SANAA – Yemen’s opposition called for mass protests Wednesday after deadly clashes with police, while talks seemed stalled between Gulf mediators and representatives of embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Members of the UN Security Council also failed to come up with a joint statement on Yemen after adding the Arabian Peninsula country’s crisis to their agenda for the first time. Youth groups called for nationwide marches by millions of people in protest at the killing of protesters on Tuesday, and to stress the rejection of any deal that excludes Saleh’s immediate departure.
Confrontations between security forces and protesters demanding the ouster of Saleh raged on, with medics and witnesses reporting eight people, including a passer-by and a policeman, shot dead. One protester was killed when a gunman on a motorbike opened fire at dawn on Wednesday at demonstrators staging a sit-in at Al-Nasr Square in the western Red Sea city of Hudaydah. The assailant managed to escape after also wounding about eight other protesters, most of whom had been asleep.
Also Wednesday, a policeman was shot dead during clashes between police and protesters in the main southern port city of Aden, while five demonstrators were shot dead in the capital Sanaa on Tuesday. Foreign ministers of the Gulf Cooperation Council held talks on Tuesday with representatives of Saleh as part of efforts to hammer out a deal by which Saleh would step down. But the meeting in Abu Dhabi appeared to have made no major progress as a curt, vague statement issued afterwards described the talks as “constructive,” vowing to “exert more effort to preserve security, stability and the unity of the Yemeni state.”
“During the meeting both sides exchanged opinions over the Gulf initiative,” the statement said. The spokesman of the Yemeni delegation, Ahmed bin Dagher, told reporters any solution should not clash with the constitution. “We adhere to the constitution which we cannot breach,” he said, in a statement that could mean that Saleh should serve out his term until 2013 — a position stated previously by the ruling General People’s Congress party. He told Al-Arabiya television that “no immediate solution has come out of the meeting.”
The meeting came after talks in Riyadh on Sunday between the Gulf ministers and representatives of the parliamentary opposition, who are adamant Saleh should step down immediately. Saleh, who came to power in 1978, has faced protests since January calling for his departure, in which more than 130 people have been killed. On April 10 the GCC — Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — appealed to Saleh to “announce the transfer of his powers to the vice president,” Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi. It also called for the formation in Yemen of “a government of national unity led by the opposition” which would be responsible for “establishing a constitution and organising elections.”
The opposition objected to the wording of the proposal, insisting on Saleh stepping down completely and not just handing over authority to his deputy. Last week, Saleh’s office said in response to the GCC mediation bid that the president has “no reservation about transferring power peacefully and smoothly within the framework of the constitution”. Saleh has so far insisted on overseeing any transition, fearful of being hounded out of office and faced with prosecution like his ally, Egypt’s former president Hosni Mubarak, who resigned on February 11 following mass protests.
