International community should be ashamed over Yemen situation: Analyst

Press TV has conducted an interview with Jamal Daoud, a spokesperson of the Social Justice Network, about the United Nations (UN)’s probe of the use of banned munitions by Saudi Arabia in its war on Yemen.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Yemen is inching closer to almost 9,000 people dead. In three weeks, it’s going to be a year that Saudi Arabia has conducted daily bombings on this country, annihilating the infrastructure. There’s been a disproportionate number of civilians killed. Isn’t this a little too late for the UN human rights agency to start speaking up on this? And they could have done much sooner and much more aggressively.

Daoud: Of course, the international community and the United Nations and other organizations talking about human rights and about the rights of people to live in peace were very slow. They allowed one year of daily bombing and killing. They allowed 800 schools to be destroyed, more than 250 medical institutions, more than 2,200 children to be killed. It is too little too late and the international community should be ashamed of itself for allowing all these devastations and the crimes and massacres to happen for one year without intervention.

In other conflicts, we saw how the United Nations and other organizations concerned about human rights, moved very quickly to demand even military intervention to stop such even low scale conflicts, but in this situation, because it is Saudi Arabia, which is supported by the US and its allies, we saw how even USA was participating in bombing in Yemen and helping Saudi Arabia and its allies in killing people, and this is why Saudi Arabia was thinking that it is immune from any criticism and conducted so much devastation and so much killing under the eyes and nose of the international community.

Press TV: Shouldn’t these concerns be also addressed more so at the Security Council as opposed to the human rights agency because many of the things you said disproportionate number of civilians, schools, parts of residential areas and the number of hospitals that you mentioned over 250, I mean, don’t a lot of these amount to war crimes and need to be addressed at the Security Council level?

Daoud: As I said if this happened by any other regime, there would be demand for International Court of Justice and other international organizations to demand accountability and making a lot of arrests and maybe… Until now, let us be frank, until now Saudi Arabia was... the international community did not demand blocking the exportation of weapons to Saudi Arabia. There was no demand for sanctions on Saudi Arabia like what’s happened in Syria for example or against Iran without any justification.

Here there is a regime who’s killing on daily basis, destroyed so many schools, killed so many children and the international community did not demand even sanctions on this regime to stop these massacres. And until now, the British government for example did not halt the export of weapons totaling more than about three billion pounds to Saudi Arabia to be used to kill civilians and destroy universities and hospitals, schools and other infrastructure.

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