Saudi soldiers fire artillery toward three armed vehicles approaching the Saudi border with Yemen. Hasan Jamali/Press Association. All rights reserved. A cycle of claim and counter-claim has been set in motion about arms sales and international humanitarian law (IHL) in the Saudi-led war in Yemen. Serious, widespread and credible allegations of the targeting of civilians, of failures to take precautions to protect them or to investigate their deaths have been made by a growing chorus of international actors: from Amnesty International and the International Committee of the Red Cross, to the European Parliament and, most recently, a UN panel of experts and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.
Calls for a halt to arms transfers to Saudi Arabia are growing, yet major suppliers to Saudi Arabia such as the UK continue to not listen. Initially the UK government showed itself deaf, ignoring the allegations. Then it trotted out the standard line about having one of the world’s most rigorous control regimes – waiting for the fuss to blow over, essentially. But the fuss is not blowing over. The scale of civilian harm is growing, accompanied by increasingly widespread and vocal public and elite concern.
As a result, the UK government is starting to have to actually respond to the allegations. But what we’ve seen is not engagement with the substance of the claims. Rather, we’ve seen a blanket counter-claim that the UK supports efforts by its ally Saudi Arabia to restore the legitimate government of Yemen. This has led to a confrontation within the UK government between the Department for International Development (DfID) and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), the former arguing that the promotion of arms transfers undermines the growing provision of humanitarian aid to Yemen. (DfID does not scrutinise arms sales to Saudi Arabia because it is not poor; and the Minister of State for International Development Desmond Swayne claims he would not expect to have been consulted about them, despite the disastrous impact on the humanitarian and sustainable development situation in Yemen.)
