The Saudi Council of Ministers which is led by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz yesterday expressed its appreciation to Kuwait for hosting the Yemeni consultations and the facilities and support that it is providing to facilitate the consultations which are being held under the auspices of the United Nations. The Council also expressed its hopes that the consultations are successful so that efforts to reach a settlement of the crisis in Yemen are concluded according to the Gulf initiative and the outcomes of national dialogue and the UN Security Council resolution 2216.
The Yemen negotiations were scheduled to begin in Kuwait yesterday, however, due to the absence of the rebels’ delegation, they have been postponed indefinitely. The UN envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed announced that “due to some developments that have taken place in the last few hours, there has been an unexpected postponement of the date of the Yemeni peace consultations”. However, he did not specify how long that delay would be and praised the “commitment” of the government’s delegation and their prompt arrival for the negotiations. Ould Cheikh also called on the representatives of the Houthi group Ansar Allah and the General People’s Congress “not to miss this opportunity which may prevent Yemen from losing more lives”.
The rebel delegation did the same thing that it did at the Geneva 1 and Geneva 2 conferences and did not arrive for the start of consultations. According to observers of Yemeni matters, this was expected in light of the fact that rebel forces continue to breach the ceasefire. To justify this step, the President of Supreme Revolutionary Committee Mohammed Ali Al-Houthi said that “our presence in Kuwait requires a complete cessation of aggression, and we cannot accept conditions and demands before reaching a political solution which would be followed by understanding and a discussion of the details”.
On its part, the Yemeni presidency expressed its disappointment in the rebel delegation’s absence from the consultations in Kuwait. The Yemeni Presidential Adviser Sheikh Abdulaziz Al-Maflahi told Asharq Al-Awsat “This shows the confused mentality of the rebels, their indifference to the constant bloodshed in Yemen and their insistence on completing this bloody series and causing chaos in Yemen and the region”.