Gunmen rob Yemeni diplomat, stealing over half a million dollars

Cairo- Mar 2, 2011- Yemen's ambassador to Egypt was robbed by gunmen, who stole about 594,000 dollars in cash, security sources told the German Press Agency dpa on Wednesday.

Ambassador Abdel-Walay al-Shemiri was on his way to the southern city of Assiut in Egypt when three gunmen robbed him, said Egyptian security sources, who did not give further details.

Al-Shemiri told authorities he had the lofty sum of 3.5 million Egyptian pounds (594,000 dollars), in cash to distribute to the University of Assiut, where a number of Yemeni students were studying on scholarship.

A woman leading change in Yemen

By Alice Hackman *

LONDON- Mar 3, 2011- With two presidents unseated in Tunisia and Egypt and highly publicised protests across Libya, the recent demonstrations in Yemen are catching the world’s attention. The escalating violence is worrying and only time will tell if it will lead to a quick overthrow of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh or whether change will take much longer in Yemen. But one thing is different in Yemen: the international face of the Yemeni pro-change movement is a woman.

Profiled in high profile outlets including The Washington Post, The Toronto Star and Time Magazine, journalist and human rights activist Tawakkul Karman represents a positive image of Yemeni women. Long before she was photographed leading February’s protests against the government, she was called a brave defender of freedom of expression and human rights in Yemen.

In a January 2010 interview with Al Jazeera, she spoke of detained journalists, a sheikh’s tyranny against villagers in Ibb, a governorate south of the capital, the lack of justice for the family of a murdered doctor, and – long before January’s WikiLeaks revelations – even went so far as to accuse the government of being “in alliance” with Al Qaeda. Today, she continues to protest, demanding peaceful change.

Finally a refreshing change from the “over-sized post box” image of the Yemen’s women in the niqab (a garment that covers the female body, face and hands), or the photos of child bride Nujood Ali that have fuelled Yemen’s early marriage debate since April 2008.

Of course, all is not rosy for Yemen’s women. Yemeni parliamentarians (one out of 301 is a woman) still have not agreed on a minimum age for marriage to prevent girls like Nujood, nine years old at the time of her divorce, from being married before they finish school. Illiteracy among women is still a whopping 67 per cent, women are typically the first victims of food shortages (one in three Yemenis suffers from severe malnutrition according to the UN) and many have difficult and limited access to healthcare. Women’s participation in politics is minimal and, despite two female ministers, Yemen has consistently ranked at the bottom in the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index since it was first included in the ranking in 2006.

But there is hope.

Karman and fellow female human rights activists, such as journalist Samia al-Aghbari, are on the frontline of protests in the Yemeni capital. They may not be representative of Yemeni women in general, but they are indeed inspiring. In fact, one Yemeni man was so impressed by al-Aghbari’s courage during the protests of 13 February when she was knocked onto the pavement by a member of security, that he wrote her a poem, “Revolution of the Green Hijab... To Samia al-Aghbari and all the other revolutionaries”, which was published the following day on the Nashwan News website.

Although they are not all out on the streets, there are a number of inspiring women in Yemen. In addition to Karman and al-Aghbari, Yemeni women are human rights activists, journalists, doctors, educators, members of civil society, academics, wives of political detainees, photographers, and even tweeters.

Dozens of brave women have run against all odds and lost in local council and parliamentary elections. According to Nadia al-Sakkaf, female Editor-in-Chief of the independent Yemen Times, winning is difficult without the support of a political party, and most politically ambitious women at the moment are waiting to see how the current situation develops.

Then there are the women who quietly start their own revolutions. In May 2010, a literacy eradication course inspired women in rural Dhamar, a governorate south of Sana’a, to go home and ask their husbands and brothers for their rights to education, inheritance and political participation. Course organisers received phone calls from confused male family members asking what they had been discussing. Participants also rallied together and prevented a man from marrying off his 12-year-old daughter.

When Karman was detained by security for organising protests on 22 January, she made the most of a bad situation by chatting to her fellow female detainees about their rights. "I was happy to discover the prison and talk to the prisoners," she told The Yemen Times after her release.

But perhaps the most inspiring thing about Karman is that she is not speaking up only for Yemeni women, but for Yemeni society as a whole, addressing national grievances such as unemployment and corruption.

It may be too early for a female president in Yemen, but Karman adds a new, welcome dimension to the media coverage of a country usually associated in the Western mind with Al Qaeda, poverty and oppressed women.

*Alice Hackman has recently returned to London after two years as reporter and Features Editor for The Yemen Times in Sana’a, Yemen. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).

