Local Editor
A United Nations monitoring team will hold its first formal meeting with the resigned regime and Houthi Ansarullah forces in Hodeida on Wednesday as it begins overseeing a truce for the port city that is considered crucial to hopes of ending Yemen's brutal civil war.
The team led by Patrick Cammaert, a retired Dutch general, arrived in Hodeida on Sunday night to start monitoring the truce and the withdrawal of forces by the popular Houthi movement and the resigned regime of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
The monitors arrived in Aden, the resigned regime's temporary base, on Saturday and visited the Yemeni capital Sana’a before travelling to Hodeida.
“The general arrived to Hodeida last night and is expected to hold the first meeting between the UN and members of Yemen’s warring sides on December 26,” a source in the resigned regime told The National on Monday.
Cammaert will chair the Redeployment Co-ordination Committee (RCC) comprised of UN monitors and Hadi regime and Houthi representatives.
On their first day in the city the UN team was scheduled to visit Hodeida’s three ports, meet Houthi representatives and prepare the logistics for the first meeting of the RCC, the source said.
The team will also estimate the number of monitors required.
The truce was brokered during UN-led peace talks in Sweden this month and lays out a step by step process to halt the fighting in Hodeida and transfer of control of its ports from the Houthi revolutionaries to local administrators and security personnel, under UN supervision.
As the entry point for most of Yemen's food and humanitarian aid shipments, the city had become the focal point of the four-year-old civil war. The UN's efforts are aimed at keeping this lifeline open and preventing a deterioration in what it says is already the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with a third of the population on the brink of starvation.
The UN monitoring team has been given an initial period of 30 days to implement the ceasefire in Hodeida and surrounding areas, with any breaches to be reported by Secretary General Antonio Guterres to the Security Council.
The mandate came from a resolution adopted unanimously by the 15-member council on Friday, a week after Martin Griffiths, the UN special envoy to Yemen, said there was an urgent need for the truce to be monitored on the ground.
Guterres will report to the Council on a weekly basis regarding the ceasefire and the situation in Yemen.
The deal reached in Sweden is meant to pave the way for a wider ceasefire in the impoverished country and a second round of talks in January on a framework for political negotiations.
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
