It is perhaps the world’s most expensive home: a French mansion featuring marble statues and “a 57-acre landscape park” worth more than $300m, snapped up by the heir to the Saudi throne. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is on quite the shopping spree: a $500m yacht here, a $450m Leonardo da Vinci painting here. As this despot showers himself in decadent luxury, the children of Yemen are starving as Saudi bombs – many supplied courtesy of the British government – destroy the country.
It is one of the greatest crimes on earth, so it is welcome that, today, 350 high-profile figures – Nobel peace prize laureates and celebrities among them – have signed a letter demanding the leaders of France, the US and the UK stop “stoking the flames of war”. The barbarous Saudi regime is being armed and supported by the west as it pummels Yemen.
Our governments all share responsibility for the 60,000 who have died in the 1,000-day war, the 17.8 million without access to enough food, and the 22 million in need of humanitarian aid and protection. It is estimated that nearly a third of the Saudi-led air strikes have targeted non-military sites: farms, market places, food storage sites among them. In one recent Saudi airstrike, a dozen women were reported dead after returning home from a wedding procession. These are crimes that receive little coverage – but don’t turn away, because they are being committed in our name.
The Tory government has offered a derisory £50m extra in aid for food and fuel supplies: like setting fire to a neighbour’s house, then slipping a tenner through the charred letterbox. Even Samantha Power – Barack Obama’s former ambassador to the UN – has admitted that the US is “wrong (as were we in last admin) to keep supporting Saudi-led coalition as it kills civilians w/ impunity & blocks medicine/food/fuel supplies in face of looming famine.”
It is a little late now to admit guilt, and Obama should be troubled by the horror he helped to unleash. But this confession certainly underlines what a catastrophe the western-backed Saudi war represents.
Having written about the nightmare of Yemen, and visited a refugee camp across the water in Djibouti, it is deeply dispiriting how ignored it remains. Our continued silence gives carte blanche for our government to maintain its sordid support for the Saudis’ onslaught against civilians and human rights. The children will continue to silently starve, the civilians to silently perish under British-supplied bombs. It is surely time for us all to speak out about what is done in our name.