Yemen

Stephen Gethins Excerpts

Thursday 4th February 2016 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the conflict in Yemen.

I am very pleased to have secured this important debate. I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allowing it to take place here today.

We meet against a background of continuing conflict and death, with further reports of Saudi-backed strikes on populated areas, most recently a cement factory in the city of Amran. That resulted in reports of further deaths, including of people inside cars parked nearby, of shopkeepers and of residents going about their daily business. This is a very pressing issue. The humanitarian situation in Yemen is dreadful and it is getting worse. Recent estimates by the United Nations suggest that over 8,000 people have been killed in Yemen since March last year. At least 1,500 children are reported to have died. Much of the civilian infrastructure has been destroyed by air strikes and armed fighting on the ground, effectively cutting families off from essential services, including clean water, sanitation and medical treatment.

My hon. Friend the Member for Central Ayrshire (Dr Whitford) has already raised in this House the incident in which a Médecins sans Frontières hospital in Saada was hit by missiles. That was the third MSF facility to come under attack in recent months. People are dying there from what should be preventable diseases because there are not the hospitals, medical supplies or infrastructure to prevent it. With hospitals reduced to rubble, thousands of children are at risk of malnutrition. In fact, Save the Children has reported a 150% increase in cases of severe acute malnutrition among children. Some of its facilities, which should be safe havens, have been destroyed.

It is no surprise, therefore, to see Médecins sans Frontières and others declare that the conflict in Yemen is being played out with total disregard for the rules of war. The UK Government have been aware of mounting evidence of civilian deaths and of the destruction of civilian infrastructure. Among other growing voices, Amnesty International has raised concerns about air strikes targeting heavily populated civilian areas with no military targets nearby. That would clearly constitute a violation of international humanitarian law.

The numbers of civilians dying as a direct consequence of the conflict are stark. According to the UN, 73% of child deaths and injuries during the second quarter of 2015 were attributable to air strikes by the Saudi-led coalition. Some 60% of all civilian deaths and injuries have been attributed to air-launched explosive devices. Increasing numbers of children are being pressed into military service, used as pawns by both sides in the conflict, and placed in increasingly dangerous and vulnerable situations. More than 3 million children are now out of school. Education has fallen by the wayside, setting the children of Yemen up perfectly to be another lost generation, with significant long-term consequences for the country and the region.

More than 21.2 million people in Yemen, including 10 million children, are now in need of humanitarian aid. This staggering figure gives Yemen the dubious distinction of being the country with the highest number of people in humanitarian need in the world. Yemen relies almost entirely on imports for its food, so the de facto blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition at the start of its military intervention in March 2015 has had an extremely damaging impact. There is a very high level of food insecurity. According to the UN, 14.4 million Yemeni people are in this situation. In basic terms, that means one in every two people is not getting enough to eat.

One of the most distressing features of the conflicts that have plagued the middle east for too long is the re-emergence of the barbaric practice of siege as a weapon of war. When I raised the issue in the context of Syria, I was pleased to receive confirmation of the UK Government’s position that the imposition of starvation and deliberate destruction of the means of daily life for civilians may be a matter for the International Criminal Court. The practice must be stopped. It is vital that support be given to ensure that supplies and humanitarian aid can enter the country and be safely distributed to the population, including in the southern city of Taiz, where humanitarian access has been extremely constrained. Parties to the conflict must be pressed to allow this access. Unless we address those issues, we should not be surprised to see continued outflows of refugees from countries that are being bombed back into the dark ages. Such an outcome is exactly what Daesh is working towards. Those who claim the status of legitimate Government cannot continue to act like medieval warlords and expect to receive the backing of the international community.

It is important to acknowledge the brave and tireless work of many non-governmental organisations working in the area, despite the huge dangers they face in this volatile situation. The conduct of the war means that NGOs are having to put their workers in peril. This raises significant questions about how much longer they will be prepared to do so, and about the consequences for Yemeni civilians if they decide they cannot continue. The Government must now listen to these organisations and consider the evidence. They must acknowledge what is happening and the scale of the issue. It is vital that they put pressure on all parties to allow humanitarian agencies a safe space in which to operate.

I acknowledge the important and welcome role of the Department for International Development in supporting the Yemeni population. Its response has been flexible and responsive and would appear to provide a constructive way forward, were it not for the astonishing mismatch between its welcome work and the Government’s military dealings with Saudi Arabia, which severely impact on life in Yemen and the country’s future prospects.

World attention on difficulties in the middle east is focused on the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, and sadly the catastrophic situation in Yemen is often overlooked. Yemen’s status as only a minor oil producer—it is not even a member of OPEC—perhaps makes the country less likely to feature on the western news radar. The International Red Cross described Yemen as one of the world’s forgotten conflict zones. While the world looks elsewhere, economic and political power-plays in the middle east cause ever more chaos and destruction to the country. The UK cannot continue to look the other way or sit on the fence. If it does, it must accept that its foreign policy is morally bankrupt and that its lack of action is both knowing and deliberate.

Yemen is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. Meanwhile, the daily intensive use of explosive weapons, often in populated areas, continues to rain down death on the civilian population. Many of these civilians have been killed by air strikes conducted by the Saudi Arabian air force, using British-built planes flown by pilots trained by British instructors, including at RAF Lossiemouth in Scotland, dropping British-made bombs—they are probably made in Scotland—and with operations co-ordinated by Saudi Arabia in the presence of British military advisers.

Figures from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills show that in the third quarter of last year, the UK granted more than £1 billion of arms export licences for Saudi Arabia, despite overwhelming evidence of human rights violations committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its aerial bombing campaign.

[Stephen Gethins (North East Fife) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that if the Government consider that there have been breaches of international humanitarian law, the Government should investigate and report to the House?

[Kirsten Oswald]

I agree entirely with my hon. Friend.

Through their substantial support for Saudi Arabia, the Government are exacerbating the desperate plight of the people of Yemen. Since the conflict reignited in March, there have reports of serious violations of the laws of war by all sides. Human Rights Watch has documented several apparently unlawful coalition airstrikes between April and August. In all these cases, it either found no evident military target or considered that the attack failed to distinguish between civilians and military objectives. There are legal questions to be answered about the UK supplying weapons to Saudi Arabia in support of its military intervention and indiscriminate bombing campaign in Yemen.

It is important that we take stock of other UK interventions in this part of the world. Not only in Yemen but across the region, we have a very chequered past. The UK has a history of subjugating the interests of the population in the region, who are bit players in UK conflicts with other powers. Although we still have significant relationships with the rulers and leaders of the region, the UK is, perhaps unsurprisingly, mistrusted for its failure to deliver on promises. As Tarek Osman says,

“the wave of Arab uprisings that commenced in 2011 is this generation’s attempt at changing the consequences of the state order that began in the aftermath of World War One.”