'US presses UAE to allow probe on rights abuses in Yemen'

The administration of US President Donald Trump has reportedly been calling on the United Arab Emirates to allow an independent investigation into widespread torture in its detention facilities in Yemen.

The US State and Defense departments informed Congress in a March report that they had “raised serious concern with the UAE” over the reported abuse and “urged them to conduct a thorough investigation and allow access for independent monitors,” Al-Monitor reported this week.

Commander Rebecca Rebarich, a Pentagon spokeswoman, confirmed to Al-Monitor that senior Defense Department officials had indeed raised the allegations with their Emirati counterparts before submitting a separate report to Congress in December.

In that report, the Pentagon claimed it had not found “credible information indicating that US allies or partners have abused detainees in Yemen.”

The US pressure follows mounting evidence of torture and abuse in UAE-run prisons from the United Nations and human rights groups.

The Associated Press revealed in a report in June 2018 that hundreds of prisoners had suffered sexual abuses and other forms of bodily harm at the Beir Ahmed prison in the southern city of Aden.

A former security chief once involved in the torturing told AP that rape was used as a way to force detainees to cooperate with the Emiratis in acts of espionage and intelligence gathering.

“They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then sodomizing starts,” said a father-of-four who was detained for more than two years.

Emirate is believed to run at least 18 secret prisons where the detainees are tortured and raped on a regular basis.

According to Al-Manitor, the UN-backed Group of Experts confirmed in December that UAE forces raped, beaten and shocked prisoners while hanging them upside down.

Naturally, the UAE has never allowed independent monitors from accessing the jails.

PressTV-UAE buys $1.8 billion in US arms amid Yemen war

The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia’s main partner in a Riyadh-led coalition invading Yemen, buys around $1.8 billion worth of American arms at an Abu Dhabi military exhibition.

The alleged move by Washington in pressuring the UAE to allow a probe was welcomed by lawmakers who have called on the Trump administration to end support for Saudi Arabia and Emirate’s war on the people of Yemen, which has killed thousands of civilians and destroyed the country’s infrastructure since its onset in March 2015. 

“I’m encouraged by the report that the Trump administration raised concerns with the UAE regarding the torture prisons in Yemen," Representative Ro Khanna, a Democrat from California, told Al-Monitor in a statement. "The US must never condone or be associated with torture and we must hold our partners and allies to the same standard. I hope the administration makes it clear to the Emiratis that this conduct is unacceptable and must stop immediately.”

However, advocates of stopping America’s complicity in the Yemen war have little faith that the US would pressure the UAE further to stop the abuses, specially since it has been making huge profit by increasing its arms deals and military contracts with the sheikhdom over the past years.

In the March report to Congress, the Trump administration called Saudi Arabia and the UAE “strong US counter-terrorism partners” and revealed that the US had backed the UAE military in what it called “several successful counter-terrorism operations” in Yemen.

 “You can forgive my skepticism that the Trump administration or the Pentagon is actually applying any real pressure on the UAE over detention-related abuses, as it claims in this report to have done,” said a former US official, speaking not for attribution.

"UAE stonewalling to date does not give much hope that they will allow access for independent investigators, including the UN Group of Experts, so that the truth about these abuses can be even further exposed, absent real US pressure to do so,” the former official added.

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