Anna Stavrianakis - History won’t look kindly on Britain over arms sales feeding war in Yemen

The war in Yemen has killed as many as 57,000 people since March 2015, left 8.4 million people surviving on food aid and created a cholera epidemic. The British government claims to have been at the forefront of international humanitarian assistance, giving more than £570m to Yemen in bilateral aid since the war began. Yet the financial value of aid is a drop in the ocean compared with the value of weapons sold to the Saudi-led coalition – licences worth at least £4.7bn of arms exports to Saudi Arabia and £860m to its coalition partners since the start of the war. Relatively speaking, aid has been little more than a sticking plaster on the death, injury, destruction, displacement, famine and disease inflicted on Yemen by an entirely manmade disaster.

Britain and the US have been the key supporters of the Saudi-led coalition, providing arms, intelligence, logistics, military training and diplomatic cover. This has provoked criticism: in the US, a Democrat congressional resolution invoked the 1973 War Powers Act to end US involvement in the war in Yemen, but was blocked by a Republican procedural rule change to a resolution wolves. More recently, an attempt to push through a UN resolution calling for a ceasefire was stalled by the US and other countries, reportedly after a lobbying campaign by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In the UK, parliament’s committees on arms export controls (CAEC) fell into disarray in 2016, unable to agree on whether or not to recommend a suspension of arms exports to Saudi Arabia pending an international investigation into alleged war crimes. Britain’s own rules state that it cannot sell weapons to countries where there is a clear risk they might be used to violate international humanitarian law. The UK government claims to have one of the most rigorous arms control regimes in the world, yet evidence of attacks on medical facilities and schoolchildren in Yemen is clear.

War is the primary cause of death, injury, famine and disease in Yemen; and the coalition is causing twice as many civilian casualties as all other forces fighting in Yemen – including the Houthis... 
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