Prisoner swap offers hope after years of war in Yemen
Now that thousands of Yemenis are expected to be freed after a meeting that was two years in the making, to Hisham Al-Omeisy, “the prisoner swap is actually big news and it especially means a lot to Yemenis.”
“I was detained myself,” the Yemeni political analyst and one-time political prisoner told The World from his home in exile in Cairo.
Negotiator Martin Griffiths, the U.N. special envoy to Yemen, got opposing sides in that country’s civil war to go to a conference center an hour outside Stockholm. In a matter of days, the delegations agreed to exchange thousands of prisoners captured during Yemen’s fouryear civil war that has killed tens of thousands and made Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with 12 million people reportedly suffering from severe hunger.
The two delegations last met in 2016. On Wednesday, representatives of the Yemeni government, headquartered in Saudi Arabia, were flown in from Riyadh. Then on Thursday, the government side and the rebel side agreed to the first of several U.N.-proposed confidence-building measures: the prisoner swap.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said at least 5,000 would be freed.
Yemeni rebel delegates reported more progress into the weekend on the key issues of reopening the airport at the capital and the implementation of the agreement on the exchange of prisoners.
“The two parties are engaged in a serious and constructive way in discussing the details of confidencebuilding measures,” Mr. Griffiths said Saturday. “We hope we will achieve progress during this round of consultations.”
Mr. Omeisy is pleased to see warring parties agree to a potential release of thousands of prisoners. And he says it is likely welcome news for most Yemenis, regardless of which side they’re on.
He was taken from his home in the Yemeni capital by secret police in 2017. He was released in January 2018 after five months last year in a security prison run by Yemen’s Houthi rebels.
“I remember what my family had to go through during my detention,” Mr. Omeisy said. “They constantly worried that I wasn’t going to make it alive out of the prison. They didn’t even know where I was.”
Mr. Omeisy, who was released in January this year, talks about his confinement without hesitation now. But it took him months to speak publicly about what happened to him.
“I was kept in a dungeon for five months — solitary confinement,” he told The World. “It was a one-meter-by-one-and-a-half-meter cell. I had no windows. There was no light for the first two weeks and I was literally buried alive.”
While the coalition side would release captured Houthi fighters, the rebels would largely free civilians who were imprisoned in brutal sweeps aimed at suppressing opposition and obtaining captives who could be traded for ransom or exchanged for Houthi fighters held by the other side.
Though international outrage over the bloodshed in Yemen has largely focused on abuses carried out by the U.S.-backed and Saudi-led military coalition fighting on the side of the Yemeni government, the Abductees’ Mothers Union — an association of female relatives of detainees jailed by the Houthis — has documented 1,000 cases of torture in a network of secret prisons, according to Sabah Mohammed, a representative of the group in the city of Marib.
The mothers’ group says at least 126 prisoners have died from torture since the Houthis took over the capital, Sanaa, in late 2014.
Houthi leaders previously have denied that they engage in torture, though they did not respond to repeated AP requests for comment in recent weeks.
Anas al-Sarrari, a 26-yearold critic of Houthi brutality who was snatched from a main street in Sanaa one morning in September 2015, remembered hanging for 23 hours by his handcuffed wrists from the ceiling of a stuffy interrogation room as numbness claimed his fingers, arms and much of his body. The cuffs began to slit his wrists and he tried to rest on his toes.
“Death must be less painful than this nonstop torture,” he recalled thinking at the time. “One more hour like this and I will die.”
Mr. al-Sarrari’s and other accounts are seen as underscoring the significance of the prisoner-swap agreement reached Thursday.
On the issue of the prisoner exchange, Houthi delegate Abdul-Malik Al-Hajri said the rebels were prepared to release all of those they hold, provided the other side reciprocates. The two sides, however, agreed on incremental releases, with 200 prisoners from each side being simultaneously released. He did not say when that would start.
After he was released, Mr. Omeisy said people often asked if he wanted revenge against the Houthis.
“I kept insisting on repeating that I don’t want vengeance, I don’t want revenge,” he said. “What has happened has already happened. Let’s try and promote peace.”
Mr. Omeisy said that rather than seek vengeance and rejoin the fighting, released prisoners of war may well want to return to their families and to live in peace.