UN struggles to get Yemen peace talks off the ground

The United Nations was scrambling today to get Yemen peace talks in Geneva moving with both the exiled government and the Iran-backed Yemeni rebels accusing each other of trying to sabotage the process.
The third day of the high stakes talks, launched by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon with an appeal for a badly-needed two-week humanitarian truce, also stumbled over the makeup of the different delegations.
"The only positive point so far is that the negotiations are continuing and that no delegation has slammed the door," said a Western diplomat close to the talks.
The UN special envoy for Yemen, Mauritanian diplomat Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed, has urged the warring sides to bend down, stressing the dire situation in Yemen. More than 2,600 people have been killed in the fighting since March and about 21 million people are in dire need of humanitarian aid.

But the positions of the two warring sides are so divergent that they are not sitting in the same room and the UN is holding separate consultations with them.
"In a situation like this, the Yemenis need to talk among themselves, not with the United Nations," Ould Cheikh Ahmed said.

He also said yesterday that the talks so far had focused on trying to get the rebels to whittle down their team from 22 to the pre-agreed 10.
"We believe that in order to commence, the numbers need to be reduced and there has to be a balance between the two teams," he said.

The rebels rejected that their delegation size was a sticking point.
"The question of the number of delegates is not a problem," Faiwa Sayed, a leader of the General People's Congress, the former ruling party which is still headed by former president Ali Abdullah Saleh.