SANAA, 27 April 2003 — Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh yesterday called for the third parliamentary elections since reunification in 1990 to take place without incident and free of the violence that has marred previous polls.
“I hope Sunday’s elections pass off safely and peacefully,” Saleh told a rare press conference at the converted warehouse headquarters of the Supreme Commission for Election and Referendum (SCER).
The president called for polls to be “violence-free and a day without weapons,” in reference to the heavily armed Yemeni population that holds an estimated 60 million weapons among some 20 million people.
“I call on people to elect the proper people to best represent them,” he said, flanked by SCER officials and a squad of bodyguards. The republic’s 22 main political parties have signed a 32-point “code of honor” in an effort to avoid the bloodshed that marred elections in 1993 and 1997.
The electoral process was temporarily halted last week in a constituency 60 km north of Sanaa after a failed assassination attempt by a Al-Islah Party candidate on the governor, a member of Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress (GPC).
A Sanaa-based diplomat said that while the situation was seemingly calm, there were still a “number of potential flash points in Sanaa and particularly Taiz,” 180 km south of the capital.
The president put the declining number of female candidates down to the nature of Yemeni society, the males of which “refuse to give up their seats for women.”
The problem of female emancipation was, however, endemic throughout the Arab world, Saleh said, but noted that Yemeni women held some senior public positions. There are two female MPs, two members of the Shoura Council, one female ambassador and one woman minister.
Women do play a bigger role behind the scenes of the political parties, with Al-Islah employing 13 on its central committee even though it rules out female candidates. But women’s rights advocates struggle even to make it onto the agenda in large swathes of the rugged hinterland, run by heavily armed tribes where the central government has scant control.
SCER Chairman Khalid Al-Sharif earlier told reporters that just 11 women will contest the 301 one-seat constituencies. A total 1,396 candidates, 991 from political parties and 405 independents, will run for office in the third legislative elections since political pluralism was introduced after the unification of north and south Yemens in 1990.
Eight million people over the age of 18 years will be eligible to vote, including 3.4 million women, he said. More than 37,000 local and international observers will also cast an eye over the electoral process. Polling stations open today at 8 a.m. (0500 GMT) and close 12 hours later.
