Yemen

Debate between Emily Thornberry and Lord Spellar

Tuesday 11th September 2018 Commons Chamber

[Emily Thornberry (Islington South and Finsbury) (Lab)]

Thank you for granting this emergency debate on Yemen, Mr Speaker, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), the Chair of the International Development Committee, on securing it. I will come to his powerful speech in a minute, but on this day of 9/11, especially at this time of day, we should all pause and pay our respects to the almost 3,000 innocent people killed in the attacks on New York and Washington 17 years ago today, including the 77 British victims. Our thoughts are especially with their families, friends and colleagues, for whom this day always brings such painful memories and to whom we owe a constant duty to fight the scourge of jihadi terrorism wherever it rears its head.

I also acknowledge an anniversary that the events of 2001 have naturally relegated in importance over the past two decades, but one that we should also remember. Forty-five years ago, Salvador Allende, the great reforming, democratically elected socialist leader of Chile, killed himself in the presidential palace in Santiago as the forces of General Pinochet approached to seize power and plunge Chile into 17 dark years of brutal military dictatorship.

In historical terms, this is a dark and painful day, and it is a dark and painful subject that we debate today, but I still thank the Chair of the International Development Committee for raising it, as he has so consistently and insistently. The last time we had an emergency debate on this subject back in November 2017, secured by the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield (Mr Mitchell), there was great media criticism because only around 30 Members were present to debate what is still accepted as the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. There may be slightly more Members in attendance today.

When I look back at debates on Yemen over the two or three years since we began to realise the enormity of this crisis, I see that there have been certain constants. The Chair of the International Development Committee, from whom we have just heard, has of course been a constant voice, insisting that wherever the blame for this conflict lies, and wherever our international alliances preside, the only thing that matters is stopping the violence and allowing the people of Yemen to get the humanitarian relief they need.

There have been other constants over the years: my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), who is here; the right hon. Member for Sutton Coldfield, who again made a powerful speech today; my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty); my great and esteemed predecessor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leeds Central (Hilary Benn); and many others who I am sure we will hear from today and who have fought the long and often lonely struggle to give the war and humanitarian crisis in Yemen the attention they deserve, and to rightly condemn the Houthi rebels for their atrocities, their use of child soldiers and their firing of missiles into Saudi Arabia, but also to hold the Saudi-led coalition to account for its actions in this war. Those actions include the indiscriminate airstrikes that have killed thousands of innocent men, children and women; the systematic and targeted destruction of Yemen’s agricultural and food infrastructure; and the blockade that has stopped supplies of food, clean water and medicine, jeopardising millions of lives.

For those of us who feel as though we have been hitting our head against a brick wall these past three years, it is easy to feel jaded and to give up hope of ever forcing a change in the British Government’s policy or approach, because it seems as though no Saudi atrocity is too much and no Saudi behaviour cannot be excused so that the Government’s inaction at the United Nations and their lucrative trade in arms can be allowed to continue.

If we are becoming jaded, all we have to do is listen to the families of the victims of this conflict. They remind us all that if we do not continue campaigning for an end to this disastrous conflict and Britain’s support for it, their numbers and their pain will just continue to grow. I will put on record the words of Zaid Tayyib, a father of five boys from Sa’dah city, three of whom—Youssef, Ahmed and Ali, aged 14, 11 and nine—went on a school bus trip together a month ago, along with dozens of schoolmates.

Mr Tayyib was in the same street as the bus as it returned from the trip, which was when the Saudi missile struck. He rushed to the scene, despite his own pain and shock, to try to help the survivors. When he turned over the body of one young boy, with his blue UNICEF rucksack still on his back, he saw that it was his own 11-year-old little boy, Ahmed. Over the next few hours he discovered his two other children on the bus had also been killed, and he had to break the news to their mother. The hardest news to tell her, he said, was about their nine-year-old boy, little Ali. When Mr Tayyib finally discovered Ali’s body, he brought him home and his mother held him like any mother would hold a young child who had just come home from a trip. But with Ali she kept holding on to his lifeless body because she simply could not let him go.

That is the war we are supporting. That is the coalition we are arming. That is the handiwork of the Saudi crown prince, over whom this Government fawned so desperately when they welcomed him here in March.

When Mr Tayyib was asked what he thought of the international reaction to the death of his three sons and of the 37 other children killed in that Saudi airstrike, he expressed his shock at the silence of the international community with these poignant words: “It’s as if it was livestock that was targeted, as if it wasn’t children that were targeted, as if it wasn’t people who were killed.”

We owe it to Mr Tayyib, we owe it to his wife, and we owe it to the sons they have lost, and to the thousands of other innocent children who have been killed in this conflict, not to stay silent but to raise our voices ever louder in demanding again the same three things that the Opposition have consistently demanded for the past three years: first, an independent UN-led investigation of all allegations of war crimes in this conflict; secondly, the suspension of UK arms sales for use in this conflict until the investigation is complete; and thirdly, for the UK Government, at long last, to do their job as the penholder on Yemen at the UN Security Council and bring forward a new resolution obliging all sides to respect a ceasefire to allow peace talks and open access for humanitarian relief.

[John Spellar]

Many of my right hon. Friend’s points are extremely valid, and the Government should be undertaking them, but on shutting off plane sales to Saudi Arabia is she prepared, as her next visit, to go to the north-west to say to workers there, their wives and their families that we should shut their factories and destroy their communities? Is she prepared to do that? Because that is the logical consequence of what she proposes.

[Emily Thornberry]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend for raising that very serious and very important point. I will put it as I have put it to many of those who work in these factories: no one who makes arms in this country wants those arms to be sold in contravention of national law and international law.

I appreciate that there has been a court case, and I appreciate that there is an appeal. I watched the court case carefully, and I feel that, from those parts of the trial held in open court, there is an overwhelming case that we should no longer be selling arms to Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, half the case was held in secret court, in which we do not know what happened, so we do not know why the court came to its decision, which frankly, raises a completely different issue about the accountability of secret courts.

Ultimately, no one wants to do anything outside the law, and it is important for our arms industry that sales are done within the law. I know those workers understand that. I do not stand in the way of our arms industry; I stand in the way of our arms industry selling weapons illegally around the world. Frankly, I do not want our bombs and our planes to be responsible for this, and I am quite sure my right hon. Friend does not, either.