UNITED NATIONS (Dispatches) – An agreement has been reached in principle on a UN-coordinated proposal that would transfer more than 1 million barrels of crude oil from a tanker that has been moored off the coast of war-torn Yemen since the 1980s to another ship, the UN humanitarian chief says.
Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council he was pleased to report the recent progress in efforts to resolve the issue of the FSO Safer, whose long-term presence in the Red Sea has raised fears of a massive oil spill or explosion that could cause an environmental catastrophe.
Griffiths gave no details, but Hans Grundberg, the UN special envoy for Yemen, told reporters later that progress, “as always in Yemen, needs to be solidified in order to be taken forward.”
The remarks came ten days after the UN indicated that both the Sana’a-based National Salvation Government and the Saudi-sponsored administration of former Yemeni president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi were keen to find an emergency solution to avoid a catastrophic spill.
According to environmental group Greenpeace, an oil spill would prevent access to Yemen’s main ports of Hudaydah and Salif and adversely affect food aid supplies for up to 8.4 million people.
The Safer tanker reportedly allows vessels to anchor offshore and transfer oil extracted and processed from installations in Ma’rib oil fields in central Yemen.
The tanker is said to contain 34 crude oil tanks of different sizes and volumes, amounting to a total capacity of around 3 million barrels.
The ship has been moored several kilometers outside the Red Sea port of Ras Isa, north of Hudaydah.
Saudi Arabia and a number of its regional allies, backed by the United States and European powers, launched the war on Yemen in March 2015, with the goal of bringing the government of former Yemeni President Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi back to power and crushing the popular Ansarullah resistance movement.
The war has left hundreds of thousands of Yemenis dead and displaced millions more. It has also destroyed Yemen’s infrastructure and spread famine and infectious diseases there.
Despite Saudi Arabia’s incessant bombardment of the impoverished country, the Yemeni armed forces have gradually grown stronger, leaving Riyadh and its allies, most notably the United Arab Emirates, bogged down in the country.