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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
(Score: 5, Informative) by butthurt on Friday June 10 2016, @01:01AM
a couple of titbits I found on the Web:
—https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/22/saudi-arabia-surge-arms-imports-middle-east [theguardian.com]
—https://web.archive.org/web/20110814154242/http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DRIT=1&DBID=1&LNGID=1&TMID=111&FID=376&PID=0&IID=5177&TTL=Arms_for_the_King_and_His_Family:_The_U.S._Arms_Sale_to_Saudi_Arabia [archive.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by purple_cobra on Friday June 10 2016, @11:03AM
Unfortunately because we're dependent on oil, we can't just cut off all ties with Saudi Arabia; we're also dependent on cheap trinkets so we can't cut off all ties with China, either. I think it's far, far too late to be looking for solutions to this now. We should have been throwing money at developing alternatives to oil since the 70s but oil has served us well and while we know it'll run out, that won't be for aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages yet. I wouldn't mind betting that no big, nation-state kind of money will be put into developing alternatives to oil until 10 minutes before we're due to slurp the last gallon out of the earth.
We also have pretty strong indications that Daesh are funded, at least in part, by Saudi Arabia, in an effort to spread Wahabist Islam throughout the region and the world by force. Cut off funding to SA, which in turn would cut funding to Daesh, may leave them at each others' throats instead of butchering their way across the middle-east, though it would undoubtedly result in yet more civilian casualties. There's been far too much death already.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Friday June 10 2016, @07:25PM
Well, the North Sea hasn't entirely [scotsman.com] run dry yet. Also, if it's all right to purchase from Iran [wikipedia.org], Iraq [wikipedia.org] and Libya [nytimes.com] again [reuters.com], perhaps we can. Or perhaps Saudi Arabia will decide [wikipedia.org] to close the spigot and see what happens. [theislamicworkplace.com]
You may be right; no one's doing "hurry production" on ITER.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 10 2016, @07:11PM
Which is why:
https://theintercept.com/2015/10/26/bbc-protects-uks-close-ally-saudi-arabia-with-incredibly-dishonest-and-biased-editing/ [theintercept.com]
And back to Yemen:
http://www.thecanary.co/2016/06/10/west-fake-entire-attack-al-qaeda-oil-pipeline/ [thecanary.co]
Independent on-the-ground sources have denied there was any such attack.
Veteran BBC journalist Iona Craig, who has reported extensively from Yemen, said that the coalition statement was “ridiculous”, as AQAP had already deserted the city before the alleged military ‘rout’:
There weren’t even 800 fighters left there. There was no fighting inside the city because al-Qaeda had already left.
She described the 800 figure as “a lie that’s not even plausible.”
Craig had been in Mukalla a month before the military operation. She said that Saudi-led forces had been secretly negotiating with AQAP for the previous two weeks “to let fighters leave”. Far from being ‘routed’, al-Qaeda “had been given free passage out of the city” by their Saudi benefactors.