UN denounces death of Yemeni children in Saudi strikes Saudis admit ‘mistakes’ in targeting civilians
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child denounced the death of children in Saudi airstrikes on Yemen as it examined the Saudi record on compliance with a treaty protocol on children in armed conflict on Monday.
The UN committee examined the Saudi record on compliance with a treaty protocol on children in armed conflict, and repeatedly raised the issue of children killed by coalition attacks in Yemen.
“This has been going on a number of years. But still there is no information that any perpetrators or people responsible for these kinds of actions have been prosecuted or sanctioned or dealt with in any way,” said panel vice chair Clarence Nelson.
Addressing the UN committee on Monday with respect to the massive civilian death toll in the Saudi invasion of Yemen, Saudi officials made rare admissions of fault, saying that they had made “mistakes” in targeting and were working hard to rectify the problem.
Saudi Arabia claimed that it was working hard to correct mistaken targeting by its military coalition in Yemen that has killed civilians including children, but UN rights experts voiced skepticism.
International pressure mounted on the kingdom, including from allies, to do more to limit civilian casualties in a 3-1/2 year war that has killed more than 10,000 people and pushed the already impoverished country to the brink of famine.
Osaiker Alotaibi of the Saudi Defense Ministry told the panel of 18 independent experts that the Saudi-led alliance was committed to upholding international humanitarian law. The coalition had a list of 64,000 potential targets in Yemen that were off limits to attack, including schools and hospitals.
Coalition investigations had uncovered “the existence of certain unintentional mistakes in a number of these operations,” Alotaibi said.
Renate Winter, panel chairwoman, asked why schools and hospitals had been repeatedly struck: “You say it’s an accident. How many such accidents can you bear and how many such accidents can people in the country (Yemen) bear?”
Winter then referred to an airstrike on a school bus in August in Sa’ada Province in north Yemen that killed dozens.
Saudi officials were clearly trying to use this to get a pass on the 10,000-plus killed civilians, insisting that the internal investigations note the “mistakes,” and that perpetrators will be “held to account,” despite little evidence that this ever happened.
The UN committee didn’t appear to be sold on this idea either, with members noting the war has been going on since 2015 with no sign of prosecutions for civilian deaths.
The panel chairwoman noted that an awfully large number of these “mistakes” had hit the same civilian targets, with several schools and hospitals hit myriad times. She asked how many times the Saudis could possibly keep making that same mistake.
For Saudi officials, of course, the illusion of improvement is what is sought here, but it does warrant asking why, several years into the war, the sites of longdestroyed schoolhouses keep getting hit with “precision” munitions, since that seemingly doesn’t do the Saudi war any good, whether civilians are present or not.
Yemen has been racked by violence since 2014. The conflict escalated in 2015 when Saudi Arabia and its allies launched a devastating air campaign aimed at undermining the Houthi Ansarullah movement and reinstating former president, Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi, a staunch ally of Riyadh.
The alliance has conducted thousands of airstrikes since it intervened in the war in 2015 and has often hit civilian areas, although it denies ever doing so intentionally.
The humanitarian situation has worsened sharply since, putting 8.4 million people on the brink of starvation and ruining the already weak economy.
Reuters, Press TV and news.antiwar. com contributed to the story.