“By now the Saudi/UAE Trump-backed invasion of Yemen has killed over 9,000 civilians, more than 60% being women and children. It has starved and endangered the lives of millions more ordinary people.
“These three nations have stepped beyond what Civil Society will tolerate in humanitarian atrocities. The cruelty of Thursday’s massacre of a bus-load of unsuspecting and unwarned children has no possible mitigation.
“Dropping large bombs on a market has nothing to do with the alleged goal of reinstating Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi as the Saudi Arabian preference to run Yemen’s government. It is an horrific war crime. It is an unspeakable crime against humanity .
“As those remains of the children which could be found amidst the devastation of a school bus are buried today; and triggered by the manslaughter of these children, The RINJ Foundation Women are demanding the out-of-control men who author this violence immediately agree to a cease-fire while the UN conducts its investigation as it says it will do; and while the parties to this slaughter negotiate a compensation settlement with the full extended families of the children they murdered, however long that may take.
“The pilots and all co-conspirators must be captured and arrested by any state’s agents on the charge of murder and a crime against humanity.
“All available steps will be taken to facilitate those arrests and eventual prosecutions which as of today remain as events contiguous to the time and place of the commission of the crime. In other words the crime is seen to be ongoing and the perpetrators must be apprehended to prevent the further commission of new counts of the same crime against humanity.
“The leaders of these three countries must in the meantime hide their faces away from Earth’s mothers and children in unfettered shame. Every woman on the planet is asked to support unequivocally all of the foregoing.”
by Melissa Hemingway Feminine-Perspective Staff
As information continues to flow from the Saudi Air Force attack on the market in Sa’ada’s Majz district it has begun to appear that the attack by Saudi Arabia was intended to cause civilian casualties against the Houthi people of Yemen.
The United Nations has demanded a full investigation.
The Saudi/UAE coalition says that it has submitted a request for investigation to its own Joint Incident Investigation Team but in the meantime the Saudi’s have declared the killings in the market of 50 people, mostly children, and the 6 dozen injuries where part of normal operations. An investigator from The RINJ Foundation tells Feminine-Perspective that some 60% of all deaths in the Yemen conflict are civilians, more than half being unsuspecting women and children killed in air raids.
Civil society is demanding that hostilities end based on the UN plan: UN-Humanitarian-Response-Plan-January-to-December-2018.
Continuing the violence in Yemen is a festering suck mindedness that needs calm, stabilizing and ongoing treatment. Rage around the world over this incident is swelling.
This blame put to Saudi for killing the children comes as little surprise since more than 60% of Yemeni civilian deaths have been the result of Saudi-led air strikes, the UN said in January of this year. But the alarming reality is that last Thursday’s attack took place far from any fighters or fighting.
That too is not unusual. In June 2018, Saudi and UAE forces carried out 258 air raids on Yemen, one-third of which targeted non-military sites according to an analysis of the Coalition’s news releases.
It was a market. At the market a school bus was bombed heavily. There’s not much left of the bus. Here is the remnants of the bus captured in a TV video and shared with you. Prepare yourself for the images of injured children far below.
The conflict is basically a surrogate war between the Sunnis Muslims of Saudi Arabia and the Shia Muslims of Iran.
Saudi Sunni Muslims are backed by the United States, France and Britain against a Houthi movement, which supports Yemen’ Zaidi Shia Muslim minority with the backing of some Yemeni Sunnis who are also seeking major reform in the country. Saudi is using its massive cash reserves to buy huge volumes of military goods from the US, Britain, and France including the bombs it dropped on a market on Thursday last. (It is also buying 15 billion dollars worth pf Light Armoured Vehicles which we have seen in Yemen.
The ‘Canadian’ LAVs are built by US-owned General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) Division which has located a factory in Canada as part of an industrial offset program after winning a contract with the Canadian government.
(GDLS makes some of the best light armoured vehicles in the world. The Saudi units are intended for the safe transport of military personnel, journalists, medical teams and observers in combat zones and elsewhere. I have travelled in one of these units and they are not the most comfortable armoured cars but for some reason they feel safer than the American Humvee (Hummer H1) which are constantly being blown up by improvised explosive devices. Humvee occupants rarely survive intact.)
The Houthi group fought a series of rebellions against Yemen President Ali Abdullah Saleh who had ruled Yemen for 33 years. Saleh was eventually forced to hand over power to his deputy, Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, in 2011.
President Hadi was compelled to deal with attacks by al-Qaeda; a separatist movement, the Southern Transitional Council (STC) stirring up trouble in the south of Yemen; and dissident military officers loyal to the ousted Saleh.
Hadi also faced pervasive corruption in Yemen. Extreme unemployment and food insecurity added to the country’s woes and the governance of Mr. Hadi was failing when the Houthi grabbed some control of Yemen’s northern heartland of Saada province in September 2014 plus surrounding environs. The Houthi had full control of Saada by March of 2015 when Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, much to the anguish of Iran.
Since Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen, backed by the United States, human rights violations have become a daily event and the country has become the world’s worst human rights fiasco. The invasion of Saudi Arabia has introduced
The UN Secretary-General António Guterres has condemned the air strike by the Saudi forces in Sa’ada, which hit a busy market area in Majz District and impacted a bus carrying children from a summer camp. Local health authorities have confirmed that scores of people were killed and injured, the majority of them children between 10 and 13 years old.
Read: UN-Humanitarian-Response-Plan-January-to-December-2018
Secretary General Guterres called on all parties to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law, in particular the fundamental rules of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack.
The UN has been urging for a negotiated political settlement through inclusive intra-Yemeni dialogue as the only way to end the conflict.
