Each time she learns Saudi bombs are falling on Yemen, Shireen Al-Adeimi rushes to her cell-phone.
Living an ocean-away in the United States, the Yemeni-Canadian anxiously scrolls through her WhatsApp chats to make sure her friends and family back home are safe.
While the world’s attention focuses on the murder of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the ongoing Saudi war on Yemen has killed upwards of 50,000 people, with at least another 110,000 children dying of malnutrition and cholera, according to the Yemen Data Project and international aid groups.
The United Nations warned last week that Yemen is on the brink of the “world’s worst famine in 100 years,” if the Saudi-led coalition bombing is not ended.
With little scrutiny, several Canadian companies have provided combat vehicles, weapons, surveillance technology, pilot training, and aircraft servicing relied on by the Saudis for their war against the Houthi movement that came to power in Yemen in 2014, after an Arab Spring uprising toppled its Saudi-backed dictator.
“Media coverage has left people in Canada and the United States to think this is just a civil war and that we should figure it out for ourselves, ignoring the crucial military backing their governments are providing Saudi Arabia,” says Al-Adeimi, a professor at Michigan State University who grew up in Canada.
This summer, Canada was showered with global praise when its Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland tweeted that she was “gravely concerned” about Saudi Arabia’s arrest of human rights activists and was met with a diplomatic backlash by the Saudi dictatorship.
Canada’s concern, however, hasn’t seemed to extend to Saudi abuses they are enabling: with the Trudeau government’s approval, $2.4 billion in military goods have been shipped to Saudi Arabia since the war on Yemen started in 2015, according to the Guardian’s calculations based on government statistics and an export database.
The boom in business has led Canadian companies to open or expand several centres through the Middle East to promote sales and to maintain, repair or update vehicles, aircraft and war-components sold to the Saudis and its allies like the United Arab Emirates, who for decades have used their enormous oil wealth to buy weapons from the US, UK, France, Germany and Canada.
On the weekend, Minister Freeland said the killers of Khashoggi “must face justice,” while refusing to follow Germany’s lead in freezing weapons sales to Saudi Arabia. But yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau shifted tack, saying he is prepared to suspend a major arms deal with Saudi Arabia if he concludes the weapons are being misused, something evidence has long pointed to.
It is the first such sign from Trudeau, after repeated pledges not to cancel a historic $15 billion deal that has General Dynamics Land Systems (GDLS) producing hundreds of light-armoured vehicles (LAVs) for Saudi Arabia, first signed in 2014 under a previous Conservative government but continued by the Liberals.
Older models of these LAVs, which the company has been making for Saudi Arabia since the 1980s, have been regularly identified along the Saudi’s southern border and within Yemeni territory, along with military vehicles made by three other Canadian companies, Terradyne, Streit Group and IAG Guardian.
Al-Adeimi’s family came to Canada after leaving Yemen in the late 1990s and settled in London, Ontario – the city where the GDLS factory makes its vehicles, a billion dollars worth of which were shipped to Saudi Arabia in 2018, including an all-time high in the summer months alone, according to the export database consulted by the Guardian.
PM Trudeau insisted Tuesday morning that it would be “very difficult to suspend or leave that contract,” but Canada’s former Ambassador for Disarmament to the UN Peggy Mason, now president of the Rideau Institute, pointed out that Canada in fact has the full authority to break the contract under the country’s laws.
The combat vehicles make up the bulk of Canadian military shipments since 2015, with another $100 million being guns, bombs, rockets or missiles, ammunition, key surveillance components for war helicopters, drones, armour and unspecified chemical or biological agents, whose shipments for the first two years of the war were previously reported by the Toronto Star.
The Canadian political and media debate, however, has focused almost exclusively on the potential misuse of combat vehicles against civilians within Saudi Arabia, rather than their deployment in Yemen.
