SANAA: Separatists in south Yemen used the anniversary of an uprising against colonial power Britain to press their claim for independence on Wednesday, while President Ali Abdullah Saleh promised to crush rebels in the north.
The veteran ruler is facing two challenges to his government — in the north where a rebellion against central authority has been raging since 2004 and a call for secession in the former South Yemen. Both complain of political and economic marginalization.
“We promise you that victory is coming soon,” Saleh told a rally in Sanaa also marking the uprising in 1963 against Britain in the southern port city of Aden.
“They are the forces of backwardness because they have forgotten the past when there were no schools, hospitals or electricity,” he said, describing unity of north and south Yemen in 1990 as the southern revolution’s greatest gain. The conflict in the north has intensified since the army unleashed Operation Scor-ched Earth on Aug. 11.
Aid groups, who have been given limited access to the northern provinces, say up to 150,000 people have fled their homes.
Thousands in the opposition Southern Movement held a rally in the town of Radfan, witnesses said. The opposition website Aden Press said the exiled former president of South Yemen, Ali Salem Al-Beidh, addressed the rally by telephone from Germany.
“We will not retreat from the aim of realizing our second independence, whatever the sacrifices are and however long it takes,” Beidh said in the speech. “The British occupation came from overseas, while the current one was the result of a coup by the Sanaa regime,” he added.
Meanwhile, the northern rebels said they were ready to open humanitarian corridors for civilians displaced by the conflict. “We are prepared to open corridors and to secure routes linking the camps” for the displaced, they said in a statement posted on the Internet.
But they want the corridors put “directly under the control of the United Nations, with a guarantee that the authorities do not use them to send in reinforcements” for Yemeni troops.
On Sunday, UN humanitarian chief John Holmes appealed at the end of a three-day visit for the protection of the displaced, saying women and children accounted for 80 percent of the most vulnerable.
