UNITED NATIONS - The United Nations has temporarily removed Saudi-led coalition from a blacklist of children’s rights violators, after a report released last week deemed the military group responsible for hundreds of minors’ deaths in the Yemen conflict.
The UN report on children and armed conflict - released last Thursday - said the coalition was responsible for 60 percent of child deaths and injuries in Yemen last year, killing 510 and wounding 667, and half the attacks on schools and hospitals.
Following a strong protest by Saudi Arabia, however, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon agreed to a joint review by the world body and the coalition of the cases cited in the annual report of states and armed groups that violate children’s rights in war. Although a spokesman for the UN Secretary-General said the decision was temporary, pending a review of the evidence, human rights campaigners expressed outrage that the global body had succumbed to Saudi pressure.
Spokesman Stephane Dujarric said, “Pending the conclusions of the joint review, the secretary-general removes the listing of the coalition in the report’s annex.”
But Saudi Arabia’s UN Ambassador Abdallah Al-Mouallimi insisted “the removal is unconditional and irreversible,” explaining that the government has no problem with a review and is confident it will conclude that the coalition was “wrongly placed on the list.”
The secretary-general’s annual report said the UN verified a total of 1,953 youngsters killed and injured in 2015 - a six-fold increase in the number of child casualties in Yemen compared with 2014. About 60 percent of those casualties were attributed to the coalition. The UN said it also verified 101 attacks on schools and hospitals last year, double the number in 2014, of which 48 percent were attributed to the coalition.
Al-Mouallimi called the casualty figures attributed to the coalition “wildly exaggerated” saying “the casualties are far lower.”
Spokesman Dujarric added Ban accepted a Saudi proposal for a joint UN-Saudi review of the cases and numbers in the report and invited the coalition to send a team to New York as soon as possible for detailed discussions before the Security Council examines its findings in August. Philippe Bolopion, deputy director for global advocacy at Human Rights Watch, said his organization and others have also documented the impact of coalition airstrikes on children, schools and hospitals.
He accused the secretary-general’s office of engaging in “political manipulation” and tainting his human rights legacy. “After giving a similar pass to Israel last year, the UN secretary-general’s office has hit a new low by capitulating to Saudi Arabia’s brazen pressure and taking the country off its just published list of shame,” Bolopion said. “Yemen’s children deserve better.”
In Yemen, the Houthis, who are under attack from the Saudi-led coalition, have held Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, since September 2014, and their advance across the Arab world’s poorest country brought the Saudi-led coalition into the war in March 2015. The UN says over 6,000 people have been killed.
The United Nations declared a truce on April 10 to pave the way for peace talks that started a week later in Kuwait. But the fragile truce has been marred with violations and breaches by both sides as clashes and airstrikes led by the coalition continued in different areas across the country.
“The timing of this report is most unfortunate because it comes as we are hoping for a breakthrough in the discussions in Kuwait leading to an agreement and hopefully an end to the conflict,” Al-Mouallimi said.
Saudi Arabia had not been consulted prior to the publication of this year’s report, Mouallimi added.