Anthony Fenton, a York University academic who studies Canadian weapons exports to the Middle East, has amassed wide-spread documentation of the Saudi use of Canadian arms. He spends most days online, tracking regional media and what he calls “bling videos” and “Saudi selfies” posted by Saudi military officials or Yemeni fighters who’ve captured combat vehicles. When he’s been blocked from viewing images by pro-war Saudi accounts on twitter, he has created dummy accounts to continue his monitoring.
“It’s rare that a week has gone by without a Canadian-made combat vehicle or weapon showing up in Yemen – the evidence of their wide-spread use is overwhelming and incriminating,” Fenton says. “Yet the silence among politicians and the media about Canada’s profitable complicity in the Yemen war has been striking.”
A analysis by Fenton found that of several hundreds of media articles published about the diplomatic spate between Saudi Arabia and Canada in the summer, only a handful mentioned any Canadian connection to the war on Yemen.
A spokesperson for Canada’s Ministry of Global Affairs said “Canada does not export items destined for Yemen or that we suspect might be used in Yemen due to the impact on regional stability and security. Careful attention is paid to the potential for the diversion of Canadian exports to the conflict in Yemen.”
Combat vehicles are not the only Canadian contribution the Saudi war effort has benefited from.
Canadian company CAE is training US pilots who refuel Saudi fighter-jets in mid-air during their bombing raids, which have destroyed hundreds of hospitals, schools, markets and mosques. It has also trained drone pilots from the United Arab Emirates, whose unarmed Predator drones have been deployed in Yemen.
Al-Adeimi’s grandmother, who passed away in 2016, spent the last year of her life in a Yemeni city surrounded by Saudi bombing.
“She was evacuated out of the city in a wheelbarrow,” says Al-Adeimi. “I can never forget that image.”
The Saudi bombing campaign has also targeted Yemen’s farmers, herders, fishers and food depots, according to a new report by Tufts University, which concludes “there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution” – a war crime under international law. Saudi Arabia has also blockaded the ports of Yemen, which relies on imports for 90 percent of its food supply, leaving 12 to 13 million civilians at risk of starvation.
Some of the Canadian weapons exports to Saudi Arabia began during Conservative Stephen Harper’s government, but others are new, including a spike in rifles sales to $30 million over the last two years, mostly by Winnipeg-based PGW. The only country that receives more rifles now from Canada is the United States.
Provincial Aerospace, for whom ex top Canadian general Rick Hillier serves as an advisor, has sold the UAE aircraft used for surveillance and repairs Saudi military aircraft. Military publication Jane’s Defence Weekly has noted that such contracts are “likely to increase in the coming years, as operational feedback from operations in Yemen...are going to drive procurement priorities.” In November 2017, the company unveiled a new surveillance aircraft called the Force Multiplier at the Dubai Air Show.
Pratt & Whitney has provided maintenance to war helicopters and built hundreds of engines for Saudi and UAE aircraft, while L3 Wescam has provided key surveillance technology for several Saudi war helicopters and aircraft regularly downed over Yemen – and both recently opened up new service centres in the Middle East.
Canadian company Streit Group, dozens of whose armoured vehicles have been identified in use by Saudi-coalition forces in Yemen, tripled the size of their facilities in the UAE in 2016. They boast of having the world’s largest industrial park for armoured cars – a 9 million square foot venue that includes a factory for producing bullet-proof glass, fuelling stations, a helipad, and a new “anti-terrorist training centre.” Little is known about the scale of Streit Group’s sales because it has taken advantage of a loophole in Canadian export controls, which only cover military goods that originate in Canada, not in factories abroad.
While Saudi Arabia and its allies have used foreign and private mercenaries to fight its war deeper within Yemen, the Saudi’s own soldiers have operated on the ground along its border, sometimes with US Army Green Berets.
“The Saudis are using the armoured vehicles to solidify their border and push into Yemen a bit,” says Dave Des Roches, who previously oversaw Saudi policy at the Pentagon and is now an associate professor at the National Defence University.
