Houthi leader says he would accept truce

In an audio recording posted on the internet, Abdul-Malik al Houthi says he will accept the conditions of a truce if attacks against the rebels cease.

The leader of the Houthi rebels in northern Yemen last night said he would accept the government's conditional ceasefire in a bloody insurgency that has left hundreds of thousands homeless and threatened to destabilise the region. In an audio recording posted on the internet, Abdul-Malik al Houthi said he would accept the five conditions if attacks against the rebels ended.

"In order to avoid ... the annihilation of civilians we reiterate our acceptance of the five points" for a ceasefire, Mr al Houthi said. "The ball is now in the other party's court." Among Sana'a's demands are the withdrawal of rebels from official buildings, the reopening of roads in the north, the return of weapons seized from security services and the release of all military and civilian prisoners.

Last September, the Yemeni president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, said the government was ready to fight the rebels for "years", although he also said hostilities could end if the Houthis themselves agree to a ceasefire. Mr al Houthi spoke at a celebration marking the anniversary of the 1962 revolution that overthrew the Zaidi Shiite imamate and established the republic, and after two separate ceasefires lasted just a few hours before fighting erupted again.

The government accuses the Houthis, who have been fighting an intermittent insurgency for the past five years, of wanting to restore the Zaidi imamate. The rebels deny that and say they are fighting social, economic and religious marginalisation by the Sana'a authorities. A possible ceasefire would come as a relief to the Yemeni government which is also facing a secessionist movement in the south and has vowed to tackle al Qa'eda militants based in the country,

The latest round of fighting with the Houthis broke out on August 11, when the military launched "Operation Scorched Earth," an all-out assault against the rebels. Saudi Arabia joined the fighting on November 4, a day after Houthi forces killed a Saudi border guard and occupied two villages inside Saudi territory. The Saudi government said its operations were purely defensive and meant to repel the infiltrators from the Saudi villages they had captured. The rebels, however, accused the Saudis of taking their fight into Yemen and they have repeatedly accused the Saudi army of backing Yemeni troops. The rebels announced they had withdrawn from Saudi land on January 25. Riyadh said they had been forced out.

The Yemeni government repeatedly accused the Houthis of being supported by Shiite Iran, the main regional rival of Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia, and in October announced it had captured five Iranians attempting to smuggle a boatload of weapons to them, but no hard evidence was ever provided. Iran also denied it was providing military support to the rebels. The Zaidis, whose faith is an offshoot of Shiite Islam, are a minority in mainly Sunni Yemen but the majority community in the north. President Saleh is himself a Zaidi.

The UN refugee agency warned on Friday that a humanitarian crisis in north Yemen was getting worse as the number of people displaced by the conflict has grown to about 250,000. The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in Geneva the fighting has moved gradually from Sa'ada city farther north-west, while more people were fleeing the province because they could not sustain themselves.

"The humanitarian crisis in Yemen is deepening and we now estimate that 250,000 civilians have been displaced since the country's internal conflict flared in 2004," Andrej Mahecic, a UNHCR spokesman, said. "This represents a more than doubling of the number displaced as of August 2009 when the latest round of fighting erupted," he told journalists. The tally of displaced from the area, which near the border with Saudi Arabia, has grown by about one fifth in just over two weeks.

About 12,000 of them have sought shelter in the capital Sana'a. The international Red Cross warned on Monday that the worsening impact of the conflict was largely neglected. @Email:[e-mail] * Agence France-Presse with additional reporting by Reuters