Alwaght- Britain’s Defense Secretary has praised controversial missiles producer, MBDA, supplying deadly arms to the Saudi regime and former Libyan dictator Gaddafi as a “role model” of cooperation.
Addressing MBDA’s staffers in Stevenage on Friday, Michael Fallon praised the arms manufacturer for building “a great reputation” supplying British armed forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, thanking the company for “sterling service.”
“You are a role model here for the kind of partnerships we’ll be seeking in future: for our defense, for our manufacturing, and for our country,” he said, as cited by the Independent.
The firm also makes the Brimstone and Storm Shadow missiles and sells them to the Saudi Arabian air force, which is bombing civilians in Yemen with over 12,000 killed. The UN estimates that Saudi-led forces have caused the vast majority of civilian deaths in the country’s bloody conflict, with reports of schools, hospitals and food factories being bombed. It is estimated that one third of Yemen’s 24 million people are at risk of starvation.
In 2007 MBDA signed a contract to provide £200 million worth of missiles and military communications equipment to Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya. The dictator was deposed in 2011 during a brutal civil war during which he was accused of bombing his own citizens using British-supplied weapons.
Anti-arms trade activists slammed the Defense Secretary for courting the arms company, accusing him of glorifying a firm that “profits from war and arms tyrants”.
Activists say the British government is complicit in Saudi Arabia’s war crimes in Yemen as London is working closely with the US and the Israeli regime to support Riyadh’s aggression against its impoverished neighbor.
Last March Amnesty International urged the British people to petition their lawmakers to pressure London to immediately halt arms transfers to Saudi Arabia.
“Schools, hospitals, mosques, funeral halls - it seems nothing is off-limits for the Saudi Arabia-led coalition and their campaign of air strikes on Yemen,” Amnesty said in its petition.
“We know that UK-made weapons are amongst those claiming Yemeni lives. By continuing to supply Saudi Arabia and the coalition with arms, the UK risks complicity in acts that may amount to war crimes,” it added.
Britain is the second biggest arms exporter in the world, according to UK Trade and Investment. The Independent revealed last year that Britain has sold weapons to 22 of the 30 countries on its own human rights watch list since 2010.
