Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP)
June 30, 2016
Mr. Ban Ki-Moon
United Nations Secretary General
We the undersigned, a group of professors in Europe and North America, are deeply alarmed to learn that the government of Saudi Arabia has coerced you to remove the military coalition led by that country in Yemen from the UN list of armies charged with war crimes in that country. According to the New York Times, you have openly admitted to reporters that you were “threatened with the loss of financing for humanitarian operations in the Palestinian territories, South Sudan and Syria” if you did not capitulate to Saudi demands in this regard.
The same reports indicate that your office had issued a report “on violations of children’s rights in war zones, and it cited deadly coalition attacks that had hit schools and hospitals,” but soon “the coalition was taken off the list, after lobbying by Saudi Arabia and some of its wealthiest allies who help finance United Nations humanitarian operations.”
We are, sir, aghast at the brazen vulgarity of power that a single ruling family in one member state can assert against the entirety of the UN to prevent it from documenting war crimes and crimes against humanity.
This in fact is the second time in a year that your office has reversed course by openly removing the name of a state charged with war crimes from such lists. Last year under US and Israeli pressure you removed Israel from a similar list of violent states freely maiming and murdering children without any repercussions.
The UN is not the first or the only international entity to charge Saudi Arabia with such crimes against humanity.
Amnesty International has also reported: “Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces have carried out a series of air strikes targeting schools that were still in use, in violation of international humanitarian law, and hampering access to education for thousands of Yemen’s children.”
On its most recent mission to northern Yemen, Amnesty International has found “evidence of US, UK and Brazilian cluster munitions used by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces. The use of cluster bombs is banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions.”
Such egregious violations of the human rights of a beleaguered nation by Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners, aided and abetted by the US and the UK, make a mockery of the sovereignty of nations, of international humanitarian conventions, of the rule of law, and above all of the rule of reason and sanity.
If not the UN then what international body has the duty of documenting such criminal offenses? If not the UN then who should hold Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners accountable for such war crimes?
Withholding of humanitarian aid to the UN for political gain is an affront to the very logic of cooperation among the community of nations and should be condemned as such by the entirety of the civilized world.
We the undersigned hold the UN chiefly responsible for continuing to document such barbaric violations of children’s safety and security by Saudi Arabia in Yemen or by any other member state anywhere else in the world.
The ruling Saudi regime obviously knows how to use its wealth to manipulate dysfunctional international bodies such as the UN. However, in the eyes of the global community it stands charged with overwhelming evidence of war crimes and of fundamental human indecency.
Your open and public confession, Mr. Moon, to have been forced to pander to Saudi power and wealth is the most damning indictment both against the staggering incompetence of UN and the wanton cruelty of Saudi Arabia, which is literally getting away with mass murder and an assortment of atrocities in a neighboring sovereign nation-state.
- Khaled Abou El Fadl, The University of California, Los Angeles
- Ervand Abrahamian, City University of New York
- Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University
- Moonier Arbach, CNRS Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris
- Geneviève Bédoucha, CNRS, France
- Peter Beinart, The City University of New York
- Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The University of Cambridge
- Isa Blumi, Stockholm University
- Laurent Bonnefoy, Sciences Politiques, Paris
- François Burgat, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence, France
- Robert Burrowes, University of Washington
- Sheila Carapico, University of Richmond
- Steven Caton, Harvard University
- Don Conway-Long, Webster University
- Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University
- Fred Dallmayr, University of Notre Dame
- Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University
- Blandine Destremau, Centre national de la recherche scientifique, EHESS, Paris
- Paul Dresch, University of Oxford
- Kaveh Ehsani, DePaul University
- Richard Falk, Princeton University, emeritus
- Mark Gasiorowski, Tulane University
- McGuire Gibson, University of Chicago
- Michael Gilsenan, New York University
- Andre Gingrich, Austrian Academy of Sciences
- Ali Ghodsi, University of Waterloo, Canada
- Ahmad Hadavi, Northwestern University
- Najam Haider, Barnard College, Columbia University
- Wael Hallaq, Columbia University
- Nader Hashemi, University of Denver
- Mary Hegland, Santa Clara University
- Juliette Honvault, IREMAM, Aix-Marseille Université, France
- Erik Hovden, Institute for Social Anthropology, Vienna
- Hossein Kamaly, Barnard College, Columbia University
- Mohsen Kadivar, Duke University
- Lamya Khalidi, CEPAM, CNRS, France
- Haider A. Khan, University of Denver
- Laurie King, Georgetown University
- Thomas Kuehn, Simon Fraser University
- Ahmet T. Kuru, San Diego State University
- Jean Lambert, CERMOM-INALCO, Paris
- Miriam Lowi, College of New Jersey
- Mojtaba Mahdavi, University of Alberta, Canada
- Elham Manea, University of Zurich
- Hamid Mavani, Bayan Claremont Islamic Graduate School
- Anne Meneley, Trent University
- Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
- Flagg Miller, University of California, Davis
- Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University
- Annie Montigny, MNHN-Musée de l’Homme, France
- Norma Claire Moruzzi, University of Illinois at Chicago
- Mehdi Noorbakhsh, Harrisburg University
- Misagh Parsa, Dartmouth College
- Vijay Prasad, Trinity College
- Babak Rahimi, University of California, San Diego
- Ahmad Sadri, Lake Forest College
- Mahmoud Sadri, Texas Woman’s University
- Muhammad Sahimi, University of Southern California
- Christa Salamandra, Lehman College, The City University of New York
- Aseel Sawalha, Fordham University
- Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College, The City University of New York
- Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle, CNRS, LLACAN-INaLCO, France
- Emilio Spadola, Colgate University
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Columbia University
- Roman Stadnicki, University of Tours
- Lucine Taminian, Independent Scholar, Amman
- Mahdi Tourage, King’s University College at Western University
- Peyman Vahabzadeh, University of Victoria, Canada
- Robert Vitalis, University of Pennsylvania
- Janet Watson, University of Leeds
- John Willis, University of Colorado
- Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University
- Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
