For
more than four years the Saudi Arabian-led military coalition, which
includes the UAE, Bahrain and Kuwait, has “targeted civilians …
in a widespread and systematic manner”, according to the UN –
dropping bombs on hospitals, schools, weddings, funerals and even
camps
for
displaced people fleeing the bombing. And British weapons are doing
much of the killing.
Britain
does not merely supply weapons for this war: it provides the
personnel and expertise required to keep the war going. The British
government has deployed RAF personnel to work as engineers, and to
train Saudi pilots and targeteers – while an even larger role is
played by BAE
Systems, Britain’s biggest arms company, which the government
has subcontracted to provide weapons, maintenance and engineers
inside Saudi Arabia.
“The
Saudi bosses absolutely depend on BAE Systems,” John Deverell, a
former MoD official and defence attache to Saudi Arabia and Yemen,
stated. “They couldn’t do it without us.”
A
BAE employee recently put it more plainly to Channel 4’s
Dispatches:
“If we weren’t there, in seven to 14 days there wouldn’t be a
jet in the sky.”
The
British bombs that rain down on Yemen are produced in three towns:
Glenrothes in Scotland, and Harlow and Stevenage in south-east
England. Bombs roll off production lines owned by Raytheon UK and BAE
Systems, firms contracted by the government to manufacture Paveway
bombs (£22,000 apiece), Brimstone bombs (£105,000 apiece), and
Storm Shadow cruise missiles (£790,000 apiece) for the Saudi Royal
Air Force.
BAE, under government contract, also assembles the jets that drop
these bombs in hangars just outside the village of Warton,
Lancashire. It is impossible to say how many bombs the UK has sent to
Yemen, because the government in 2013 and 2014 granted BAE three
special arms-export licences
that permit the sale of an unlimited number of bombs to Saudi Arabia
without requiring disclosure of how many have been sold.
Once
these weapons arrive in Saudi Arabia, Britain’s involvement is far
from over. The Saudi military lacks the expertise to use these
weapons to fight a sustained air war – so BAE, under another
contract to the UK government, provides what are known as
“in-country” services. In practice, this means that around 6,300
British contractors are stationed at forward operating bases in Saudi
Arabia. There, they train Saudi pilots and conduct essential
maintenance night and day on planes worn out from flying thousands of
miles across the Saudi desert to their targets in Yemen.
They also supervise Saudi soldiers to load bombs on to planes and set
their fuses for their intended targets. Inside Saudi forward
operating bases, there are thousands of British contractors working
to keep the war machine moving. British contractors coordinate the
distribution of bombs and aircraft parts. They manage
climate-controlled armories and work in shifts to ensure bombs are
dispatched in a timely manner for fresh raids. Alongside RAF
personnel, British contractors train Saudi pilots to conduct
hazardous bombing raids in Yemen’s rugged northern mountains and
over its cities. They also manage avionics and radar systems to
ensure that Saudi planes can get to and from their targets, and
conduct the deep aircraft maintenance necessary to keep them circling
over Yemen.
Around
80 serving RAF personnel work inside Saudi Arabia. Sometimes they
work for BAE to assist in maintaining and preparing aircraft. At
other times they work as auditors to ensure that BAE is fulfilling
its Ministry of Defence contracts. Additional RAF “liaison
officers” work inside the command-and-control centre, from where
targets in Yemen are selected.
British
military exports to Riyadh multiplied almost 35-fold in one year,
from £83m
in 2014 to £2.9bn
in 2015. Saudi
Arabia can afford to buy these weapons, but it has traditionally
lacked the skills and manpower to deploy them. British
personnel have played a major role in picking up the slack.
Government contractors carry out around 95% of the tasks necessary to
fight the air war, one former BAE employee told Channel 4’s
Dispatches – an estimate confirmed by a former senior British
official who worked in Saudi Arabia during the air war.
On
27 March 2015, one day after the first bombs fell on Yemen, foreign
secretary Philip Hammond told reporters that Britain would “support
the Saudis in every practical way short of engaging in combat”.
This would prove to be an understatement.
