Yemen peace talks collapsed on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Yemeni rebels delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with diplomacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Yemen peace talks collapsed on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Yemeni rebels delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with diplomacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The rebels\u2019 failure to come to Geneva for the first talks in three years was \u201cthe elephant in the room\u201d, but did not signify the peace process was deadlocked, UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths said.<\/p>\n
Griffiths, who held three days of talks with a (former) Yemeni government delegation, said he would meet in coming days with the rebels leadership in Sanaa and Muscat, Oman.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey would have like to get here, we didn\u2019t make conditions sufficiently correct to get them here,\u201d Griffiths told a news conference, declining to elaborate, Reuters reported.<\/p>\n
The rebels said on Friday it was still waiting for the United Nations to guarantee that the flight carrying its delegation to Geneva would not be inspected by Saudi coalition forces and could evacuate some of its wounded.<\/p>\n
Griffiths, referring to peace processes, said on Saturday: \u201cA restart is a very delicate, fragile moment. People are coming at a time when perhaps all of their constituencies are not fully engaged and don\u2019t see ahead of time results that will come out of talks.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I don\u2019t take this as a fundamental blockage in the process,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Confidence-building measures such as prisoner releases, increasing humanitarian access, especially to the city of Taiz, and reopening Sanaa airport were discussed with the government, he said.<\/p>\n
Agreement has been reached for medical evacuations from the Houthi-held Yemeni capital of Sanaa, to start in a week with a flight to Cairo, he said, calling it an \u201cearly achievement\u201d.<\/p>\n
A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen\u2019s war against the Houthis in 2015 with the aim of restoring the government of Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The humanitarian situation has worsened sharply since, putting 8.4 million people on the brink of starvation and ruining the already weak economy.<\/p>\n
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Yemen peace talks collapsed on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Yemeni rebels delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with diplomacy.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Yemen peace talks collapsed on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Yemeni rebels delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":17674,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_108372464460192_245495985553329":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[473,412,317,38,172,68],"class_list":["post-6393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world","tag-government","tag-humanitarian","tag-oman","tag-saudi-arabia","tag-united-nations","tag-yemen"],"yoast_head":"\n