US Secretary of State John Kerry yesterday announced a fresh international peace initiative for Yemen aimed at forming a unity government to resolve its 17-month-old conflict.
“This war needs to end and it needs to end as quickly as possible,” Kerry said after a meeting in Saudi Arabia with Gulf counterparts, a British minister and the UN peace envoy to Yemen.
He said participants “agreed on a renewed approach to negotiations” between the Saudi-backed government and Iran-supported Shia rebels, after three months of talks in Kuwait ended earlier in August without headway.
Those talks were suspended when the Shia Houthi rebels and forces loyal to their ally, former president Ali Abdullah Saleh, appointed a council to govern Yemen.
Kerry outlined a plan which offers the Houthis participation in government in exchange for an end to violence and a surrender of weapons.
“This is a proposal that offers the Houthis an opportunity to have confidence in the government structure that will be put in place,” he said.
The Houthis had been demanding a unity government as the first step towards resolving Yemen’s war.
But the internationally backed government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi wanted a rebel pullout from seized territory, including the capital Sanaa, and a surrender of weapons, as the first steps, in line with a UN Security Council resolution on the crisis.
Kerry also lashed out at Iran over alleged arms shipments to the rebels.
“The threat potentially posed by the shipment of missiles and other sophisticated weapons into Yemen from Iran extends well beyond Yemen and is not a threat just to Saudi Arabia and the region,” Kerry told reporters in Jeddah.
“It is a threat to the United States and it cannot continue.”
The new push for peace will have “both a security and political track simultaneously working in order to provide a comprehensive settlement”, said Kerry, adding that Gulf states had “agreed unanimously with this new initiative”.
He said details would be finalised by the “parties themselves”.
But the final agreement, in broad outline, would initially include the “swift formation of a national unity government with power shared among the parties”.
It also calls for the “withdrawal of forces from Sanaa and other key areas”, and the “transfer of all heavy weapons including ballistic missiles and launchers from the Houthis and forces allied with them to a third party”.
Kerry spoke of the “staggering” humanitarian impact of the war and announced an additional $189mn in aid in response to the crisis.
If a settlement cannot be reached that respects Saudi sovereignty and security while providing Yemen’s Houthi minority a role in government, “then things can only go in one direction, and that is worse in Yemen”, Kerry warned.
Apart from the humanitarian crisis, the conflict has allowed an expansion of militants who have taken advantage of Yemen’s power vacuum, he said.
Kerry said Washington was “deeply troubled” by rebel attacks on Saudi territory, where more than 100 soldiers and civilians have been killed in cross-border bombardments and skirmishes.
The United Nations yesterday called for the creation of an independent international body to investigate an array of serious violations in Yemen.
In a new report, it laid out a long list of allegations of grave human rights abuses by all sides in the war.
Saudi-led coalition air strikes were suspected of causing around half of all civilian deaths, while attacks by rebel-affiliated groups were blamed for around a quarter of deaths, it said.
Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir, at a joint press conference with Kerry, said Riyadh had been “extremely careful and cautious” in trying to avoid non-combatant casualties.