Under pressure from a Saudi Arabian-led campaign of airstrikes, the former leader of Yemen who is backing the group that has seized the country’s largest cities said on Saturday that he was pleading for a truce, urging negotiations, but standing by demands for the ouster of his Saudi-backed successor.
“Let’s go to dialogue and ballot boxes,” the former leader, Ali Abdullah Saleh, declared in a 10-minute address broadcast on Yemeni television.
Saleh rambled at times but sounded as though he still pictured himself as the leader, laying out plans and addressing foreign powers.
Coming on the third day of airstrikes against his forces and his allies, the Houthi movement, Saleh’s speech might have reflected a degree of capitulation. But it also appeared intended to deflect blame for the bombing and to rally public anger against it. He gave no sign of an imminent end to the chaos engulfing Yemen, a central theatre of the war with Al Qaeda and previously a crucial counterterrorism partner to the United States’ military.
It has been increasingly clear that Saleh played a critical role in the success of the northern-based Houthi movement as it swept south through the Yemeni capital, Sana, and a broad swath of the country. Important units of the military and security forces still loyal to Saleh, including the air force and the elite Republican Guard, switched sides to join the Houthis in their fight against the government, which is now led by President Abdu Rabbu Mansour Hadi.
But until Saturday, Saleh preferred to stand behind the Houthis, an Iranian-backed group that has fought for years against Yemen’s government. He has now stepped out in front.
In a gesture of compromise, Saleh promised that neither he nor anyone in his family would run for president. His supporters have been actively campaigning for his eldest son, Ahmed, the former commander of Republican Guard, whose face has been appearing on campaign posters on the walls of the capital since the Saleh and Houthi forces took it over several months ago.
However, Saleh also made clear that he saw no room for the return of Hadi, even though Saudi Arabia and most other Arab states see him as Yemen’s legitimate leader.
Hadi became president through a transitional pact brokered by Saudi Arabia and its Persian Gulf neighbours to remove Saleh and quell an Arab Spring uprising against him. However, the Saleh and Houthi forces put him under house arrest in Sana until he escaped last month to make a last stand among his supporters in the southern port of Aden.
Then, as the Houthi and Saleh forces closed in on Aden, Hadi disappeared again last Wednesday, turning up the next day in Saudi Arabia, then at a conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, and on Saturday, again, in Saudi Arabia.
In his speech, Saleh called for elections to choose a new president, saying, “We would vote for him just as did with Hadi.”
“I appeal to you and your conscience to protect your children and women in Yemen against these barbaric and unjustified strikes,” he said in his speech, apparently addressing both Yemenis and the Arab leaders lined up behind the Saudi Arabian-campaign against him.
The Houthi movement, based in north-western Yemen, follows a form of Shiite Islam and has received financial support from Iran, the region’s Shiite power and the chief rival to Saudi Arabia. That is what has alarmed the Saudis, who fear an Iranian-backed group digging in on the southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
Diplomats say that Iran has given money to the Houthis but does not control the group. However, Hadi on Saturday called the Houthis “stooges of Iran”. Speaking at an Arab League meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Hadi urged Saudi Arabia and its allies to continue bombing until the Houthis surrendered, withdrew from the cities and turned over their weapons.
Saudi Arabia said on Saturday that its navy had evacuated 86 Arab and Western diplomats from Aden, which Hadi had made his provisional capital. Air travel to Yemen has been cut off, and the Saudi Arabian coalition has blockaded the coast.
Residents of Aden, with a population of at least several hundred thousand, said on Friday that fighting had broken out in pockets around the city. Military forces nominally working for Hadi had switched sides or deserted as the Houthis advanced. Looters were pillaging arms from military bases. Local militias with no affiliation with Mr. Hadi’s government were arming themselves to defend their neighbourhoods or fight the Houthis.
