Warring Yemen sides in prisoner swap deal
sanaa — A rebel delegation flew out of the Yemeni capital on Tuesday heading for high-stakes talks in Sweden with the government aimed at ending the country’s devastating war.
The departure of the Houthi rebels on a Kuwaiti plane followed a prisoner swap deal and the evacuation of 50 wounded rebels for treatment in Oman in a major boost to peace efforts.
The delegation was accompanied by UN envoy Martin Griffiths, an airport source said.
Houthi spokesman Mohammed Abdelsalam confirmed their departure on Twitter, saying the rebels “will spare no effort to make a success of the talks to restore peace and end the aggression”.
Although no date has been announced for the start of the talks, Yemeni government sources say they could get under way on Thursday.
The agreement to exchange hundreds of detainees was welcomed by the International Committee of
the Red Cross, which will oversee the swap after the first round of planned peace talks in Sweden.
The deal was struck by Griffiths, who was in the rebel-held capital Sanaa for meetings already buoyed by the evacuation of the wounded insurgents — a key rebel precondition for the talks.
A previous UN-brokered attempt to bring the Houthis and the Saudi-backed government to the negotiating table collapsed in Switzerland in September.
Yemeni government official Hadi Haig said that between 1,500 and 2,000 members of pro-government forces and between 1,000 and 1,500 rebels would be released. On the government side, they include former defence minister Mahmoud Al Subaihi, who has been held by the rebels ever since they overran the capital in late 2014, and President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s brother Nasser, a general and former senior intelligence official.
Rebel official Abdel Kader Al Murtadha confirmed the deal, adding that he hoped it would be “implemented without problem”.
ICRC spokeswoman Mirella Hodeib welcomed the agreement, saying: “This is one step in the right direction towards the building of mutual trust among Yemeni communities.”
The resulting humanitarian crisis, already the world’s worst, will deteriorate in 2019, the UN said on Tuesday, warning that the number of people needing food aid is set to jump by four million.
Overall, 24 million people in Yemen — roughly 75 per cent of the population — will need humanitarian assistance in 2019, UN humanitarian chief Mark Lowcock told reporters in Geneva.
The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Dr Anwar Gargash, said the peace talks must not lose sight of the demands made of the rebels by Resolution 2216 passed by the UN Security Council in April 2015, a month after Hadi went into Saudi exile as they overran most of the country.
“A stable state, important for the region, cannot coexist with unlawful militias,” Gargash said.
“UN Security Council Resolution 2216 offers a workable roadmap.”
The resolution demands that the rebels recognise the legitimacy of Hadi’s government and withdraw from all towns and cities they had taken.
The demands are unacceptable to the rebels and subsequent peace efforts, including three months of negotiations in Kuwait that broke down in 2016, have focused on a power-sharing government. —