Abu Dhabi, March 19: A meeting of “Friends of Yemen,” a forum of aid donors to the poorest country in the Arabian peninsula, is to meet in Abu Dhabi on March 29-30, the Emirati state news agency WAM said on Thursday.
It said a senior Emirati foreign ministry official, Khaled Ghanem al-Ghaith, discussed the preparations for the meeting with a diplomat from the US embassy.
The “Friends of Yemen” meeting, which Sanaa had wanted to take place in Berlin, was agreed upon at an international conference held in London at the end of January to help Sanaa face up to the threat from Al-Qaeda.
The Sanaa government is seeking development aid to head off the threat but another meeting in Riyadh in late February failed to produce concrete results.
A two-day meeting in the Saudi capital of Yemen’s oil-rich Arab neighbours in the Gulf focused on why much of some 5.7 billion dollars in pledged international aid remained unused by Yemen.
At least 3.7 billion dollars of the aid was pledged by the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council, which comprises Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
The rest was from major donors like the United States, Japan, the European Union and organisations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the Islamic Development Bank.
The meetings have come in the wake of a December 25 attempt by a Nigerian to blow up an American passenger jet landing in Detroit, in a foiled attack allegedly linked to Yemen-based Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.
—Agencies