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Yemen - Analysis

Washington fears ouster of Yemen's Saleh, says expert

The US is worried about the prospect Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh being toppled by the wave of revolt which has hit the Middle East and north Africa, a leading analyst has told RFI.

Reuters/Ammar Awad
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While Libya’s Moamer Kadhafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak were expendable from Washington’s point of view, Saleh has become a key ally in the war on terror.

Last week Saleh offered to step down by the end of the year, but this proposal was snubbed by the opposition which has staged sometimes bloody protests over the last few weeks.

Despite protests and defections, Saleh’s own party wants him to keep his position at least until his term runs out in 2013.

Washington has groomed Saleh as an ally in its war on terror, ending chilly relations resulting from Yemen’s refusal to support the first Gulf War in 1991.

“They have trained him and lots of his family members at high positions in fighting the war on terror,” says Marina de Regt, a Yemen researcher with the Amsterdam-based International Institute for Social History.

De Regt is not surprised that Saleh has been in power that long:

“He’s done it very cleverly,” she says. “He has managed to be friends with all parties, both at home and abroad.”

According to de Regt, Yemen has always received a lot of support from the United States, primarily because of its strategic location at the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.

There had been a period of “less warm” relations after Yemen supported Saddam Hussein and, as a temporary member of the UN security council, voted against resolutions authorising force against Iraq after its 1991 invasion of Kuwait.

But the country continued to receive development aid from Washington. The relationship grew warmer after 1995 and “especially after 2001, when Yemen was drafted as an ally in Washington’s war against terror”.

Now Washington worried that chaos might erupt if Saleh quits power, de Regt says but she does not share that concern.

“His stepping down will not necessarily mean that Al-Qaeda will get more space in the country, she believes. “Another government could also limit Al-Qaeda’s influence and maybe in better ways than Saleh has done.”

As in Bahrein, also hit by protests, Yemen’s population is split between Sunni-Muslims, at 52 per cent, Shia, at 46 per cent.

But, says de Regt, rumours that Shia-led Iran is exploiting the uprising to split the country along religious lines are unsubstantiated. She says the only Sunni-Shia split has been the Houthi uprising by Shia rebels, which started in north Yemen in 2003.

And the roots for this split were socio-economic rather than political or religious as “this region had been very much neglected by the current government”.

De Regt rejects rumours of Iranian support for the Houthis as “speculation”.

“What we really need to take seriously is that the present government is completely failing in governing the country and that there is an urgent need for democratisation and development,” she comments.

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