Head of the Political Council in Yemen Mahid Al-Mashat. Photo: Al Mayadeen.
The once-hopeful April peace talks failed following a dispute over the payment of civil servant salaries and Saudi looting of Yemeni oil.Â
President of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council Mahdi al-Mashat announced on 23 July that negotiations with Saudi Arabia to end the war in Yemen had ceased, while accusing the US of seeking to block a peace deal, Sputnik reported on 23 July.
Mashat told Al-Masirah TV that negotiations with Saudi Arabia, which heads the US-backed coalition occupying parts of Yemen, collapsed in April over the issue of the payment of salaries to Yemeni civil servants.
In 2016, the Saudi-backed Yemeni government moved the Central Bank from the capital Sanaa, which is under Ansarallah’s control, to the southern port city of Aden and refused to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants living in Ansarallah-controlled areas.
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Saudi Arabia and the UAE also began extracting and exporting Yemeni oil from sparsely populated areas occupied by the Saudi-led coalition and refusing to hand over the proceeds to Ansarallah, which controls the most populated areas of the country, in effect, looting Yemen’s oil wealth.
During the last round of peace negotiations in April, Saudi Arabia offered to begin paying the salaries of Yemeni civil servants, but out of its own funds, rather than from Yemeni oil revenues.
Mashat explained that “The negotiations stopped at the point of handing over the salary from our oil and gas wealth, and the Saudi side was ready to pay it from its own and not from our oil and gas wealth.”
“What the Saudi side wants is to steal our oil wealth and transfer it to the Saudi National Bank and then give charity to the employees of our people, and this is what we rejected,” he said, while vowing to “extract salaries from the enemy [in reference to Saudi Arabia].”
Mashat stated further that “the American side is the one who insisted that Saudi Arabia refrain from paying salaries in the past period.”
The April talks were initially viewed as hopeful, following the broader reconciliation taking place across the region after the Chinese-mediated resumption of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in March.
A prisoner exchange, releasing more than 900 prisoners between the two sides, was successful, while Ansarallah negotiators described discussions with the Saudi delegation in Sanaa as “serious and positive.” Controversial issues remained unresolved, but a new round of negotiations was planned in the “hope of completing the discussion of outstanding issues at a later time.”
The head of the prisoners’ committee in the Ansarallah resistance movement, Abdul Qader al-Murtada, stated in May that US officials had sought to obstruct the prisoner exchange negotiations as well.
“The Americans have been obstructing peace throughout the past periods, and they are always the ones who obstruct any progress and seek to plant obstacles in all rounds of negotiations in the prisoners’ file,” Murtada told a Lebanese TV station at the time.
