Pressure is mounting on David Cameron to explain the role of British military personnel in the Saudi-led bombing campaign of Yemen after a UN panel ruled the operation contravened international humanitarian law.
Jeremy Corbyn and Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary, sent a joint letter to the prime minister on Wednesday asking for details about British involvement after a leaked copy of the panel’s report concluded there had been “widespread and systematic” attacks on the civilian population.
The 51-page report, sent to the UN security council last week and obtained by the Guardian, documented 119 sorties by the Saudi-led coalition that were linked to violations of international law.
It said that many of the attacks “involved multiple airstrikes on multiple civilian objects”. It added: “Of the 119 sorties, the panel identified 146 targeted objects. The panel also documented three alleged cases of civilians fleeing residential bombings and being chased and shot at by helicopters.”
In another key finding, it said: “The panel documented that the coalition had conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects, in violation of international humanitarian law, including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civilian residential areas; medical facilities; schools; mosques; markets, factories and food storage warehouses; and other essential civilian infrastructure, such as the airport in Sana’a, the port in Hudaydah and domestic transit routes.”
Yemen’s civil war began when the Houthi rebels, allied with a former Yemeni president, overran the capital in September 2014. In March 2015, a coalition of countries led by Saudi Arabia began airstrikes and, later, a ground operation to retake the country. More than 5,800 people have been killed and more than 80% of Yemen’s population is in dire need of food, water and other aid, according to the UnitedNations.
We are offering Saudi Arabia advice and training on best-practice targeting techniques’
UK Ministry of Defence
The UK has been furtive about its role in the bombing campaign, with details trickling out only gradually. Earlier this month, the Saudis revealed that UK and US staff were in the command and control centre where the bombing operations are directed.
The Ministry of Defence has refused to reveal how many personnel are involved, saying only it is a small team and insisting its role is not operational. On Wednesday, a spokesperson said: “UK military personnel are not directly involved in Saudi-led coalition operations.
“We are offering Saudi Arabia advice and training on best-practice targeting techniques to help ensure continued compliance with international humanitarian law.”
After prime minister’s question time, at which Corbyn called for an independent inquiry into the UK’s arms exports policy to Saudi Arabia, the Labour leader and Benn wrote to Cameron. In their letter, they ask him to “set out the exact nature of the involvement of UK personnel working with the Saudi military”.
Mourners pray by the coffins of a senior Yemeni judge and his family killed in a Saudi-led airstrike. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA
They add: “Can you confirm whether the British government has received any reports from these UK personnel of actions that might constitute a potential breach of international humanitarian law?”
The question is aimed at establishing whether, if the role of the British team is to advise that an attack on a residential area would contravene humanitarian law, that advice has always been taken.
The two called on the prime minster to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia. “In the light of continuing reports from the United Nations and other organisations of breaches of international humanitarian law in the conflict with Yemen, we are writing to call on you to launch immediately a full review of arms export licences to Saudi Arabia and to suspend arms sales to that country until the review has been concluded.”
According to the Campaign Against Arms Trade, UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia totalled £2.95bn for the first nine months of 2015, and about £7bn since Cameron took office, including a contract for 72 Eurofighter Typhoon jets.
David Mepham, UK director of Human Rights Watch, said the findings of the UN report “flatly contradict repeated statements made by British ministers about the actions of the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen”.
“For almost a year, [foreign secretary] Philip Hammond has made the false and misleading claim that there is no evidence of law or war violations by the UK’s Saudi ally and other members of the coalition.”
Amnesty International UK’s head of policy and government affairs, Allan Hogarth, said: “Thousands of civilians have already died and it’s been utterly dismaying to see Downing Street brushing aside extremely serious concerns about the reckless conduct of Saudi Arabia in this devastating conflict.”
The Foreign Office is under pressure to back an independent inquiry into the conduct of the air campaign over Yemen, after ministers accepted it had helped block an independent inquiry by the UN Human Rights Council in favour of an inquiry led by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
Speaking after taking evidence from aid agencies and the Foreign Office, the chairman of the Commons select committee on international development,Stephen Twigg, said: “We have today received very powerful evidence that we need to see an independent inquiry. There are alleged serious violations on all sides, and they need to be investigated, but not by the parties to the conflict.”
Tobias Ellwood, a Foreign Office minister, said he was putting private pressure on the Saudi government to investigate specific allegations, including from Unicef, that the Saudi-led coalition was involved in an indiscriminate bombing campaign that would inevitably lead to wide-scale civilian casualties.
He also defended the British government’s licensing of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, saying: “You are being naive if you think Britain cannot sell weapons systems to allies. We are legitimately allowed to do that.
“Saudi Arabia is entitled to defend itself, and under the UN security council resolutions, Saudi is allowed to participate [to defend] the legitimate government of Yemen. Yes, there are details about the way in which this war is being conducted that we must scrutinise.
“We do not just accidentally sell these things on eBay. Every single arms sale is scrutinised, whether it is a Paveway [laser-guided bomb], a Typhoon [jet], or a Hellfire missile, every nut and bolt is scrutinised and comes across my desk or the foreign secretary’s desk.”
He said the issue was not the scale of the arms sales, but what they were used for. “What is at the heart of this is that there are some events in the public domain that need to be looked at. We want to make sure every single incident is investigated thoroughly and for information to be shared, and that when mistakes have been made to ensure that processes are followed.”
Yemenis shout anti-Saudi slogans during a rally protesting Saudi-led military operations in Sana’a. Photograph: Yahya Arhab/EPA
Nicholas Alton, the Foreign Office’s section head for the Arabian peninsula and Iran, said: “We believe the most effective way of conducting an investigation is for the Saudis to start the process themselves.” The Foreign Office insists that a consensus was reached at the UN on how to look at allegations of indiscriminate bombing by the Saudis.
Ellwood added he would look at the UN panel’s report but stressed that the country was highly complex and that al-Qaida was active there. He said opponents of the Yemen government were as skilled as Islamic State in putting out false propaganda, and that some of the allegations about Saudi activity, such as the bombing of the Iranian embassyin Yemen’s capital, Sana’a, had proved to be untrue.
The international development select committee was told by Save the Children, Oxfam and Unicef that an independent inquiry into Saudi actions in Yemen was necessary, in line with proposals put to the UN in September by the Dutch government.
The Saudis, with UK support, watered down the proposals so that the UN could aid an inquiry to be conducted by the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
The UK government is spending £80m in aid in Yemen and humanitarian agencies giving evidence alongside ministers said it was incoherent for ministers to supply arms to a country that was then destroying the work of UK aid agencies.
Desmond Swayne, a junior minister for international development, refused to say whether the Yemeni crisis was worse than Syria, saying he was not going to become involved in “a misery Olympics”.
