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Opinion: There Will be no Peace as Long as the Houthis are Present | ASHARQ AL-AWSAT English Archive 2005 -2017
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All indicators coming from Switzerland say that the first round of Geneva 2 talks on Yemen which concluded yesterday will share the same fate as its predecessor Geneva 1 – a total failure far from the procurement of a real way out of the Yemeni crisis as long as the Houthis continue to pursue political negotiations with a flippant attitude.

The rebels prove day after day that they are a militia and are not a group or a party able to act responsibly, constantly procrastinating instead of displaying a serious desire to stop the war which they caused, and they reaffirm that they do not know any language other than the language of arms and war instead of the language of peace and negotiations.

The Yemeni crisis will not end soon as long as the United Nations does not have anything to give the Houthis except a carrot, and every time the rebels consume the carrots, it rushes to give them more carrots, drifting away from the Security Council resolution 2216. Indeed the negotiations that took place in Geneva saw lots of violations, the most important of which were statements made by members of the Houthi delegation in front of the negotiating room doors which were broadcasted on TV despite officials of the organisation emphasising that this was unacceptable and considered a breach of the principles of the negotiations. This also indicates their disrespect for the principle of refraining from giving statements to the media. If we added their lack of commitment to the ceasefire which they broke hundreds of times in the days of the first truce, and their insistence on continuing to fight, their presence in Geneva is just to make gains in the media and to exploit negotiations in order to gain more time. In contrast, the UN’s silence on these violations considering that they cannot be described as orderly actions, leads one to struggle to see a glimmer of hope that the Houthis will accept a peaceful solution, and this is what the United Nations does not want to be convinced of until now.