Yemen's Karman slams Russia, China over Syria vote

Sunday, February 5, 2012

Yemeni activist and 2011 Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman says Russia and China bear moral responsibility for killings in Syria and is urging governments to expel Syrian ambassadors.

Karman spoke at the Munich Security Conference, an annual gathering of security officials, on Sunday — a day after Moscow and Beijing vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at ending Syria's bloodshed.

Their vote came amid international outrage over a devastating bombardment of the city of Homs by President Bashar Assad's forces.

Karman says "those two countries bear the moral and human responsibility for these massacres."

She urged governments to expel Syrian ambassadors and withdraw their own ambassadors from Damascus, saying "that is the minimum you can do to punish this regime."

Fighting over captured Yemeni city kills five

Sun Feb 5, 2012

ADEN (Reuters) - Four Islamists linked to al Qaeda and a government soldier have been killed in clashes in southern Yemen, security sources said on Sunday, hours after the breakdown of a short-lived ceasefire designed to pacify the area ahead of a presidential election.

The clashes between militants from Ansar al-Sharia (Partisans of Islamic Law) and government forces broke out late on Saturday on the outskirts of Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province, which militants seized last May.

The capture of the coastal city has increased the vulnerability of Yemen's second city, Aden, security experts say. The United States and Saudi Arabia are particularly concerned that emboldened militants linked to al Qaeda could threaten nearby oil shipping routes through the Red Sea.

Zinjibar has been nearly destroyed in regular clashes between the government and Islamist militants in the past eight months. Tens of thousands fled and are now refugees in nearby Aden and Lahej.

Tribesmen and residents said government mediators on Saturday forged a ceasefire with militants in an effort to create a peaceful environment for voting on February 21, but militants denied they had made any such agreement.

"They (the government) wanted to hold negotiations with Ansar al-Sharia, but (we) refused," a representative of the Islamist group told Reuters.

Diplomats hope the elections, agreed as part of a deal to ease President Ali Abdullah Saleh out of office, will pull the country back from the brink of civil war. Over the last year, militants have exploited lawlessness that accompanied protests against Saleh's 33-year rule to seize towns like Zinjibar and Radda in Yemen's mountainous interior.

Authorities had opted for negotiations in Zinjibar after it became clear that the military option was "not viable," a government official in Sanaa told Reuters, especially given that the army had been weakened by divisions between supporters of the uprising and Saleh loyalists.

"Because of the split in the army and the political crisis, the military solution did not succeed in Abyan... Tribal negotiations may help get the al Qaeda members out of Abyan as they did in the city of Radda," he said.

Militants quit Radda, around 170 km (105 miles) southeast of Sanaa, in exchange for the release of jailed comrades and the formation of a council to govern the town.

But such a solution would be difficult to replicate in Abyan province where militants are firmly entrenched.

Highlighting the fragile security situation just weeks before voting, militants on Saturday attacked a Yemeni army base in the south, and elsewhere in Abyan unknown gunmen opened fire on a group of tribesmen, killing one and wounding two. Some tribes have joined forces with the army against the militants.

Two southern activists killed in Yemen

February 5, 2012 share

Two southern activists were killed and seven wounded in clashes with police in the Yemeni province of Hadramut on Sunday, activists said.

They said the clashes took place in the city of Mukalla as security forces intervened to evacuate a police station overrun by activists opposed to Yemen's presidential election of February 21.

Security forces recaptured the police station after activists had released detained colleagues, a police source said.

The operation resulted in clashes that left one activist dead and eight wounded, the source said. Activists said one of the wounded later died in hospital.

Late on Friday, armed clashes between supporters and opponents of the presidential election left dozens of people wounded in the main southern city of Aden.

The violence erupted when supporters of the Southern Movement, a separatist group, attacked a march organized by rivals from a year-old protest movement against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an activist said.

Some factions of the Movement have been campaigning for a boycott of the election, which they say fails to meet their aspirations for autonomy or southern independence.

