Made in Britain? The Saudi-led attack on a Yemeni refugee camp

 David Cameron watches a Eurofighter Typhoon during a visit to BAE Systems in Warton, Lancashire. Photograph.

Wednesday 1 April 2015 13.28 BST

On Monday, a Saudi-led coalition apparently dropped bombs on a refugee camp in northern Yemen. It’s perfectly likely that, as they have admitted before, the Saudis may have used jet fighters that were made in the UK. After all, Saudi Arabia is the UK defence industry’s largest export market. More than 40 innocent people died. Around 200 were injured, many seriously. The Yemeni state news agency showed pictures of dead children laid out on the floor.

Apparently, the Saudis were trying to hit a nearby Houthi rebel position. “It could have been that the fighter jets replied to fire, and we cannot confirm that it was a refugee camp,” said a spokesman for the Saudi regime, lamely. Well yes, it was a refugee camp, confirmed the UN. And if the Saudis invade Yemen, thus further extending the widening gyre of Sunni/Shia conflict, expect a lot more of the same. For if you think the Middle East could not get any worse, think again. And if you think it has little to do with us, that’s because
we do not choose to remind ourselves that it may well be Rolls-Royce engines, made in Derby, that will be roaring through the sky, and Eurofighters assembled in Lancashire, that will be doing the bombing. We say little because we have a multibillion pound conflict of interest. We supply the weapons, then throw up our hands in horror when they are used.

Perhaps I also ought to declare an interest. I fell in love with Yemen back in the 90s. Its searing heat, its desert, its ancient architecture, its fearsome mountains. I would lie on the top of our flat roof in Taiz and hear the call to prayer floating over the city, echoed by the barking of wild street dogs. There was little to distinguish any of this from the middle ages – except for trucks, a few Aston Villa football tops, lots of dodgy looking eastern European weaponry and the cigarettes that my friend was flogging out of the back of his Toyota Land Cruiser.

Yes, Yemen was a political basket case. Indeed, the very idea of some overarching national entity called Yemen hardly shaped the local consciousness. This was a collection of semi-autonomous tribes and communities, especially up in the mountains. They were keep-themselves-to-themselves kind of people. Most of the men spent much of their time lying around chewing khat, a sort of pointless amphetamine version of spinach. I passed my time playing chess with the lepers up at the leper colony run by Mother Teresa’s nuns. Despite the dysentery, despite the humidity, despite the suicidal driving and terrible food, I loved it. It had a wild, epic grandeur and the people a fierce independent mindedness. It doesn’t deserve to be a geo-political battleground for a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Indeed, where does?
King Abdullah embodied the wickedness of Saudi Arabia’s regime
Andrew Brown

I offer this personal reminiscence because I want to try to humanise a place that can easily seem like little more than a name on a map. Not many people from the UK have reason to visit the Yemen. But this is not to say that we are not up to our necks in this war – worse, we are massively profiting from it. Back in 2012 David Cameron and Lord Stephen Green (of HSBC fame) led a trade delegation to Saudi Arabia, flogging our weapons of war. The coalition government has licensed £3.8bn of arms to a Saudi dictatorship that regularly decapitates its subjects, retains the death penalty for conversion to Christianity, prevents women from having basic human rights, and has exported its extreme version of Wahhabi Islam to other parts of the Middle East, inspiring the likes of Islamic State, to catastrophic effect. “Ethics and values are important to us. They define how we behave towards others and play a major part in how we’re creating a responsible business,” says BAE Systems, who manufactures Eurofighter. That’s a sick joke.

Think about it: if Israel had dropped bombs on a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, it would be on the front page of every paper. But when the Saudis do it, there is hardly a bat-squeak of interest. We fly our flags at half-mast when their king dies. Even a supine Westminster Abbey pathetically follows suit. And all because of Saudi oil money. We ought to be thoroughly ashamed.