Yemen govt says ready for peace talks

DUBAI: Yemen‘s government said Thursday it was ready to re-start peace talks with Huthi rebels, amid growing international pressure to end the years-long conflict.

The Yemeni government said it welcomed “all efforts to restore peace” after the UN called for the warring parties to enter negotiations. “Yemen is ready to immediately launch talks on the process of confidence-building, primarily the release of all detainees and prisoners, as well as those who have been abducted or subject to enforced disappearance,” the government said in a statement carried by the state-run Saba news agency.

That came after a string of comments by key US officials and by the UN’s envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths, who called Wednesday for warring parties to come to the table “within a month”.

Washington backs the coalition, which is fighting alongside Yemen‘s government against the Iran-backed Huthi rebels. Yemen‘s war has been particularly devastating for the country’s children, over seven million of whom now face food insecurity, according to the UN children’s agency. “Today, 1.8 million children under the age of five are facing acute malnutrition, and 400,000 are affected by severe acute malnutrition,” said Geert Cappelaere, regional director of UNICEF.

“In the last couple of years, we see the number of severely acute malnourished children stabilising,” he told AFP late on Wednesday. But “ending the war is not enough,” he added.“The war is exacerbating the situation that was already bad before because of years of underdevelopment” in the Arab world’s poorest nation, Cappelaere said.

According to aid organisation CARE International, food security experts are determining whether famine should be declared in Yemen. “A declaration of famine would mean that the international community has already failed the people of Yemen,” said Jolien Veldwijk, assistant country director for CARE Yemen.