Amnesty International Calls for Ending Devastating Violence in Yemen
YemenExtra
M.A.
The head of Amnesty International warned Monday that a US military intervention in response to the attack on Saudi oil facilities would only aggravate suffering in the Middle East.
The rights group’s secretary-general, Kumi Naidoo, said the world, instead, should redouble efforts to end the devastating violence in Yemen, where a Saudi-led air campaign has been striking the country.
“We need to stop the bleeding right now, and any talk of military intervention right now will only exacerbate a bad situation,” Naidoo told AFP in an interview in Washington.
“The horrific levels of violence that people have been experiencing — as well as the bombings of hospitals, the destruction of water infrastructure and so on — is something that just should have been stopped with political will,” Naidoo said.
“Sadly, it appears that some governments, if they are allied with the United States, like Saudi Arabia, they can get away with murder — literally murder.”
He warned of the lessons of Iraq, where the 2003 US invasion that cited intelligence findings “created the catastrophe we have, not just in Iraq but in neighboring countries.”
“Certain political leaders could for opportunistic reasons choose to go to war because it might help them electorally,” he said.
But he added: “I don’t make any distinction about countries. I think far too many countries are comfortable with beating the drums of war at the moment.”
Yemeni Army has announced responsibility on Saturday for drone attacks on two major facilities run by Saudi Aramco, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant.
Attacks on Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s largest oil processing facilities in the east of the kingdom, have caused record-high crude prices in troubled global markets. It also caused a global awakening for the first time in scale on the humanitarian catastrophe and tragedy caused by the US-Saudi aggression in the 5-year war on Yemen.
This post originally ran on Almasirah English