US Secretary of State John Kerry
British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond
French Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean-Marc Ayraut
On the occasion of a year of the bombardment and blockade of Yemen, we write for a third time as scholars of Yemen to deplore the actions of the governments you represent, which have served cumulatively to erase fundamental principles of international and international humanitarian law: a) drafting the one-sided UN Security Council Resolution 2216 used to legitimize war; b) attempting to protect Saudi Arabia and the other Coalition countries against condemnation by the UN Human Rights Council, leaving the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights alone to issue a condemnation of war crimes; c) continuing massive arms sales in the face of documented war crimes by the Coalition; and d) participating in refueling warplanes, identifying targets, and facilitating the blockade of vital imports of food and fuel to Yemen.
We are aligned with no party in the internal political divisions of Yemen and deplore human rights violations by all the warring parties. However, we note that the major targets of the Yemen war, the Houthis and the bulk of the former Yemeni army, have over the past years fought Islamic State and al-Qaeda, which your governments view as terrorist groups and which have targeted Arab as well as European cities—most recently Brussels. Against this background, we renew our call to you to do everything to obtain an immediate and complete ceasefire and the launch of unconditional Yemeni-Yemeni negotiations for the formation of a transition government. And we ask that you offer no cover to the attempts of the Coalition states to extract commercial gains from their war and to avoid, in the name of plans for Gulf Cooperation Council “reconstruction” of Yemen, legal responsibility for war reparations.
Najwa Adra, Independent scholar
Geneviève Bédoucha, CNRS, Paris
Isa Blumi, Stockholm University
Laurent Bonnefoy, Sciences Politiques, Paris
François Burgat, IREMAM, Aix-en-Provence
Robert Burrowes, University of Washington
Sheila Carapico, University of Richmond
Steven Caton, Harvard University
Don Conway-Long, Webster University
Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University
Blandine Destremau, CNRS, EHESS, Paris
Paul Dresch, University of Oxford
Ulrike Freitag, Free University of Berlin & Centre for Modern Oriental Studies
McGuire Gibson, University of Chicago
Michael Gilsenan, New York University
Andre Gingrich, Austrian Academy of Sciences
Najam Haider, Barnard College, Columbia University
Mouna Hashem, Independent scholar
Juliette Honvault, IREMAM, Aix-Marseille Université
Eirik Hovden, Institute for Social Anthropology, Vienna
Lamya Khalidi, CEPAM, CNRS, France
Laurie King, Georgetown University
Thomas Kühn, Simon Fraser University
Jean Lambert, CERMOM-INALCO, Paris
Anne Meneley, Trent University, Canada
Brinkley Messick, Columbia University
W. Flagg Miller, University of California-Davis
Martha Mundy, London School of Economics and Political Science
Michael Perez, University of Washington
Christa Salamandra, Lehman College, CUNY
Jillian Schwedler, Hunter College, CUNY
Gregory Starrett, University of North Carolina
Lucine Taminian, Independent scholar, Amman
Daniel Varisco, American Institute for Yemeni Studies
Gabriele vom Bruck, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
Lisa Wedeen, University of Chicago
Shelagh Weir, Independent scholar
John Willis, University of Colorado
Jessica Winegar, Northwestern University
Stacey Philbrick Yadav, Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Sami Zubaida, Birkbeck College, University of London
