SANAA – Yemeni protests demanding an end to President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 32-year rule spread to a tribal area considered his political stronghold on Tuesday, and military vehicles deployed in the capital. Around 10,000 protesters marched in the city of Dhamar, about 60 km (40 miles) south of Sanaa, residents said by telephone.
Dhamar is known for its ties to Saleh and is the hometown of Yemen’s prime minister, interior minister and head judge. “Leave! leave!” the protesters shouted, just two days after Saleh loyalists there held a similar-sized pro-government rally.
Rising protests in the Arabian Peninsula state, and a series of defections from Saleh’s political and tribal allies, have added pressure on him to step aside this year even as he pledges to stay on until his current term ends in 2013.
Protesters in Dhamar pelted a municipal official with rocks, causing several injuries, local members of the ruling party said, as demonstrators ended their march and began a sit-in they said would continue until Saleh fell. In the capital Sanaa, where thousands of protesters have been camped out for weeks, military vehicles with armed soldiers spread across streets in what appeared to be a response to calls by youth activists for a march to the presidential palace.
Police also brought out water cannon and placed concrete blocks around Sanaa University, the rallying point for anti-Saleh protest that had been quiet in recent days, after weeks of fierce clashes across the country between government loyalists and protesters killed at least 27 people.
Yemen, neighbour to oil giant Saudi Arabia, was teetering on the brink of failed statehood even before recent protests. Saleh has struggled to cement a truce with Shia rebels in the north and curb secessionist rebellion in the south, all while fighting Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based wing.
In further unrest, men on motorbikes shot and wounded a senior intelligence officer in the southern city of Zinjibar in what appeared to be an assassination attempt by Al Qaeda militants, a local official said. Analysts say the recent protests, inspired by unrest that has toppled the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia and stirred insurrection in Libya, may be reaching a point where it will be difficult for Saleh, an astute politician, to cling to power.
Yemen’s foreign minister blamed burgeoning anti-government protests on poor economic conditions in the impoverished state where 40 percent of its 23 million people live on $2 a day or less and a third face chronic hunger.
He said he wanted foreign donors to inject up to $6 billion to fill a five-year budget gap and would present a development plan later this month to donor nations including European and Gulf Arab allies as well as the United States.
“What we need is really development and economic growth because the present political crisis is really as a result of the economic situation in Yemen,” Abubakr al-Qirbi told Reuters after meeting Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) foreign ministers late on Monday in Abu Dhabi.
