Western cooperation with Saudi in Yemen amounts to complicity: Analyst

The UK’ and West’s military cooperation in the Saudi war on Yemen is tantamount to complicity in war, says an international lawyer.  

“Legally-speaking… It (Western military backing) makes them complicit in Saudi Arabia's well-documented record of blatant human rights abuses in Yemen," said Arno Develay, international human rights lawyer in a Sunday interview with Press TV.

“The most problematic aspect of these unsavory alliances is that they feature partners that are anything but equal. To be clear, money talks and the West is broke, so in order to "contribute," the West is only left with the option of providing military support to their Saudi patrons’ own misguided foreign policy.”

The comments follow a recent report by the UK daily, The Telegraph, that British military advisers are in control rooms assisting the Saudi-led coalition staging bombing raids across Yemen that have killed thousands of civilians.

The UK Ministry of Defense said that the military officials were not directly choosing targets or typing in codes for the Saudi “smart bombs” but confirmed that they were training their counterparts in doing so.

“We support Saudi forces through long-standing, pre-existing arrangements,” a spokesman said, adding that the purpose of training was to ensure “best practice” and compliance with international humanitarian law.

The admission that British officers were working alongside Saudi and other ‘coalition colleagues’ in the military campaign’s operations rooms came in a briefing to the paper and other journalists by the Saudi foreign minister, Adel al-Jubeir.

“It should be underlined that as the Saudi foreign minister himself admitted, the United Kingdom is but one of several Western countries taking part in the coordinating of military strikes on Yemen,” Develay said.

“To further explain Western backing of Saudi aggression in Yemen, it is thus crucial to understand the degree to which the West depends on financial support from [Persian] Gulf countries. Many of these Middle Eastern monarchies have for instance become major shareholders in key, high-profile Western corporations.”

“Thus, we end up with a Western political class having to obey to oligarchical interest in keeping their (Persian Gulf partners) ‘happy.’ If this means contributing to a military onslaught leading to major civilian casualties, then so be it; it is the cost of ‘doing business’.”

The international lawyer added, “This state-of-affairs applies to almost every Western government since these same government have proceeded to ship out their entire industrial and manufacturing base to emerging markets starting at the turn of the century in order, once again, to ‘satisfy shareholders.’

Philip Hammond, the UK foreign secretary, last year called on the Saudi authorities to better investigate civilian casualties, but this week said that the British officials were "checking" targeting practices.

The Saudi military started a military campaign against Yemen in March 2015. Riyadh’s airstrikes have taken a heavy toll on the country’s facilities and infrastructure, destroying many hospitals, schools and factories.

The Saudi military has also blocked the flow of relief aid into Yemen, creating an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in the impoverished Arabian Peninsula state.

More than 7,500 people have been killed and over 14,000 others injured since last March.

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