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UK ignoring Saudi war crimes to sell weapons: Analyst

Wednesday, 14 December 2016 4:34 PM [ Last Update: Wednesday, 14 December 2016 4:35 PM ]

File photo shows a cluster bomb used by Saudi forces in their onslaught against the civilians in Yemen.

Yemen’s new Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin Habtoor has accused Britain of war crimes over its arms sale to Saudi Arabia. According to the prime minister, the British have sold cluster bombs to the Saudi kingdom to drop on the Yemeni people in Sana’a, Sa’ada and other provinces. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have reported the use of illegal Western-made cluster bombs by the Saudis in Yemen.

Ian Williams, a senior analyst with the Foreign Policy in Focus from New York, told Press TV’s Top 5 that the British officials do not care what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen, because “they like the money and the influence” that the Saudis give them.

Williams said that “especially with Brexit coming up, the British government is really eager to develop alternative markets. They (the British authorities) really want to sell weapons to the fundamentalist states in the [Persian] Gulf like Saudi Arabia.”

“Selling those weapons to Saudi Arabia allows Britain to maintain an arms industry that is disproportionately large compared to the size of the country and the economy,” he said on Wednesday.

Pointing to the British hypocrisy in dealing with Saudi war crimes in Yemen, he noted, “The weaponry that it (Riyadh) is using in Yemen and the tactics that it’s using in Yemen are exactly what the UK describe as war crime” when it comes to other countries.

He said, “It doesn’t matter they (the Saudis) have blood on their hands as long as they (the British) have money on their pockets.”

However, he noted, there are groups in Britain who are against weapons sale to countries like Saudi Arabia, which is violating human rights both domestically and internationally.

At least 11,400 people have died as the result of the Saudi campaign in the kingdom’s impoverished neighbor since March 2015, according to the latest tally by a Yemeni monitoring group.

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