders of our war machine to the actual battlefields to demonstrate their equipment. Asking them to fight for their nation, for free, just like the rest of us do, isn't anti-Capitalism, but actual patriotism.

    The £2.8bn being received by UK arms companies is blood money, and they're absolutely complicit in the actions of their foreign customer. I cannot blame any Middle Eastern citizen for wanting to blow people up in the UK at this point. After all, the UK is selling the bombs that are killing them in their fields around civilian targets. Shit, if I lived in those fields I would probably wish death upon those sitting sipping tea and making money off my misery too.

    Britain can claim they are not at war with Yemen, but that reminds me of a saying I'll paraphrase:

    Just because you don't believe in the government of the UK, doesn't mean it doesn't believe in you.

    Ask any Yemen citizen that has been bombed if they feel that they are at war with the UK. Gee, I wonder what they'll say.....

    Ohhhhh, and I just love how EU pharmaceutical corps refuse to sell the US drugs used in carrying out death sentences, but are perfectly okay with killing thousands by selling weapons of war instead. Talk about an astronomical level of hypocrisy.

    --
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  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday June 10 2016, @12:55AM

    by bob_super (1357) on Friday June 10 2016, @12:55AM (#357580)

    > all the arms manufacturers are traitorous duplicitous lying pieces of shit that only care about profit

    Gotta quote Tom Lehrer:

    Once the rockets go up,
    Who cares where they come down?
    It's not my department,
    Says Wernher Von Braun

  • (Score: 1) by Wodan on Friday June 10 2016, @10:21AM

    by Wodan (517) on Friday June 10 2016, @10:21AM (#357717)

    EU pharmaceutical corps sell weapons now? That's news to me!