HUMAN Rights Watch has indicted a so-called investigatory body, overseen by Saudi Arabia, which has for more than two years been covering up war crimes committed by the kingdom in Yemen.
The rights organisation released a 90-page analysis on the investigative work of the body, known as the Joint Incidents Assessment Team (JIAT), which is made up of officials from the countries involved in the murderous military ‘coalition’ fighting the Yemeni people. The criminals are investigating themselves and exonerating themselves for the crimes that they are committing against the Yemeni people on a daily basis!
Riyadh launched the war on Yemen in March 2015 in an attempt to reinstate Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, Yemen’s former president and a staunch ally of Riyadh, and crush the popular Houthi Ansarullah movement. The vast majority of the investigatory body’s so-called probes in Yemen, according to HRW, concluded that any strikes on civilian targets were ‘unintentional outcomes of legitimate military operations.’
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, said ‘the investigators are doing little more than covering up war crimes.’ At least 31 civilians, mostly children, were killed after a Saudi airstrike hit their vehicle in Yemen’s Hudaydah province on Thursday, only two weeks after a strike by the kingdom hit a school bus in the impoverished country and killed scores of Yemeni children.
Whitson warned countries selling arms to Saudi Arabia, including the United States and the UK, that the ‘sham investigations do not protect them from being complicit in serious war crimes.’ British officers are believed to have been seconded to the Saudi armed forces and are actually directing the atrocities!
Many workers and trade unions in the US and the UK are opposed to their ruling classes’ war crimes in the Yemen and are demanding that the UK and US governments stop supplying Saudi Arabia and its allies with the most modern arms, intelligence and the aerial refuelling of warplanes operating in Yemen. More than 14,700 Yemenis have been killed and thousands more injured since the onset of the Saudi invasion with their weapons.
Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has expressed concern over reports of death sentences for human rights activists in Saudi Arabia, saying his country will continue to stand up against human rights violations in the kingdom. ‘We have expressed our concern with the sentence handed down by Saudi Arabia, our concern for defending human rights and our shared values all around the world,’ Trudeau said on Thursday.
Human rights groups say Riyadh is seeking the death penalty for five Saudi human rights activists, including Israa al-Ghomgham, a Saudi woman, for the first time. They are accused of inciting protests in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province. Rights groups say the execution threat is aimed at stifling dissent.
There have been no condemnations from the US or UK against these projected murders. There is an axis of evil in the Middle East and it is made up of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain (where a dock is being built to hold the huge UK aircraft carriers that are being built), the UK, the US and Israel.
It is directed against the Arab people, against Palestine and against Iran and is prepared to stop at nothing ing to keep their grip on the oil wealth of the region. The workers movement in the UK and the US must support the Arab and the Iranian peoples in their struggle to own and control their own countries. The US and UK workers organisations must publicly declare that their enemy is at home and is certainly not the Iranian, Palestinian or Yemeni people.
A new war in the Middle East to achieve regime change in Iran and stop the establishment of the state of Palestine will set the world ablaze. The US, and the UK trade unions must be ready to stop any such war by calling general strikes to bring down the imperialist governments and bring in workers government and socialism. This is the only way to defeat imperialism and stop its atrocities in the Yemen, Palestine and throughout the Middle East.
