West aiding rule of dictatorships in Mideast: Activist

Press TV has interviewed Kim Sharif, director of Human Rights for Yemen in London, to discuss Saudi Arabia’s ongoing military aggression against the impoverished Arab country.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Why do you think that though on the one hand there are talks taking place in Kuwait and dealing with the situation in Yemen, Saudis just continue to bombard the Yemeni people? What kind of message is the Saudi regime trying to give to Yemen?

Sharif: Well it is a message to the world at large. The situation is from the start of the so-called Kuwait dialogue there has never been any cessation of hostilities towards Yemen either directly by the Saudi regime itself or through its bunch of people that it had purchased with its petrodollars in the land. In fact, it has been provoking those people to carry out attacks so that it has excuse for carrying out air raids on Yemen and this has been going on the whole time.

What is really happening in reality is the UN is aiding and abetting these crimes against humanity, against this poor nation in the region. The real issue … that is at stake here is democracy because if you look at the whole region apart from Yemen and Iran every other regime in the area is a sort of a militia of dictatorship that is thirsty for the blood of the innocent which is what we are witnessing. Whether they aid and abet terrorism in Syria, or in Libya or in Iraq or they actually directly attack Yemen, these are just a bunch of militia of dictatorships that have no sense of decency, all they have is petrodollars.

What is sad and tragic is the Western world that appears to or tells us that it is supporting and protecting democracy in the world [but it] is doing completely the opposite here in the sense that it is aiding and abetting a militia of dictatorships whose hands are dirty with the blood of the innocent in the region.

What is going on also is that this has been planned from the start to divide Yemen into tiny little portions so that they have complete control of the southern part of Aden and in particular Bab el-Mandeb which is of strategic importance to them. And as you know American and I believe British marines have just landed in the al-Anad military base and they have been bringing their own armies into land in the south.

My message to them and the message of the world to them is that Yemen is a graveyard for invaders. That is number one. Number two, playing this extremely dirty politics on the poorest, weakest nation in the region is not going to look good for anybody. Thirdly, those handful of people that they had purchased with petrodollars are sooner or later going to betray them in the same way that they had betrayed their country and their people.

So they are not going to get anywhere with this apart from coming clearly as what they really are. They really are not supporters of democracy, they are supporters of dictatorships of the most evil kind and at the end of the day the people of Britain and the people of America do deserve justice because all the terrorism suffered by the US and the UK clearly appears to be attributable to the Saudi regime as recently as an American court has come out with this decision that the Saudi regime had a hand in 9/11. So why aren’t they delivering justice for the people of America instead of trying to pretend to be helping the people of Yemen?

They are not helping the people of Yemen, they are killing them, they are committing crimes against humanity and the UN is vicariously liable for these crimes because in the middle of all these negotiations they also introduced irrelevant issues like women’s rights. Clearly we have not achieved women’s rights here in the UK or the US, how can we speak about it there in the country of militia of dictatorships?

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