Opponents of President Ali Abdullah Saleh — a group that started with university students and has expanded to include defecting military commanders, politicians, diplomats and even Saleh’s own tribe — had immediately rejected his offer a week ago to leave by the end of this year. Its formal withdrawal by the president indicates an attempt by both sides to negotiate a transfer of power to end the crisis has failed.
Saleh himself warned that “Yemen is a ticking bomb” in a TV interview on Saturday night and said that without him in power, the country would descend into civil war.
The protesters behind weeks of demonstrations are demanding Saleh step down immediately and want a ban on future government positions for him and his family. For 32 years he has ruled over Yemen, an impoverished and deeply divided country stitched together by fragile tribal alliances.
Yemen is the poorest nation in the Arab world, is rapidly running out of water resources and oil and is buffeted by conflicts that include an on-and-off rebellion in the north and a secessionist movement in the south.
The protesters complain of corruption and the lack of jobs and political freedom. Their ranks swelled as many of the president’s allies abandoned him over an escalating crackdown that has killed 92 protesters, according to the Shiqayiq Forum for Human Rights.
More than 40 of them were killed in a single day, as snipers firing from rooftops methodically picked off people in the main protest square in the capital, Sanaa, on March 18.
Increasingly isolated, Saleh convened a meeting Sunday of hundreds of members of his Congress Party’s leadership committee.
A party statement released afterward said the meeting affirmed that “President Ali Abdullah Saleh should remain in his position until he finishes his constitutional term” in 2013.
The delegates also reasserted that dialogue is the only way to end the crisis and ensure a peaceful transition of power.
Just days earlier, Saleh had pledged in a meeting with senior officials, military commanders and tribal leaders that he would step down by the end of the year. But that offer was quickly rejected by opposition leaders who dismissed it as a political maneuver.
