Iran's empowerment and booby-trapping of Yemen.. Presidential camp warns of peace "concessions"
English - Saturday 23 September 2023 الساعة 09:08 am
Mokha, NewsYemen, exclusive:
Statements by the Chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, Rashad Al-Alimi, and Council member Aidaroos Al-Zubaidi revealed a position of rejection and warning against making additional concessions to the Iran-backed Houthi group under the banner of peace.
In a speech before the seventy-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, on Thursday, Al-Alimi warned against turning Yemen “into a hotbed for the export of terrorism and a fuse for a regional and international conflict that cannot be contained through diplomatic means” in the event that more concessions are made to the Houthi group, stressing that the legitimate government is no longer It has “more concessions to make.”
Al-Alimi referred in his speech to the approach of the Houthi militias, and their treatment of peace offers as “mere test balloons... from a tactical perspective to control more resources, and to postpone the decision on military confrontation until better conditions are achieved, which is what happened in its disavowal of all previous agreements, the most recent of which Stockholm Agreement.
In a similar situation, Aidaroos Al-Zubaidi, a member of the Presidential Leadership Council and President of the Southern Transitional Council, warned, in an interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, of the danger of reaching what he called a “bad agreement” with the Houthi group, considering that maintaining the “status quo for low-level violence” is better than that. Option.
Al-Zubaidi warned that reaching a bad agreement would effectively allow the Houthis, and behind them Iran, to control “the oil wells in the south and the Bab al-Mandab commercial road through which billions of dollars of oil flow,” stressing at the same time that no peace agreement could be imposed on the south.
Al-Zubaidi pointed to the most important issues currently negotiating with the Houthi group, which is the issue of paying salaries in areas under its control from oil revenues. He stressed that the current oil revenues are not enough to pay the salaries of the Yemeni government in the south, and he asked: “If they are not enough for us, how can the revenues be shared?” With the north?
The issue of disbursing salaries to employees in areas controlled by the Houthi group is the most important point of contention currently taking place in the negotiations and efforts that have been ongoing for months with the aim of reaching a renewal of the UN truce in Yemen with a permanent ceasefire agreement that paves the way for political negotiations between the group and the Presidential Leadership Council.
The Council and the forces within its framework, led by the Transitional Council, see the issue of disbursing these salaries from the revenues of oil and gas produced from the liberated areas as a major concession to the Houthi group and an acceptance of blackmailing it into imposing the sharing of these revenues after its success in stopping the export of oil about a year ago as a result of its attacks on export ports.