Last
year Saudi Arabia decided to deploy significant ground forces across
the border – and here too, the British have joined the mission. In
May 2018, an unknown number of British troops were sent to Yemen to
assist Saudi ground forces. Since then, multiple newspapers have
published
reports
of British
special forces wounded in gun battles inside Houthi-controlled
territory. The presence of British special forces in Yemen has not
been officially acknowledged, but has become an open secret in
defence circles. A senior British diplomatic source told me that the
decision to approve military assistance to Saudi Arabia emerged from
a meeting in London between British ministers and Bin Salman during
his state visit to the UK in March 2018 – when he signed a
memorandum of intent to buy 48
more jets worth £10bn to upgrade his war-ravaged fleet. On 23
May 2018, Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, released a carefully
worded statement
committing an undisclosed number of UK troops to provide
“information, advice and assistance” to “mitigate” the threat
to Saudi Arabia from Houthi missiles.
Under
British law, it is illegal to licence arms exports if they might be
used deliberately or recklessly against civilians – or in legal
terms, to violate international humanitarian law. There is
overwhelming evidence that the Saudis are flagrantly
in violation, and yet when questions are raised in Parliament
about Britain’s role in the atrocities occurring in Yemen,
Conservative ministers typically limit themselves to three well-worn
responses.
First,
they claim that Britain operates “one of the most robust arms
export regimes in the world”. Second, they say that while Britain
may arm Saudi Arabia, it does not pick the targets in Yemen. Third,
they say that the Saudi-led coalition already investigates its own
alleged violations of international humanitarian law.
These
responses have long since been overtaken by the bloody reality of the
Yemen war. In
fact, as the conflict has continued, the killing of civilians has
actually accelerated. According to Larry
Lewis,
a former US State Department official who was sent to Saudi Arabia in
2015 in an attempt to reduce civilian harm, the proportion of strikes
against civilians by Saudi-led forces almost doubled between 2017 and
2018. Last July, crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), the
architect of the air war, issued a royal decree “pardoning all
military personnel who have taken part in Operation Restoring Hope of
their respective military and disciplinary penalties.”
The
Saudi-led coalition investigates itself. This
work is done by the Joint Incident Assessment Team (JIAT), a body
composed of around 20 military officers from Saudi Arabia and the
UAE, which is charged with investigating reports of civilian deaths
in Yemen. Larry Lewis, the US official who urged the Saudis to
establish the JIAT, told me that the team does not have researchers
on the ground inside Yemen, so it must rely on the Saudi Royal Air
Force to provide it with information. “Occasionally they will take
trips to Yemen to investigate high-visibility incidents,” he said.
Lewis also said the JIAT was “designed to reduce common mistakes”
such as hitting targets on the no-strike list – wells, hospitals,
schools. Similarly, it was supposed to reduce the chances of Saudi
forces “failing to deploy tactical patience” – for instance,
bombing Houthi militiamen when they stop at a market, rather than
waiting for them to leave to minimise civilian casualties. But Lewis
now says the JIAT failed on its own terms, because it was simply
ignored by the Saudi defence ministry.
For
the British government, however, the JIAT provides a convenient
figleaf for the continued licensing of arms exports to Riyadh.
Researchers at the open-source investigative agency Bellingcat have
accused the coalition of dishonesty in “the vast majority of JIAT
assessments”. Rawan Shaif, who heads the group’s Yemen project,
said that “the information that the UK has been relying on” is
coming from “a partner you have been directly supporting in a
conflict, who is lying to you about the majority of strikes”.
In
the case of two particularly deadly attacks in May and July 2015 –
in which more than 100 people were killed by airstrikes on outdoor
markets in the town of Zabid and Fayoush, a suburb of Aden – the
JIAT assessment simply insisted that the coalition had not bombed
either location, in spite of reports by the UN, the BBC,
Human
Rights Watch and Amnesty, as well as camera-smartphone footage
from the sites making it clear that an airstrike had taken place.
Elsewhere the JIAT has justified strikes by flatly asserting that the
targets were military ones. After reports of civilian deaths in an
airstrike in al-Jawf governorate in September 2016, JIAT released a
statement claiming that the coalition had hit “Houthi commanders”
travelling in a pickup truck. But when the UN and the Yemeni human
rights group Mwatana made independent visits to the site, they
discovered
that
the victims were a woman driving with her two sisters-in-law and
their 12 children.