Saudi-Canadian LAVs as far as the eye can see pic.twitter.com/NmKHzE5HL2
— Anthony Fenton (@anthonyfenton) June 12, 2018
Des Roche says that while the Canadian combat vehicles were purchased by the Saudi National Guard, which is supposed to function as an internal “coup-protection force” for the Royal family, they have been operating at the border in a role traditionally reserved for the Saudi Army.
“The roles of the two have been evolving, and we could eventually see the National Guard somehow incorporated into the Army,” he says.
The Saudi National Guard also operated outside its borders in 2011 when it sent a convoy of Canadian-made GDLS combat vehicles to help the Bahraini dictatorship crush a democratic uprising during the Arab Spring.
In Canada, a local CBC reporter has taken video footage of GDLS combat vehicles being transported by rail to a port in Saint John, New Brunswick, where they are usually picked up Saudi cargo vessels.
As demands for countries to halt military exports to Saudi Arabia grows, Canada, along with the United States and United Kingdom, are finding themselves increasingly isolated. Austria and Holland have repeatedly denied licenses for arms deals with Saudi Arabia, Greece has scrapped an agreement, and Germany has suspended future sales. If the world were to see a domino of cancellations, Saudi Arabia would not be able to keep up its war, Al-Adeimi believes.
“Saudi Arabia doesn’t have their own weapons industry, they only have their oil money,” she says. “This war wouldn’t be possible without Canada and others arming them. Western countries are literally holding their hand while they wage war.”
The Global Affairs spokesperson noted that
“Canada remains deeply concerned by the ongoing conflict in Yemen and its humanitarian impact on civilians, particularly women and children, who continue to bear the brunt of the fighting. This year alone, Canada has provided $44 million in life-saving assistance to conflict-affected people in Yemen.”
“The Canadian government are arsonists who like to play at being fire-fighters,” Al-Adeimi says. “But if Canada wants a morally upright foreign policy, Yemen is such a huge stain on everything you want to stand for.”
While the Canadian government has rarely made public pronouncements about Yemen, internal documents give us clues about their position.
In the spring of 2016, the government publicly released its permit approving the export of GDLS’s combat vehicles. The document, signed off by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, underlined that Canada “has an important and growing commercial relationship with Saudi Arabia,” a “key partner” that is “promoting regional security and stability” and “countering instability in Yemen.”
“To believe that Saudi Arabia is a stabilizing force in the region in any meaningful sense of that term is absurd,” Al-Adeimi says. “They started bombing Yemen within two months of Prince Salman gaining power. They’ve funded extremist militias in Syria that enabled the rise of ISIS. They kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon. They’ve treated Al Qaeada as a convenient partner, paying them off and using them. They blockaded Qatar and are furthering isolating them by literally digging a canal around the country to turn them into an island.”
The stability that Saudi Arabia provides has mainly meant one thing to western policy-makers, George Monbiot writes: stability in oil supply and the maintenance of its price, no matter the human cost. Saudi Arabia, as the world’s largest producer of cheap oil and the only country able to raise production if it falls elsewhere, has long held incredible strategic importance.
When-ever political protests break-out against the authoritarian royal monarchy, the western business media issue a clock-like warning: prepare for a rise in oil prices. In 2011, when it looked like the Arab Spring might threaten the Saudi dictatorship, the warnings grew apoplectic: serious unrest could mean prices spiking as high as $200 a barrel.
An oil price that high would create grave economic disturbance for many oil-dependent economies in western countries, including Canada’s. Which is why western governments have preferred the brand of stability the Saudi regime provides – and why they’ve been happy to have their weapons bought by the Saudi’s oil wealth. Yet as the oil reserves of the Saudi petro-state dwindle, and decarbonization of the global economy gains momentum, critics have suggested Saudi Arabia is entering a deeper crisis, engaging in a fire-sale privatization of its state assets, and acting out violently, as it has in the killing of Khashoggi and in the Yemen war.
Twitter: @Martin_Lukacs
