JEDDAH: Gulf states vowed to increase their efforts to broker an end to Yemen's political crisis so as to avert a civil war on their doorstep, the UAE foreign minister said Tuesday. “The unstable situation in Yemen is top of our agenda,” Sheikh Abdullah Bin Zayed Al-Nahayan told a foreign ministers' meeting of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) in Jeddah. “We have made huge efforts to reconcile the opposing points of view and our efforts are certainly going to continue without letup,” the UAE official said. Gulf states have tried repeatedly and in vain to broker an exit for Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, forced to seek treatment in Saudi Arabia for injuries suffered in an attack on his palace earlier this month. The Yemeni president told King Abdullah, Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, Tuesday that his health was “constantly improving,” Yemen's official Saba news agency reported. Saleh thanked the King for the care he had received since he was flown to Riyadh for treatment after the June 3 bomb blast. King Abdullah reiterated Saudi Arabia's support for a “united, secure and stable Yemen”, Saba added. The King also spoke by telephone with US President Barack Obama Tuesday, the official Saudi Press Agency said without giving any details of the contents of the conversation. Yemeni opposition activists had called on the Gulf ministers to “stand with the will of the people in forming a transitional council that would achieve the aims of the revolution”. The GCC has seen Saleh back out of deals it struck to ease him from office three times. Its members pledged Tuesday to continue efforts to resolve Yemen's political crisis. Sheikh Sadeq Al-Ahmar, a leader of Yemen's powerful Hashed tribal confederation, parts of which have turned against Saleh, said Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the acting leader, must allow a transitional government to take shape. “Constitutionally...he must bear his responsibilities and go forward with them until the transitional period,” he told the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera.