UK
arms sales buy Britain influence with Saudi Arabia. John Deverell,
the former director of defence diplomacy at the MoD, who was defence
attache to Saudi Arabia and Yemen between 2001 and 2003, said “We
are worried that if we do speak truth to power, we will endanger the
commercial relationship.” It is this commercial relationship that
is keeping Britain firmly ensnared in the Yemen war. Its foundation
is an multi-billion pound, government-to-government arms deal signed
in 1985 called al-Yamamah. This guarantees British maintenance,
training and rearmament of any British aircraft sold to Saudi Arabia,
in war and peacetime. The deal is open-ended, which means that its
terms, which in the 1980s applied to Tornado aircraft, now cover the
export of BAE’s newer Typhoon jets. The government refuses to
disclose the total income from the Al-Yamamah contract but former BAE
CEO Mike Turner put it at more than £40bn in 2005. Nick Gilby, a
researcher who has written a book on the deal, estimates the current
sales figure to be “conservatively, £60bn” based on BAE
statements and annual reports. Under the terms of the deal, Saudi
Arabia reimburses the British Ministry of Defence for the costs it
incurs by paying BAE to arm and maintain the Saudi air force, plus a
2% fee for the time of civil servants administering the procurement.
BAE depends on this state contract for its survival, but it also
wields enormous sway with the government as the principal executor of
this multi-billion dollar deal.
Although
al-Yamamah does not generate any income per se for the British
treasury, it is the bedrock of a deeper financial relationship
between London and Riyadh. The House of Saud uses its oil revenues to
buy British stocks, bonds and luxury property; in 2017 it spent £93bn
in Britain. David Wearing, a specialist on UK-Saudi relations at
Royal Holloway University, estimates that a fifth of the UK current
account deficit is financed by Saudi cash, which “stabilises an
increasingly vulnerable pound”.
In
2015, Riyadh privately communicated that it would squeeze Britain
financially if the government wavered in its military cooperation.
“At the outset, the imperative was conveyed that they saw British
support of its war as a key test,” the minister recalled. “If you
fail, you’re out, as far as commercial opportunities and influence
in the future.”
Asked
how it was possible that his own department – the Export Control
Joint Unit (ECJU) – had issued blanket approvals for arms exports
used in Yemen, an official responded, “I don’t know, it just is.
I’m doing what I’m told and doing my job,” then he added, “But
I’m uncomfortably aware that Adolf Eichmann said the same thing.”
The
head of the ECJU, Edward Bell, has also expressed discomfort with
re-arming the Saudi air campaign. “My gut tells me we should
suspend exports to Saudi Arabia,” he wrote in a 2016 email to Sajid
Javid, who was then the minister responsible for arms licensing.
Javid ignored Bell’s advice.
Parliamentary
scrutiny of Britain’s compliance with arms export control laws is
the responsibility of the Committees for Arms Export Controls (CAEC).
This cross-party grouping, which includes 18 MPs, is chaired by
Graham Jones, a Labour MP who has criticised the “dishonesty” of
NGOs reporting on human-rights violations in Yemen, written in
support of Bin Salman and the Saudi-led coalition, and touted BAE’s
“vital role” for employment and the economy in his Lancashire
constituency.
Dr
Anna Stavrianakis, an academic researching arms licensing at the
University of Sussex, who has regularly given evidence to CAEC,
accused Jones of keeping Yemen off the committee’s agenda. “The
government deliberately mobilises doubt and ambiguity when it comes
to international humanitarian law violations in Yemen,” she said.
“And the chair acts in support of government policy rather than
acting impartially to scrutinise it.” In an email to the Guardian,
Jones replied that his critics were “far-left Marxists who back a
violent, racist, Islamic fascist militia” in Yemen, and said he had
been “at the forefront of discussions on Yemeni issues”.
QC
Philippe Sands says that ministers should be personally concerned
about the prospect of facing criminal charges for their role in
arming Saudi Arabia. “If the United Kingdom is supplying weapons
that are being used to commit crimes, then the possibility cannot be
excluded that a minister who signs off on the sales in that knowledge
could in the future be hauled before a court of law, national or
international.” British case law is clear that knowingly supplying
a weapon that is used to commit a crime can mean that the supplier of
the weapon is also liable for that crime. According to Wayne Jordash
QC, government officials would face a higher risk of prosecution if
Britain is a “party to the conflict”. Under international law,
being a party to a conflict means providing military, financial or
logistical support that directly degrades the military capacity of
another belligerent and weakens their ability to conduct hostilities.
involvement in
the Yemen war are nothing short of acrobatic. The government has
tethered Britain, its military and its economy to the richest nation
in the Arab world as it brutalises the poorest. Saudi Arabia is
estimated to have spent $60-70bn every year on its failing war,
nearly four times the current GDP of Yemen, and enough money to have
secured the livelihoods of a generation of Yemenis.
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