Policy

The Republic of Yemen has not acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Yemen has not made a public statement explaining its position on joining the convention.

Yemen participated in two meetings of the Oslo Process that produced the convention (Lima in May 2007 and Belgrade in October 2007) and expressed its support for work to prohibit cluster munitions.[1]  It did not attend the negotiations of the convention in Dublin in May 2008 or the Convention on Cluster Munitions Signing Conference in Oslo in December 2008.[2]

Yemen attended in its first meeting of the convention in September 2011, when it participated as an observer in the Second Meeting of States Parties in Beirut, Lebanon. It did not attend the 2012 meeting, but participated as an observer in the Fourth Meeting of States Parties in Lusaka, Zambia in September 2013. Yemen attended the convention’s intersessional meetings in Geneva in 2013, but not those held in April 2014.

Yemen has voted in favor of UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolutions condemning the Syrian government’s use of cluster munition, including Resolution 68/182 on 18 December 2013, which expressed “outrage” at Syria’s “continued widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights…including those involving the use of…cluster munitions.”[3]

Yemen is a State Party to the Mine Ban Treaty. It is not party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Production, transfer, and stockpiling

Yemen is not known to have produced or exported cluster munitions.

New evidence, detailed below, indicates that Yemen may have stockpiled cluster munitions in the past. Jane’s Information Group reported in 2004 that KMG-U dispensers that deploy submunitions are in service with the country’s air force.[4] Moldova exported 13 220mm Uragan multiple launch rocket systems to Yemen in 1994, and Yemen possesses Grad 122mm surface-to-surface rocket launchers, but it is not known if the ammunition for these weapons includes versions with submunition payloads.[5]

Use

Recently disclosed information shows that cluster munitions were used in Sada’a governorate in northern Yemen during fighting between the government of Yemen’s armed forces and Houthi rebels that intensified and spilled over the border with Saudi Arabia in November 2009, resulting in airstrikes and a ground intervention by armed forces from Saudi Arabia into Sada’a.

In July 2013, the Monitor reviewed photographs taken by clearance operators showing the remnants of unexploded BLU-97 and BLU-61 submunitions, made in the United States (US), as well as dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) submunitions of an unknown origin.[6] The BLU submunitions are dropped by aircraft, while the DPICM is launched from the ground or air by artillery or rocket. Arms experts view both means of delivery as beyond the military capabilities of the Houthi rebels.[7]

In May 2014, VICE News aired video footage shot near the city of Sada’a, the capital of Sada’a governorate, showing remnants of a US-made CBU-52 cluster bomb.[8] The Houthi administration in Sada’a provided VICE News with photographs showing remnants of Soviet-made RBK-250-275 AO-1SCh cluster bombs and associated antipersonnel fragmentation submunitions.[9]

The US-made CBU-52 and the Soviet-made RBK-250-275 AO-1SCh possess suspension lugs spaced at different lengths, which means the US cluster munitions were likely dropped by US-manufactured or compatible aircraft and the Soviet cluster munitions were likely delivered by Soviet-made or compatible aircraft. Saudi Arabia possesses attack aircraft of US and Western/NATO origin capable of dropping US-made cluster bombs, while Yemen’s Soviet supplied aircraft are capable of delivering Soviet-made RBK cluster bombs.

US use

On 17 December 2009, the US used at least five ship- or submarine-launched TLAM-D cruise missiles, each containing 166 BLU-97 submunitions, to attack a “terrorist group” training camp in al-Ma‘jalah in the al-Mahfad district of Abyan governorate in southern Yemen. The attack killed 55 people, including 41 civilians living in a Bedouin camp.[10] Neither the US nor the Yemeni government has publicly responded to the allegations.[11] The US has never exported the TLAM-D cruise missile.[12]

A 2010 report of the Yemeni parliament’s investigation into the attack called on the Yemeni government to investigate and “hold accountable those found guilty” of “mistakes that were made causing the deaths of…innocent victims” and called on the Yemeni authorities to compensate victims and remove cluster munition remnants from the site.[13]

The government of Yemen accepted the report’s findings in 2010, but does not appear to have implemented the recommendation to clear the contaminated area and provide compensation for the casualties caused and damaged property. An October 2013 report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) found the cluster munition remnants from the 2009 attack at al-Ma‘jalah were never cleared and have killed four more civilians and wounded 13 more in the period since the strike. The most recent casualty was on 24 January 2012, when a young boy brought home a bomblet that exploded, killing his father and wounding him and his two brothers.[14]