Saudi Gazette report

LONDON — Saudi Arabia is determined to bring stability, prosperity, and security back to Yemen, and the Kingdom has made repeated and determined efforts to do so, including this latest peace initiative said Prince Khalid Bin Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

In an opinion column in Telegraph, the UK’s leading daily, he called on the international community to put pressure on the Iranian-backed Houthi militia to end the escalation.

The Saudi envoy emphasized that it would take sustained global efforts to restore peace in the war-hit country.

The Saudi ambassador’s column comes in response to continued biased coverage of the Yemeni crisis in the UK mainstream media.

Expressing concerns of Saudi Arabia and its citizens over the plight of the ordinary Yemenis as the result of the ongoing conflict, Prince Khalid Bin Bandar said: “Like all Saudis, I feel deeply for the suffering of the people of Yemen. The conflict in that nation has been a humanitarian tragedy long before our intervention and continues to be so despite our best efforts to minimize civilian casualties.”

He said that Saudi Arabia got involved in the conflict with the sole purpose of ending it.

“This is a conflict between the internationally-recognized government of Yemen and the militant Houthi groups that are backed by Iran. Saudi Arabia originally intervened to support the Yemeni government, with the backing of a UN Security Council resolution, against an organization that was attempting its overthrow by military means. Since then, we have repeatedly attempted to bring the Houthis to the negotiating table, to find a route to ending the conflict,” the Saudi envoy said.

“This week, we have launched another initiative to bring about peace, another proposal for a ceasefire. We are serious about the initiative because we know that there is a genuine threat of famine in the country. But the world also needs to understand the hurdles that must be crossed,” he added.

He also Saudi Arabia’s immediate and complete disengagement will exacerbate the crisis rather than solving it.

“There are those who say that after six years of unresolved conflict, Saudi Arabia should simply walk away. To those people, I would say first that it is harder to leave than to arrive; there are still over 2,000 US troops in Afghanistan today, nearly 20 years after America first intervened in that country. We need to be realistic about what would happen should we leave unilaterally. The conflict would not end, but it would enter a new and bloody chapter, with an increased civilian death toll, and the humanitarian aid that is currently able to flow into the region would for the most part no longer be able to do so.”

“Just as America has felt the moral obligation to keep some presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, Saudi Arabia realizes that it cannot at this point walk away from the commitment it has made to the people of Yemen,”

Highlighting the Saudi humanitarian efforts to ease the suffering of the Yemenis, he said, the Kingdom has so given $17billon in aid to Yemen.

KSRelief, Saudi Arabia’s charity arm, is working with 80 partners on a series of humanitarian projects totaling $3.4billion.

“We have donated $422million in oil to the Yemeni government to keep power stations running; we have spent $100million clearing landmines, while at the same time the Houthis have been laying more; and we deposited $2.2 billion in the central bank of Yemen to fund food supplies, schools, hospitals, and other basic services,” the Saudi ambassador added.