Factories, jobs destroyed by war.Yemen,November 2015. Wikicommons/ Almigdad Mojalli ( VOA). Some rights reserved.Is the coalition air and land war against Yemenis about to end? A second round of ‘peace talks’ is scheduled to start in Geneva on 15 December. Getting to a date and a meeting which ‘both’ sides agree to attend has taken almost 6 months of efforts for Ismail Ould al Sheikh Ahmed, the new Special Envoy of the United Nations Secretary General. In addition to having had to cope with undermining by his predecessor and underwhelming support by the Permanent 5 of the UNSC, his nomination was accepted by the GCC largely because they considered him weak and ineffective.
He has operated in less than ideal conditions: merely achieving agreement on a meeting is a significant achievement, given the reluctance of the warring parties and the international environment. However, I have not met a single person who expects these talks to achieve very much, if anything. Hope is free and anyone with friends and family in Yemen has to continue to have some hope, what else can we do?
The coalition
Yemen has become the focus of not only a violent and murderous civil war between factions loosely aligned with the so-called ‘legitimate’ government on the one hand and former ruler Ali Abdullah Saleh and his Huthi allies on the other. While this unfortunate development was predicted by many in recent years, it was dramatically worsened by the open foreign intervention and emergence of a ‘proxy’ war between the Arab Gulf states led by a new, young and warmongering leadership in Saudi Arabia which insists that Yemen is the site of a life or death struggle against its rival Iran for domination of the politics in the Arabian Peninsula.
