Saudi Arabia's top cleric urges businessmen to help troops
Source: Reuters
Saudi Arabia's most senior cleric has urged businessmen and banks to set up a fund to help soldiers stationed along the southern border with Yemen to pay their bills back home, Saudi media reported on Thursday.
The call reflects growing criticism of the Saudi business community seen as not doing enough for the country at a time when a drop in oil prices has slashed the kingdom's revenues and started to affect living standards.
Saudi Arabia waded in Yemen's civil war last year at the head of an Arab coalition trying to restore the recognized government to power. Hundreds of people, many of them Saudi soldiers and civilians, have been killed in cross-border raids by Houthi rebels since March last year.
Speaking in a weekly radio broadcast from the Muslim holy city of Mecca, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdullah Al al-Sheikh said Saudi soldiers were risking their lives "to defend their religion and country."
Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-yemen-security-saudi-idUSKCN10F1KN
As the Saudis Covered Up Abuses in Yemen, America Stood By
Washington let Saudi Arabia commit atrocities in Yemen, then strong-arm the UN into remaining silent.
TThe United Nations has long been bullied by its most powerful members, and U.N. secretaries-general have usually been forced to grit their teeth and take it quietly. But few nations have been more publicly brazen in this practice than Saudi Arabia, and earlier this summer, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon managed to get in a dig at the Kingdom over its blackmail-style tactics. Ban openly admitted that it was only after Riyadh threatened to cut off funding to the U.N. that he bowed to its demand to remove the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, where it has launched a harsh military intervention, from a list of violators of children’s rights contained in the annex of his annual Children and Armed Conflict report. “The report describes horrors no child should have to face,” Ban told reporters. “At the same time, I also had to consider the very real prospect that millions of other children would suffer grievously if, as was suggested to me, countries would defund many U.N. programs.”
But the secretary-general wasn’t done. “It is unacceptable for U.N. member states to exert undue pressure,” Ban added. The removal of the Saudis from the list was also, he claimed, “pending review.”
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/saudi-arabia-yemen-russia-syria-foreign-policy-united-nations-blackmail-214124
