UNSC mulls over Russian draft resolution on Yemen

April 5, 2015, 6:28 am

The UN Security Council is deliberating over a Russian draft resolution that calls for a humanitarian pause to the Saudi-led coalition airstrikes in an effort to quell the violence.

“And we hope that we can by Monday come up with something,” Jordanian UN Ambassador Dina Kawar, this month’s president of the 15-nation Security Council said at the end of the emergency council meeting, convened at the request of Russia on Saturday.

The UNSC held more than one hour of closed-door consultations to discuss the spiraling violence in Yemen and the difficulties faced by countries in evacuating citizens from the war-torn nation.

“The Russian delegation circulated a draft resolution to the council members regarding humanitarian pauses in Yemen and expressed concerns over the humanitarian situation in Yemen,” the Council president added on Saturday.

UN figures say some 519 people have been killed in Yemen and nearly 1,700 injured in the past two weeks, more than 90 of them being children.

The Yemeni crisis has become the focus of the ongoing Arab summit led by Egypt and attended by 20 Arab monarchs and presidents, including fleeing Yemeni President Abd-Rabbo Mansour Hadi, amid an ongoing Saudi-led military airstrike against targets of Shiite Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Valerie Amos, the UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, has said tens of thousands of people have fled their homes, some by crossing the sea to Djibouti and Somalia. Electricity, water and essential medicines are in short supply.

Countries including Russia, China, Turkey and India have also been evacuating their nationals from Sanaa, while the UN has pulled out its staff from Yemen.

TBP