Yemen and Terrorism is Subject of Panel Talk

Washington- Mar 3, 2011- The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs will host a panel discussion on Yemen and al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) at 4:30 p.m. Monday, March 7, in Robertson Hall, Room 16, followed by a reception in the Bernstein gallery. The panel will feature Barbara Bodine, a Princeton lecturer in public and international affairs and former U.S. ambassador to Yemen; Michael W.S. Ryan, a senior research associate at the Jamestown Foundation; and Jacob Shapiro, a Princeton assistant professor of politics and international affairs.

Source: Princeton University

Yemen Aims to Combat Qat

Sana'a- Mar 2, 2011- Yemen plans to increase qat taxes by 200 per cent this year, take qat markets outside the main cities and activate the decisions banning chewing qat at governmental institutions, the News Yemen cited an official document as saying on Wednesday.

The move comes as the country is determined to combat the expanding cultivation of qat within the efforts to meet the millennium goals 2011-2015, mainly focussed on reducing extreme poverty.

The document titled 'the fast track approach to meet the MDGs' said that within the interventions to limit qat cultivation which affects other crops, the government has plans to prevent qat inside the main cities and to raise awareness among the people about negatives of chewing and planting qat.

To make this very practical, the government will build human capacities, provide jobs and allow financial resources to enable the people to launch businesses that can contribute to combating qat which analysts say consumes between 30-40 per cent of the country's scarce water resources, it added.

Analysts also said that qat trees are occupying the largest portion of Yemen's arable land.

More than 70 per cent of the Yemeni males and more than 40 females chew qat on daily bases and spend almost two thirds of their monthly salaries on it.

In addition to its economic effects, Qat has health effects on chewers topped by mouth cancer and those caused by pesticides used to make qat grow faster.

The document also highlighted other objectives including the reduction of unemployment rates, boosting food security, and expanding food production and small and micro enterprises financing programmes, with the rural areas to receive a special attention.

Source: Yemen Post

South Yemen politician wants referendum on secession

By Khaled Yacoub Oweis

ADEN- Mar 2, 2011- Yemen's separatists want to see a Sudan-style referendum on southern secession if protests seeking to end the three-decade rule of President Ali Abdullah Saleh succeed, a senior separatist leader said on Tuesday.

A senior member in the Southern Movement, Yassin Ahmad Saleh Qadish was a member of the socialist party that ran south Yemen until 1990 when it negotiated unification with the tribal, more religiously conservative north.

"The south will push for a referendum after Saleh falls. It is a mass demand," Qadish, a former diplomat, said.

"The unity agreement was based on sharing power and resources," he said. "The experiment has utterly failed. We were fooled. South Yemen is under occupation. Most of our resources are going to the north."

Saleh, a U.S. ally against al Qaeda's Yemen-based wing, has failed to stop daily protests that have left 24 people dead in the past two weeks, most of them in Aden, the former capital of an independent southern state.

North and south Yemen united in 1990 and a civil war began four years later. Saleh's forces crushed the secessionists and reunited the country, but southerners complain that northerners take their resources while denying them political participation.

Qadish said more than 400 people had died for southern Yemeni independence since 1994 but said that "no one noticed."

"The Arab revolutions we are witnessing have changed all that. Saleh can no longer crush us," he said.

The Southern Movement, a loose coalition set up in 2007 by former southern officers sacked by the new state, now includes southern politicians in exile such as former leaders Haidar Abu Bakr al-Attas and Ali Salem al-Beidh.

"We are not a party in the strict sense. The Southern Movement is a wide base popular movement," Qadish said.

"TOO LATE" TO RESCUE UNITY

The southern port city of Aden has taken the brunt of casualties in protests so far, and southerners have put aside separatists slogans for northern calls for Saleh to go.

Some northern politicians have advocated choosing a southern president after Saleh, but Qadish said it was too late to save unity, with southerners having been disenfranchised for too long and kept out of major positions in government and security.

The south comprises half of Yemen's land mass and most of its 300,000 barrel per day oil output. It has 5.5 million residents compared with 18.8 million in the north.

"We have been always more of a civil society. Regaining our independent state is inevitable. It is a matter of time before Saleh falls and we have a referendum," Qadish said.

The Southern Movement, he said, was unfazed by lack of world support for separation. Yemen's northern neighbor Saudi Arabia backs Saleh, fearful of separatist contagion.

Saleh is also an ally to Washington in its campaign against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, but Qadish said democracy was the best way to defeat extremism.

Qadish said Saleh has been strengthening his grip on the south by distributing land and giving out oil and mineral concessions, but the tribal approach had no place in the south, where education has been stronger traditionally.

"Tribalism, Islamisation and corruption will lessen after we separate. The south was totalitarian but the administration was clean," he said. "Now you cannot do any official business, however small, without paying bribes."

Source: (Reuters)