Loyalists of President Ali Abdullah Saleh shot dead at least five people in the Yemeni capital on Thursday casting a pall over a hard-won deal for his departure after 33 years in power. The shooting by gunmen in plainclothes came as tens of thousands gathered for a mass protest against promises of immunity from prosecution for Saleh and his family under the UN-backed accord signed with the parliamentary opposition. Thirty-four other people were wounded, the medics said.
The anti-regime protesters came under fire as they marched towards the city centre, with the demonstrators blaming the attack on Saleh’s “thugs.”
Activists behind 10 months of protests had called for a huge protest rally against the promises of immunity under the deal which the veteran president finally signed in Riyadh on Wednesday after months of prevarication. The protesters also chanted slogans against the Common Forum parliamentary opposition bloc led by the Islamist party Al-Islah which was the first to sign up to the plan drawn up by impoverished Yemen’s wealthy Gulf neighbours. After the latest killings, the marchers returned to Change Square as pro- and anti-Saleh gunmen deployed across the capital, sending tensions soaring. In Yemen’s second-largest city Taez, another centre of the protests against Saleh, “hundreds of thousands” took to the streets on Thursday with similar demands, organisers said, without reporting any early clashes.
Under Wednesday’s deal, Saleh is to hand his powers over immediately to Vice President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi and hold office on an honorary basis only for the coming 90 days. But the youth, as the driving force of the protest movement in the face of a bloody crackdown that has left hundreds dead since January, are demanding Saleh and his family face prosecution and that the whole regime be dismantled. “We will stage a million-man march today to reject the guarantees given to Saleh,” said Walid al-Ammari, a spokesman for the youth activists. Ammari said Saleh’s agreement to hand his powers to the vice president made no real difference.
“We will continue until we have toppled the rest of the regime,” he said. “We did not start a revolution to keep half of the killers.” Hadi, Yemen’s low-profile vice president for the past 17 years, is “just another arm of Saleh,” Ammari said.
Wednesday’s agreement provides for Hadi to assume “all powers necessary… for organising early elections within a 90-day period.” The opposition is to nominate a candidate to head a government of national unity charged with holding talks with the youth activists. World leaders have called on both sides in Yemen’s protracted power struggle to seize on the opportunity of the Riyadh agreement to end the bloodshed. Saleh’s long equivocation over signing the Gulf transition deal saw the protests slide into deadly clashes between loyalist and dissident troops and tribesmen that have riven the capital and left the armed forces deeply divided.
