Yemen’s political opposition held talks with the country’s acting leader on Monday in a bid to defuse months of violent political deadlock over the future of veteran leader President Ali Abdullah Saleh.
Saleh, forced to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia for wounds suffered in an attack on his palace earlier this month, has refused to leave office despite nearly six months of street protests and many diplomatic attempts to remove him.
The ensuing political paralysis and long-standing conflicts with Islamist insurgents, separatists and rebel tribesmen have fanned Western and regional fears of Yemen collapsing into chaos and giving al Qaeda a stronghold alongside oil shipping routes.
A member of a group of opposition parties calling on Saleh to formally step down, who declined to be identified, said the meeting aimed to resurrect a plan by Yemen’s oil-rich Gulf neighbours to ease the president out.
“It’s to discuss a means to carry out the Gulf initiative and transfer power to the vice president,” he said before talks began. A member of that coalition on Sunday said vice president Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was refusing to meet with them. Saleh on three previous occasions backed out of that plan at the last minute. It envisioned him leaving office inside a month, with a guarantee of immunity from prosecution.
Fierce street battles between Saleh’s security forces and those of General Ali al-Mohsen al-Ahmar, who abandoned the president in March, engulfed the capital when the most recent bid for an agreed political transition collapsed last month. A ceasefire has held in Sanaa since Saleh left following the June 3 attack on his palace.
