The Yemen Crisis, Khashoggi, and the Deadly Saudi Arms Trade

Nora brings her four month-old son Saleh to Al Hudaydah’s main hospital. Close to half a million children and two million mothers in Yemen are at risk of dying from severe acute malnutrition due to the ongoing conflict., UN OCHA/Giles Clarke

• Whatever happened to Jamal Khashoggi … is … a painful reminder of the selective nature of international outrage that the death of a single, well-connected Saudi Arabian journalist was able to spark a conversation which the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians could not.
• The murder of Jamal Khashoggi has forced new scrutiny of the Saudi role in the world’s greatest humanitarian crisis. But, despite calls for a Yemen ceasefire and other posturing, no Western country has pledged to end arms sales to the kingdom.

Evergreene Digest Editor's Note: Germany, Denmark, Netherlands and Finland stop weapons sales to Saudi Arabia in response to Yemen famine.

Elise Thomas, the Interpreter/Australia / Portside

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November 3, 2018 | "Wait, let’s take a picture!” Osama Zeid al Homran shouted to his friends. In the video the boys, aged six to eleven, are laughing and joking with one another on the bus on the way to an excursion to celebrate the end of term at their school in Sa’dah, a region of Yemen bordering on Saudi Arabia.

"I tell you what I don't want to do. Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, all these companies – I don’t want to hurt jobs. I don’t want to lose an order like that." -Trump

Hours later, Osama and at least 24 of his classmates would be dead. The bomb which killed them when it struck their school bus was a GBU-12 Paveway II, made in Garland, Texas, and sold to Saudi Arabia by Lockheed Martin in a deal approved by the US State Department.

Of the 51 people who died in the bombing on 9 August, 40 were children.

Elise Thomas is a Melbourne-based freelance journalist with an interest in humanitarian and human rights issues and the impacts of new technologies. She has studied international affairs at the Australian National University and the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

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