Yemen govt, rebels name 15,000 prisoners for swap
The Sweden talks do not aim to broker an official ceasefire, both parties have come under intense international and UN pressure to reach a truce
RIMBO
(Sweden): Yemen’s government and rival rebels agreed on Tuesday on a mass prisoner swap, exchanging more than 15,000 names, but warned that talks this week were unlikely to yield a truce.
Nearly four years into a war that has pushed 14 million Yemenis to the brink of mass starvation, the Saudi-backed government of Abedrabbo Mansour Hadi and Houthi rebels have been in UN-brokered talks since Thursday in the rural town of Rimbo in Sweden.
While the Sweden talks do not aim to broker an official ceasefire, both parties have come under intense international and UN pressure to reach a truce. Mediators are pushing for a de-escalation of violence in two flashpoint cities: rebel-held Hodeida, a port city vital to the delivery of humanitarian aid, and Taiz, Yemen’s third largest city, scene of some of the most intense fighting of the war.
The Sweden talks are the first meeting between the two parties in the Yemen conflict in more than two years. The last round of talks, in 2016, collapsed after more than three months of negotiations.
Brokered by UN special envoy Martin Griffiths earlier this month, the prisoner swap was one of the main points -- and the least contentious -- at this week’s talks.
It is the largest prisoner exchange between the rival parties since the outbreak of the Yemen war. Askar Zaeel, a government negotiator on the prisoner swap, said the rebels had named 7,487 detainees whom they were willing to release. The government had named 8,576 detainees, Zaeel said. Rebel negotiator Abdelkader Mourtada confirmed a total of more than 15,000 prisoners and detainees had been named in the swap. He did not give further details. Zaeel said the government demanded the rebels hand over the body of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s former president who was killed at the hands of the Houthis after he broke a fragile alliance with the rebels to re-align with Saudi Arabia.
Both parties said the exchange should be complete by January, pending final revisions of the lists. The International Committee of the Red Cross has confirmed it will oversee the exchange.
The government on Tuesday ruled out a truce, one day after the pro-government military coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the UAE, said military operations were ongoing in Hodeida.
The government alliance launched an offensive to retake the rebel-held city in June, sparking an international outcry over the fate of its 600,000 residents and a port crucial for food imports.
“This has been proposed as part of the general framework, and this is what we came to make progress on: a full, complete ceasefire. But I think we will be unable to achieve this progress in this round,” Yemeni government delegate Askar Zaeel said. “This is a round of talks to prepare for that.”