Daily Times

Let us be clear. The cholera outbreak in Yemen is tantamount to a war crime.

Since Saudi Arabia and its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council allies started bombing this impoverished nation -Yemen has found itself home to the world’s largest cholera epidemic, affecting some 200,00 and claiming the lives of around 1,300.

If a war crime has been committed — which we believe it has — this begs the question of who is to blame. Riyadh has been leading the campaign of terror. Indeed, the bombs and bullets that have been raining down on Yemen since 2015 are responsible for destroying the country’s water supplies. The rest, as they say, is history.

Yet it is not enough to pinpoint who is doing the bombing. We need to talk of collective responsibility. Which leads us to the United States and the matter of whether or not it has blood on its hands. We believe it has. And lots of it. It has, after all, been from the beginning a staunch supporter of the bombing of one of the world’s poorest countries.

As criminal as what is going on in Yemen is — we must not stop there in exposing the hypocrisy of putative western concern for the Global South, with Washington at the helm. The latter, has, after all, signed a major arms deal, close to $400 billion, with the Saudi kingdom. Which more than confirms that the US has lost any vestige of moral authority that it had carefully manufactured on the international humanitarian front. Similarly, we strongly condemn Saudi actions and future ambitions in the region.

It is against this backdrop that we commend the incumbent Pakistani government for not succumbing to Saudi pressure to join the campaign in Yemen. It is also against this backdrop that we warn our parliamentary leaders to tread very carefully the path of the Saudi-led Islamic Alliance. We say no to any possibility of having war crimes committed in our name. *

Published in Daily Times, July 1^st , 2017.