Saleh's deputy, Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi, himself a southerner, is the sole candidate in the election to succeed the veteran strongman who is standing down after more than three decades in power.

Nationwide protests erupted against Saleh's regime in January last year, triggering months of bloodshed.

Yemen negotiating Qaeda pullout from Zinjibar

(AFP)

February 4, 2012

ADEN — The government is trying to negotiate the withdrawal of Al-Qaeda linked militants from Zinjibar, capital of Abyan province in southern Yemen, tribal and government officials said on Saturday.

The negotiations, taking place through tribal mediators, are "ongoing," a government official told AFP on condition of anonymity, without giving further details.

Last May, the Partisans of Sharia (Islamic law), linked to Al-Qaeda, took control of Zinjibar, triggering nine months of deadly clashes between militants and government troops.

Hundreds of people have been killed in the fighting and more than 90,000 residents displaced.

Tribal mediator Tareq al-Fadhli said the government's negotiating team comprised six members of parliament headed by the influential tribal chief and lawmaker Awad al-Wazir.

Al-Fadhli said he "passed on the demands of the Partisans of Sharia (to the lawmakers)" at a meeting on Saturday in the southern coastal town of Shaqra, 35 kilometres (22 miles) east of Zinjibar.

The militants are demanding assurances that "Sharia law be implemented" and government troops "retreat to their barracks," he said.

The Partisans of Sharia will withdraw from Zinjibar and police forces would be allowed back into town under the command of Abyan's current security chief once the conditions are met, he added.

Al-Fadhli said a "second phase" of negotiations would deal with the militants' pullback from other southern Yemeni towns once the withdrawal from Zinjibar is complete.

At least three tribal-mediated negotiation attempts to secure the militants withdrawal from Zinjibar have failed since the town fell.

On January 25, hundreds of Al-Qaeda gunmen bowed to tribal pressures and withdrew from the town of Rada, 130 kilometres (85 miles) southeast of the capital Sanaa.

Rada was overrun on January 16, the latest in a series of towns and cities to fall as Al-Qaeda takes advantage of a central government weakened by months of anti-regime protests.

Heavily armed tribes, which play a vital role in Yemeni politics and society, have been joining the army to battle militants linked to Al-Qaeda who have taken over several regions across the country's south and east.

Is Saleh running Yemen from US exile?

February 4, 2012

Some 20 gathered to protest Feb. 2 outside the Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Manhattan's Central Park South, where the Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh is said to be staying. Protesters decried Saleh's his trip to New York City for medical treatment, and a deal he received that granted him immunity from prosecution for repression during the uprising last year. The rally was organized by a group calling itself the Yemeni American Coalition for Change. "We are greatly dissatisfied that the US chose to side with a dictator,” said Summer Nasser, a member of the coalition. The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman spoke to the group from Yemen via cellphone and an interpreter. She accused Saleh of orchestrating violence in Yemen while in New York, and concluded: "We call on the US to hold Saleh accountable and not to allow him to rule Yemen from the US.” (NYT City Room blog, Feb. 2)

Meanwhile in Yemen, independent journalists lost a struggle as armed regime loyalists helped invade the nation's flagship newspaper, al-Thawra, and forcibly reinstated the ousted Saleh's image at the top of the Feb. 3 edition. Late the previous night, about 40 pro-regime journalists from al-Thawra and other government newspapers, supported by a group of armed men, entered the newsroom and took over the publication, according to three senior journalists at the paper. They retrieved the old masthead from the computer files and hastily wrote multiple stories in favor of President Saleh, which appeared in Friday's edition.

Since his departure for the US on Jan. 22, President Saleh has left day-to-day running of the government in the hands of his vice president, Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi. However, he won't officially be stripped of his title as head of state until Feb. 21, when a referendum is scheduled to approve Hadi as the new leader—the only name on the ballot. The political limbo has left the bureaucracy wondering who is in charge, especially as the vice president has stayed behind closed doors, making no public statement since Saleh's departure.