Yemeni protesters urge UN to resolve standoff

AFP/Sanaa

Yemenis shout slogans during a protest demanding the ousting of President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa yesterday

Tens of thousands of protesters marched in the Yemeni capital yesterday, calling on the UN to resolve the country’s political crisis and force President Ali Abdullah Saleh to resign. The demonstration came a day after the parliamentary opposition Common Forum said it would support a stronger UN role to bring an end to months of violence and political deadlock that have plagued the country. “Oh world, why are you silent while the people of Yemen are getting killed?” the protesters chanted as they marched out of Change Square in central Sanaa, the base camp for the democracy movement. “We are sending a message to the UN Security Council asking them to put pressure on Saleh and the remnants of his regime to leave power,” a protest leader, Mohamed al-Assal, said. Those at the rally steered far from Saleh loyalists to avoid clashes, marching only in areas controlled by dissident troops who defected in support of the protest movement that has gripped Yemen since January. On Sunday, Common Forum spokesman Mohamed Qahtan said his group supported stronger UN action in Yemen after regional efforts, specifically a Gulf initiative, have failed to force Saleh’s resignation. The UN, and in particular the Security Council, would be “more effective” in ending the crisis and serve as a “continuation of the regional efforts” already under way, he said in a telephone interview. The focus on UN action precedes today’s planned report to the Security Council by Yemen envoy Jamal Benomar, who failed to secure an agreement on the Gulf Co-operation Council deal which aimed to end the crisis that has put the country on the brink of a wider conflict and crippled its economy. Meanwhile, dozens of Yemeni journalists held a sit-in in Sanaa to demand the release of a colleague held by troops loyal to dissident General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, an AFP correspondent said. Mohamed Sudam, a Reuters reporter who also works as an interpreter for President Saleh, was detained on Friday night at a checkpoint manned by Ahmar’s troops on the way home from the airport after a trip to Cairo. The journalists, who held the sit-in at Sanaa’s Change Square, called on Yemen’s new Nobel peace laureate, activist Tawakul Karman, to intervene on Sudam’s behalf. Ahmar, who defected in March to support the protest movement, said he was unaware that Sudam was a reporter and promised to release him later yesterday. “I didn’t even know he was a journalist... he was detained based on the fact that he was the personal interpreter for President Saleh,” Ahmar told a small group of reporters yesterday. He added Sudam was taken in response to the detention by Saleh security forces of relatives of an officer in Ahmar’s First Armoured Division. Meanwhile, in Yemen’s second city Taez, 40 women were hurt on Sunday night when regime supporters attacked an all-female street celebration of Karman’s Nobel Prize win last week, medical officials said. Participants said they were attacked with glass bottles and stones.