Riyadh engaged in concerted effort to persuade European parliament not to pass amendment calling for EU sanctions because of bombing campaign

Saudi Arabia has mounted an intense lobbying campaign to try to prevent members of the European parliament voting for an arms embargo because of the Saudi military action in Yemen that has resulted in heavy civilian casualties.

As part of a concerted campaign, Saudi representatives have been meeting MEPs to try to persuade them not to back an amendment on Thursday that calls for a EU-wide embargo following “the serious allegations of breaches of international humanitarian law by Saudi Arabia in Yemen”.

The Saudi ambassador to Brussels, Abdulrahman al-Ahmed, sent a letter to parliamentarians on Sunday in which in he pleaded with them not to vote for the amendment and defended his country’s military intervention.

In the four-page letter, a copy of which has been obtained by the Guardian, he blamed the intervention mainly on Iran and insisted much of Saudi’s action had involved humanitarian aid.

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He added that the Saudi intervention was partly in response to concern in the west about Yemen-based terrorists, including al-Qaida and Islamic State.

“Saudi Arabia has also answered the call from the west to take a greater role in combating terrorist instability throughout the Middle east and the consequences of our not intervening in Yemen’s conflict would have been far worse than the west could as yet imagine,” the ambassador wrote.

Riyadh has been stung by the increasing criticism of its conduct in the Yemen civil war. Normally, its diplomats try to maintain as low a profile as possible, conducting business through discreet lunches and dinners rather than mounting such high-profile lobbying exercises.

The vote was originally scheduled for 4 February but was postponed until Thursday, a delay campaigners for the embargo attributed to Saudi pressure.

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A UN panel set up to investigate the bombing campaign in Yemen reported to the security council last month that it had uncovered “widespread and systematic” attacks on civilian targets by Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, one of the biggest buyers of UK defence equipment, including planes, began bombing in Yemen last March in support of the Yemeni president, Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who was under threat from Houthi forces aligned with Iran.

A European parliament vote for an embargo would have no binding effect on member states. But it would be a diplomatic embarrassment for Riyadh, coming on top of other international criticism.

After publication of the UN report, the UK Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, called for an inquiry and for a suspension of arms sales pending the outcome. But the British prime minister, David Cameron, confined himself to saying he would look at the report. The UK approach is at odds with some other European countries which have suspended arms sales.

Britain has supplied export licences for up to £3bn worth of arms to Saudi Arabia in the last year and been accused of direct involvement in the bombing campaign through the deployment of UK military personnel to the kingdom.

Ahmed, in his letter, countered the criticism of the Saudi military action, saying Riyadh had set up a “a high-level independent committee, in the field of weapons and international humanitarian law, to assess the incidents, authentication of procedures and the used targeting mechanism to develop it”.



He said in spite of Saudi Arabia’s own involvement in exporting extremist Wahhabism, one of its aims in Yemen was “the erosion of religious extremism”, adding that the kingdom has had to contend with “the threat of an Iranian destablisation campaign in eastern Arabia … Left unchecked by Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s political power shift and resulting civil war would have left that country deeply vulnerable to the violent influence of terror groups already inflaming the region.”

The ambassador said that the Houthi rebels being bombed by the Saudi-led coalition had bombed civilians, deployed child soldiers and used starvation as a weapon. The Saudis, by contrast, had dropped food and medicine in order to relieve the siege of Taiz.