Yemen peace talks collapse in Geneva after Houthi no-show

An attempt to hold peace talks for Yemen was abandoned on Saturday after three days of waiting for the Houthi movement’s delegation, but the United Nations envoy vowed to press ahead with diplomacy.

The UN is renewing efforts to end Yemen’s war under a peace plan that calls on the Iranian-aligned Houthis and the internationally recognised government, backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, to work on a peace deal under a transitional governing body.

UN Special Envoy Martin Griffiths said the Houthis’ failure to come to Geneva for the first talks in three years did not signify that the peace process was deadlocked.

Griffiths, who held three days of talks with a Yemeni government delegation, said he would meet in coming days with the Houthi leadership in the Yemeni capital Sanaa and in Muscat, Oman.

Read: Contacts disclosed between Houthis and Saudi princes

“They would have liked to get here, we didn’t make conditions sufficiently correct to get them here,” Griffiths told a news conference, declining to elaborate.

Houthi leader Abdul Malik al-Houthi, whose forces control northern Yemen and the capital Sanaa, accused the Saudi-led coalition of blocking his movement’s delegation from travelling to the peace talks.

“We all know that the talks collapsed because of the obstruction of the national delegation from leaving and travelling to Geneva by the coalition forces,” he said in a speech broadcast on the group’s al-Masirah TV.

The Houthi group said they had wanted guarantees from the United Nations that their plane, supplied by Oman, would not have to stop in Djibouti for inspection by the Saudi-led coalition, after being “sequestrated” there last time for months by the Saudi-led military coalition. They also wanted the plane to evacuate some of their wounded to Oman or Europe.

The coalition have controlled Yemen’s airspace since 2015.

A Saudi-led military coalition intervened in Yemen’s 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 ravaging the already weak economy.