Saudi Arabia, UAE accused of war crimes
GENEVA — The military coalition led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in Yemen has killed thousands of civilians in air strikes, tortured detainees, raped civilians and used child soldiers as young as 8 — actions that may amount to war crimes, U.N. investigators said in a report issued Tuesday.
The report singled out Saudi and Emirati air strikes for causing the most civilian casualties, saying they had hit residential areas, markets, funerals, weddings, jails, boats and medical facilities.
“There is little evidence of any attempt by parties to the conflict to minimize civilian casualties,” Kamel Jendoubi, chairman of the panel of experts that produced the report.
The report also said that the Houthi rebels, who control northern Yemen and are fighting the Saudi-Emirati coalition, may have committed war crimes. They were accused of shelling civilians, torturing detainees, recruiting young children to fight and blocking access to humanitarian agencies.
“None have clean hands,” one of the experts, Charles Garraway, a retired military officer who served for 30 years as a legal officer in the British army, told reporters in Geneva. “Despite the severity of the situation, we continue to witness a total disregard of the suffering of the people of Yemen.”
A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition said it would respond after its legal team had reviewed the report.
The Emirati minister of state for foreign affairs, Anwar Gargash, said on Twitter that his government would need to study the report before responding, but he said the culpability of the Houthis for civilian suffering needed to be recognized.
Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told reporters in Washington that the Trump administration had reviewed its support for the Saudi-Emirati coalition.
“We determined it was the right thing to do in defense of their own countries, but also to restore the rightful government there,” he told reporters. “Our conduct there is to try to keep the human cost of innocents being killed accidentally to an absolute minimum.’’
The U.S. goal, Mattis said, is to encourage the combatants to negotiate a settlement to the conflict.
Political factions and militias have been fighting for control of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country, since powersharing talks collapsed in 2014 and the Houthis ousted the internationally backed government of President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi.