ADEN: Yemen’s warring parties started fresh UN-sponsored talks in Jordan on Monday, Yemeni officials said, two days after Ansar Allah forces began withdrawing from the ports of Hodeidah, breaking a six month stalemate.
The talks will focus on sharing out revenues from Hodeidah’s three Red Sea ports to help relieve an urgent humanitarian crisis, they said.
The Ansar Allah group began on Saturday a unilateral pullout from the ports of Saleef, Ras Isa and Hodeidah, handing them over to UN-supervised local forces as agreed under a pact with the government last December that had stalled for months.
“The UN and its special envoy are sponsoring talks in Amman ... to discuss the issue of salaries and to make the economic situation neutral,” Mohammed Ali al Houthi, head of the Ansar Allah Supreme Revolutionary Committee, said in a tweet.
A Yemeni government official confirmed the talks to Reuters.
A UN official said the office of UN envoy Martin Griffiths was facilitating the meeting.
Hodeidah, the main entry point for Yemen’s commercial and aid imports, became the focus of the four-year conflict last year when the coalition tried twice to seize the port to cut off the Ansar Allah main supply line.
Under the Stockholm agreement for a truce and troop withdrawal by both sides from Hodeidah, the ports’ revenues would be gathered in the Hodeidah branch of the central bank to help pay public wages.
The war has devastated Yemen’s economy, exacerbating an urgent humanitarian crisis with millions of Yemenis on the brink of starvation.
Soaring prices have put basic commodities out of reach for many Yemenis and the central bank has struggled to pay public-sector salaries as foreign exchange reserves evaporated. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
