MPs on the House of Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls have urged in a draft report that the UK government stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia because of its war crimes in the Yemen.
It said: ‘The weight of evidence of violations of international humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen is now so great that it is very difficult to continue to support Saudi Arabia while maintaining the credibility of our arms licensing regime.’
The report adds: ‘UK should suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen until an independent and international inquiry can establish the truth.’ On Monday, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson defended the arms sale, insisting that the UK would continue arming its feudal ally.
In fact, the UK supplied export licenses for over $4 billion worth of arms to Saudi Arabia last year. The largest export license granted was worth $2.48 billion of fighter jets agreed in May 2015. The UK also approved the export of $1.45 billion of air-to-air missiles to the Saudi regime in July 2015. In September, it further approved the sale of $90.5 million worth of bombs to Riyadh.
The truth is that the Saudi regime is acting as an imperialist gendarme in the Gulf, this is why it is being armed to the teeth. In fact, the Saudi need for more and more weapons is coinciding with a desperate internal crisis.
The Saudi absolutist regime has sought to ruin its rivals by crashing oil prices. It has in fact shot itself in both feet, with the collapse of oil prices, and is now crawling on all fours instead of walking.
Saudi Arabia is planning to abandon a third of its internal projects worth $20 billion. According to Bloomberg, thousands of projects worth $69 billion are being reviewed, which would impact transport, housing and healthcare. The feudal kingdom has been burning through $12-$15 billion per month from its financial reserves to fund government spending and its war in Yemen as well as proxy military ventures elsewhere in northern Iraq, Bahrain and Syria where it favours the anti-Assad, anti-Iraqi IS forces.
The British government not only supplies the arms that Saudi uses it is also guiding the Saudi military aggression in Yemen, and guiding the suppression of the pro-democracy movement in Bahrain, through the seconding of UK army and police cadres.
Now the UK is having a giant dock built in Bahrain to house two giant British aircraft carriers that are currently being constructed. The Royal Navy £1bn destroyer, the Daring, has been sent to join a fleet of US warships in the Gulf, where incidents and near misses with Iranian speed boats are taking place every week.
In the last few days the US military has claimed that an American warship patrolling in the central Persian Gulf changed its course after a speedboat operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) came within 100 yards (91 metres) of it.
In a similar development on August 25, Pentagon officials said Iranian speedboats had ‘harassed’ US warships in the Strait of Hormuz. They said Iranian boats sped close to two US Navy destroyers with their weapons uncovered in the Strait of Hormuz in an ‘unsafe and unprofessional’ encounter.
Saudi Arabia’s economy is in desperate crisis. It’s military efforts in the Yemen are killing thousands with nothing to show for it, while its efforts to overthrow Assad have failed. The regime is preparing an even bigger leap into the dark to try to reverse its fortunes.
The mood of the Saudi autocrats was recently expressed by the Saudi Grand Mufti who declared that Iran’s leaders are not Muslims but Zoroastrians. This not just fighting talk, this is creating the ideological basis for a new and greater war in the Middle East in which the US, UK and Israel will be the major support of the Saudi autocrats against the masses of Iran, Syria, the Lebanon, Bahrain, the Yemen and Palestine.
Workers in the UK must demand that its government stop arming the Saudis, that it withdraws all of its advisers from Saudi Arabia, the Yemen and Bahrain and that it immediately withdraws all of its military forces from the Gulf! The TUC at its Congress next week must make these demands and tell the Tories that if they do not withdraw from the Gulf, the TUC will start a campaign of industrial and political action to make them do so.