Yemen being highlighted in GCC and UN discussions on Tuesday

The United Nations Security Council is scheduled on Tuesday to discuss the situation in Yemen, where anti-government revolt entered its third month. Meanwhile, foreign minister of the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council are set to meet a Sana’a government delegation in the United Arab Emirates to consider ways to resolve the Yemeni standoff.

The 15-nation Security Council’s first formal meeting on Yemen, which was proposed by Peter Wittig, Germany’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, is scheduled to take place at 1930 GMT, diplomats told Reuters on condition of anonymity.

“It is a sign of the growing attention that Yemen is attracting after Egypt, Tunisia and Libya,” said one UN diplomat.

A senior official from the UN Department of Political Affairs will brief the Security Council, which might issue a statement on Yemen after the meeting is over, the diplomats said.

The meeting was being organized as members of Yemen’s ruling party, including three former ministers, formed a new bloc to support protests against the rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

GCC foreign ministers, meanwhile, will meet a Yemeni government delegation in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday to discuss an initiative to end the standoff. Protesters have been demanding since January that President Saleh end his three-decade rule.

Abu Dhabi “will host an extraordinary meeting of foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council... with a Yemeni government delegation,” a GCC statement said, according to Agence-France Press.

GCC, which was formed in 1981, is a union that includes Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait.

GCC foreign ministers met on Sunday in the Saudi capital Riyadh with a Yemeni opposition delegation seeking details on a plan for the departure of Mr. Saleh, 65.

More than 125 people have been killed in the protests. Yemen’s population is estimated at 24 million.

After the Sunday meeting in Riyadh, leading Common Forum opposition activist Mohammed al-Sabri told AFP on Monday: “The opposition has succeeded in conveying its point of view to Gulf Arab monarchies” on the need for President Saleh to step down.

The protests, inspired by uprisings that toppled the authoritarian leaders of Egypt and Tunisia, have brought tens of thousands of people onto the streets almost every day to demand an end to endemic poverty and corruption. Scores of protesters have been killed.

At least 88 people were wounded on Monday in the Red Sea port of al-Hudaida as plainclothes police fired bullets and teargas at protesters, who responded by hurling stones, witnesses and doctors told Reuters.

Similar demonstrations to show solidarity with the Sana’a protests were also held late on Sunday in Taez and Dhamar, south of the capital, and the main southern port city of Aden.

Last week, Mr. Saleh’s office said in response to the GCC mediation bid that the president has “no reservation about transferring power peacefully and smoothly within the framework of the constitution”.

President Saleh, in power since 1978, has so far insisted on overseeing any transition, fearful of being hounded out of office and faced with prosecution like his ally, Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on February 11 following mass protests.

(Abeer Tayel of Al Arabiya