In a Monday statement, Iran's Foreign Ministry announced that Tehran is ready to help alleviate the worsening situation in Yemen, calling on the international community to speed up the operations to send humanitarian aids to the war-torn country.
The statement comes a few days ahead of a new UN-brokered peace talks between Yemen's warring sides, which will be held in Sweden this week.
It urges the sides to sieze the opportunity to take effective steps toward confidence-building and reaching a comprehensive consensus over the issue so as to put an end to the dire situation of Yemeni people.
In recent months, the United Nations has increased pressure on the two sides to pursue a negotiated end to the conflict, as observers stress that a diplomatic solution is the only way to avert a man-made famine.
Previous peace negotiations broke down in September after Saudi Arabia refused to allow a Houthi delegation to fly to Geneva to attend the meeting.
The evacuation of the wounded fighters has been a key condition of the Houthi movement to attend peace talks in Sweden this week.
The UN is planning to steer the new round of talks towards confidence-building measures such as unifying Yemen’s central bank and arranging prisoner swaps. The UN has previously sponsored a series of peace talks, the first being held in Geneva in 2015.
The full text of the Iranian Foreign Ministry’s statement on Yemeni-Yemeni talks in Stockholm is as follows:
Ahead of the Yemeni-Yemeni talks to be held in Sweden under the supervision of the United Nations, the Iranian Foreign Ministry welcomes and offers its support for the talks and calls on all Yemeni sides to have constructive and responsible participation in the talks. The Ministry also wants all the Yemeni sides to take trust-building measures, preparing the ground for achieving a comprehensive agreement to put an end to the suffering of Yemenis and the brutal blockage on them.
At the onset of the conflict and the brutal aggression on Yemen, the Islamic Republic of Iran proposed a comprehensive approach to resolve the crisis as a four-point peace plan, which included an immediate cessation of war, delivery of humanitarian aid, beginning of Yemeni-Yemeni talks, and establishment of an all-inclusive government in Yemen.
Iran now once again stresses that there is no way out of the Yemen crisis other than a political solution based on Yemeni-Yemeni talks. The Iranian Foreign Ministry calls on the international community to play a key and serious role, including by exerting pressure on the exporters of arms to the aggressors to facilitate the peace process in Yemen and let the Yemeni people decide their country’s fate free from the outsiders’ interference.
The warmongers have not achieved any of their political and hegemonic goals after four years of bitter war and destructive aggression against Yemeni people. The campaign has only led to the collapse of economic resources and infrastructures of Yemen, deaths of thousands of women and children and other oppressed but resilient people of Yemen and a total humanitarian catastrophe in the country.
The Islamic Republic of Iran’s Foreign Ministry seizes the opportunity here to express its readiness to establish cooperation with the international community to immediately resolve the Yemen crisis.
It also underlines the necessity of facilitating the process of delivering humanitarian aid to Yemen, and maintains that it is the world’s historic responsibility today to make efforts to end humanitarian crisis and catastrophe in the Arab country.
MR/4474512/PR
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