A year ago this month, a boat carrying about 145 people, almost all of them Somalis with official refugee documents, was on its way to Sudan from Yemen. It was passing through the narrow Bab el-Mandeb strait when it came under fire. The shots, a confidential report to the UN Security Council confirmed four months later, were ‘almost certainly’ fired from a machine-gun mounted on a helicopter. Only ‘the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces,’ it added, ‘have the capability to operate armed utility helicopters in the area.’ (They are Apache helicopters, made in the United States.)
‘The helicopter was right over us and it had these huge lights on,’ a survivor later told a journalist. ‘They just kept shooting.’ Some of the people on the boat hid under the bodies of the dead. Others tried to signal that they were civilians by using flashlights. When the firing eventually stopped, the boat’s captain, who had been shot in the leg, managed to steer the boat back towards the Yemeni port city of Al Hudaydah before he bled to death.
Dawood Fadal, the port’s head of security, told the New York Times that the workers at the port had been overwhelmed by the number of bodies when the boat arrived. ‘Our hospitals did not have room for them so we had to put them in the fish fridges. Can you imagine what that looks like?’ he said.
At least 42 people had been killed.
Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, repeatedly asked about the attack in the House of Commons. Each time the British government issued a two-sentence response saying it was for the Saudis to investigate.
The Saudi crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman was fêted by the British government when he came to London earlier this month. He was greeted at Heathrow by Boris Johnson. Billboards with the slogan ‘United Kingdoms’, paid for by the Saudi government, lined his route from the airport. He had lunch with the Queen. Theresa May spoke glowingly of his record on women’s rights. At the end of his visit, Salman pledged to buy 48 Eurofighter Typhoon jets. A Downing Street spokesperson trumpeted new ‘direct Saudi investment in the UK’. There was no mention of the Yemenis.
Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, said: ‘We are sharing the best of British expertise.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/03/16/musab-younis/sharing-the-best-of-british-expertise/
‘The helicopter was right over us and it had these huge lights on,’ a survivor later told a journalist. ‘They just kept shooting.’ Some of the people on the boat hid under the bodies of the dead. Others tried to signal that they were civilians by using flashlights. When the firing eventually stopped, the boat’s captain, who had been shot in the leg, managed to steer the boat back towards the Yemeni port city of Al Hudaydah before he bled to death.
Dawood Fadal, the port’s head of security, told the New York Times that the workers at the port had been overwhelmed by the number of bodies when the boat arrived. ‘Our hospitals did not have room for them so we had to put them in the fish fridges. Can you imagine what that looks like?’ he said.
At least 42 people had been killed.
Green Party MP, Caroline Lucas, repeatedly asked about the attack in the House of Commons. Each time the British government issued a two-sentence response saying it was for the Saudis to investigate.
The Saudi crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman was fêted by the British government when he came to London earlier this month. He was greeted at Heathrow by Boris Johnson. Billboards with the slogan ‘United Kingdoms’, paid for by the Saudi government, lined his route from the airport. He had lunch with the Queen. Theresa May spoke glowingly of his record on women’s rights. At the end of his visit, Salman pledged to buy 48 Eurofighter Typhoon jets. A Downing Street spokesperson trumpeted new ‘direct Saudi investment in the UK’. There was no mention of the Yemenis.
Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, said: ‘We are sharing the best of British expertise.’
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2018/03/16/musab-younis/sharing-the-best-of-british-expertise/
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