Yemen

Lisa Cameron Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2016 Commons Chamber

[Margaret Ferrier (Rutherglen and Hamilton West) (SNP)]

It is almost five months since I successfully secured a Westminster Hall debate on human rights and arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Part of my speech focused on the situation in Yemen, and since then that situation has gotten progressively worse. There is a massive humanitarian crisis as the country heads into winter, and it is also careering towards a famine. Millions of people urgently need food assistance, but unfortunately they are not receiving it due to the lack of unhindered access.

I appreciate that the Government have been making efforts to ensure that aid starts to get through—that has certainly helped the situation—but the war-related damage to Yemen’s infrastructure means that essential supplies are still not getting into the country. Onerous restrictions on humanitarian access have resulted in 1.3 million children under five suffering from malnutrition. Is it going to require images of dead children to make us do more? There will soon be no shortage of them—that fact is heartbreaking and infuriating.

The Department for International Development will no doubt argue that we are already doing our fair share, and of course it is only right that we do so. I am afraid, however, that handouts cannot make up for us arming the forces that are causing a lot of the damage to the country’s infrastructure. Make no mistake: although we are not coalition partners, we are willing accomplices.

[Dr Lisa Cameron (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (SNP)]

rose—

[Margaret Ferrier]

A lot of Members want to speak, so I am sorry but I am going to continue.

I have been calling for the suspension of the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia for more than a year, and I have heard many excuses for not doing so. First, the Government insisted that the Ministry of Defence had conducted assessments of the situation in Yemen and determined that there was no evidence of breaches of international humanitarian law. That was as recently as June, when the then Foreign Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Aylesbury (Mr Lidington), insisted, in response to me in a Westminster Hall debate, that that was the case.

There was then a climbdown when the Government admitted that the MOD had not, in fact, conducted any assessments. The new refrain is that the Saudis should be responsible for investigating themselves, and that is what has started to happen. Although the joint incidents assessment team has investigated relatively few incidents, even it has been forced to admit that the Saudi-led coalition has indeed broken international humanitarian law. That still does not seem to be enough to shame the Government into action. Even the coalition airstrike in Sana’a on 8 October was not enough.

The UN panel of experts on Yemen has condemned the airstrike. It said that the coalition had “violated its obligations” under international law and that it

“did not take effective precautionary measures to minimize harm to civilians, including the first responders”

on the scene. When I tabled a written question to the Foreign Office in June to ask for an assessment of an extensive report published by the panel of experts in January, it responded:

“The UK has supported, and continues to support, the work of the panel of experts commissioned by the UN, but we do not always agree with their conclusions.”

What is totally shameful about that response is that not once have I seen any evidence whatsoever that the Foreign Office has ever disagreed with the conclusions of the Saudi authorities, let alone questioned them. Why is it that the Government seem content to take the word of a participant in the war at face value, yet disregard so readily the findings of the UN panel?

We need to stop arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and we need an independent investigation. It is time for the Government not only to come clean about their role in the conflict, but to start putting things right.

--- Later in debate ---

[George Kerevan (East Lothian) (SNP)]

The hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) accused the SNP of grandstanding and of denying Saudi Arabia the right to self-defence. Our argument is rather that the Saudi intervention in Yemen is disproportionate; that is the key. Several legitimate and well-respected human rights organisations have used open source material to try to count the number of airstrikes in Yemen since March of last year, when the Saudi coalition began the bombing. There have been at least 8,600 airstrikes, and that is disproportionate. There are not enough targets for the Saudi coalition to go on bombing as they have done. One of the findings from that open source material is that at least one third of the airstrikes have resulted in civilian casualties. That is the issue.

[Dr Cameron]

Does my hon. Friend agree that funding what appears to be indiscriminate bombing is undermining the excellent work that the Department for International Development is doing in humanitarian aid?

[George Kerevan]

I would not only accept that, but go further and say that it is undermining the Saudi case for trying to create a stable Government and a stable political position in Yemen.

The hon. Member for Reigate (Crispin Blunt) introduced a new doctrine: the doctrine of intent. He said that we should look at the intent of the Saudis and, since they say they are doing good things and they want peace and security, we should consider that to be enough. Let us look at the intent of the Saudi Government. They have not signed up to the international convention on cluster weapons. If they do not want to use them, I would have expected them to sign up to it. In fact, as we all know, they have been using them—air-launched and ground-launched cluster weapons. I know that the Houthis on the other side are using them as well, but we are talking about a massive, western-funded, western-armed coalition versus a small group of rebels. That is disproportionate.

If we look at which cluster weapons have been found by human rights organisations across Yemen, we can see that they are not just the BL755 cluster weapons manufactured in Britain, but the CBU-105s, CBU-87s and CBU-58s manufactured in the United States. They have been found to have been used in at least five provinces in Yemen. Here is the thing: the American cluster weapons were sold to Saudi Arabia 20-odd years ago. I do not know how they got there or who used them, but it is surprising that all the types of cluster bomb weapons supplied to the Saudis about 20 years ago—in the 1980s and 1990s—have been found to have been used comprehensively and across the whole of Yemen. That deserves an investigation, which is what our amendment asks for.

The test of what Saudi Arabia is doing is not intent, but whether there is on balance a risk that humanitarian law has been broken. I put it to the House that there is ample evidence of that. How do we get the attention of the Saudi regime? That is at the core of the proposal in the SNP amendment, which has not been selected, to call for an immediate withdrawal of current sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia.

To respond to the hon. Members for South Ribble (Seema Kennedy) and for Fylde (Mark Menzies), our proposal is not to stop all arms sales in perpetuity. We are trying to get the attention of the Saudi regime, which cannot put its own ground troops into Yemen. The real secret is that the regime cannot trust to using its own ground troops—it keeps them at home to protect the regime, which has no democratic legitimacy—so it uses its air force, which has very close links to the royal family, in a consistently indiscriminate way.

Hon. Members have repeatedly mentioned the bombing of the funeral. It was the funeral of a leading Houthi Minister and a lot of Houthi Ministers were expected to be at it, so one suspects that it was not quite the accident that it has been made out to be. There have been repeated cases of civilians being killed in missile and bomb attacks in places where Houthi leaders were expected. My point is that calling for an investigation and for a halt to arms sales in the short term is a way of getting the attention of the Saudi regime to ensure a ceasefire and a permanent solution to this crisis.