THU 28 - 3 - 2024
 
Date: Mar 5, 2011
Source: The Daily Star
Saleh says no to transition plan as protesters maintain pressure
Yemeni troops kill four demonstrators and wound seven when they fire on anti-regime rally

Saturday, March 05, 2011

Mohammed Ghobari
Reuters

 

SANAA: Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh rejected an opposition plan for him to transfer power this year, as protests against his three-decade rule over the impoverished nation swelled into hundreds of thousands.
Yemeni troops killed four protesters and wounded seven others Friday when they fired on an anti-regime rally in the north, officials and Shiite rebels said.


Saleh, who has ruled the poverty-stricken Arab country for 32 years, is sticking to his earlier offer to step down only when his term ends in 2013.
However, he agreed to a reform plan proposed by religious leaders earlier this week which would revamp polls, Parliament and the judicial system.


“The president rejected the proposal and is holding on to his previous offer,” the opposition’s rotating president, Mohammad al-Mutawakil, said Friday. There was no direct word from the government.
Leading opposition member, Sakhr al-Wajih, warned that Saleh could trigger more bloodshed if he does not act swiftly on demands that he quit.


“Saleh has mastered delaying tactics. I want to give people hope,” Wajih, a Soviet-trained air force engineer who was elected to Parliament in 1993, told Reuters in an interview.
“I want to say that he will go along with a transition period to confine this corrupt regime to history,” Wajih said.
In Sanaa, protests stretched back for more than 2 kilometers in the streets around Sanaa University with demonstrators chanting: “Oh God, God please get rid of Ali Abdullah.”


In the north, Shiite rebels accused the Yemeni Army of firing rockets on a protest in Harf Sufyan, where thousands had gathered. Four people were killed and 13 were wounded. “During a peaceful protest this Friday morning … demanding the fall of the regime, an end to corruption and political change, a military post fired rockets at a group of protesters and hit dozens of people,” a statement from the rebels said.


The government said men had fired on a military post in Harf Sufyan, wounding four security men, but denied having fired on the protest.

The rebels complain of discrimination by the government and announced their support for the protests in early February. They have been in an uneasy truce with the government since February 2010 to end a war that has raged on and off since 2004.


Preachers sympathetic to the opposition, whose ranks have grown with the defection of Saleh allies, joined protesters in Sanaa for Friday prayers and called on Yemenis to take to the streets to demand Saleh step down.
“This is a corrupt and oppressive regime, and God is calling on us to get rid of it,” one preacher shouted to the crowds in Sanaa, telling them to pray that they, and Libyan rebels fighting against leader Moammar Gadhafi, succeed in toppling their governments.


Protesters flooded the streets around Sanaa University – possibly some 100,000 rallied in what was among the largest demonstration in Sanaa yet, a Reuters reporter said. Similar numbers protested in Taiz, south of the capital.
More than 20,000 protesters marched in Aden, once the capital of an independent southern state, some carrying black flags of mourning for three protesters killed in the city last week. Tens of thousands more marched in Ibb, south of Sanaa.


They carried banners that read: “Leave Ali, for the sake of our martyrs,” while chanting: “The people want to overthrow the regime.”
Thousands also took part in a similar funeral in the neighborhood of Mualla, marching toward a cemetery in the district of Crater, witnesses said.


Opposition leaders put the combined number of protesters at over 500,000 in Sanaa and Taiz alone, but that could not be independently verified.
Protesters say they are frustrated with widespread graft and unemployment in a nation where 40 percent of its 23 million people live on $2 a day or less and a third face chronic hunger.


Saleh loyalists, in a sign he can still draw large crowds, organized a counter-protest Friday attended by about 100,000 people, a Reuters reporter said.
“No to sedition. No to chaos. Yes to stability,” they chanted. Police using loudspeakers called on Yemenis joining anti-government protesters to return home, but the demonstrators shouted back that the police should join them. – With AFP

 



 
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