Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Yemen: Saleh seeks a more dignified exit that Mubarak and Ben Ali "

Francois Burgat is CNRS researcher and former director of the French Center for Archaeology and Social Sciences in Sanaa (CEFAS). He believes that President Saleh will hold its promise to leave and that the opposition will be able to take over. It is therefore reasonable to assume that it will keep its promise, especially since, for now, much of the street does not accept the plan and showed no scenes of jubilation.

The street will remain mobilized. And this summit should give a lot of Yemeni what they want: the president's departure. It is considered wrong in this country as particularly traditional or archaic. Thus, unlike almost all countries in the region, there are nearly twenty years since a parliamentary opposition that incorporates the real political forces.

Unlike the countries of North Africa, it included even the Islamists, a time associated with power before returning to the opposition. Since 2006, the coalition fighting against the president's party, and in recent months against his regime, is actually the result of an alliance between the socialists (the heirs of the Southern regime, before the unification of 1990) and Islamist party Al-Islah.

This means that the opposition front - which now endorse the succession plan proposed by the Gulf Cooperation Council - has a strong presence in the country and thus some credibility to play a responsible role in the transition phase . But tomorrow, these political forces will demonstrate their ability not only to share power among themselves but also to spare the party of the president a political position to accept reasonable enough to leave.

The challenges are immense, more economic and social ideological or religious. Add still two very specific areas of tension in Yemen. The first is the conflict in the North. Since 2004, they are wrongly called the "Shia rebellion" (as President Saleh is also Shia) criticized the concessions made in the United States after Sept.

11. The other fracture that involved the configuration of the revolt against the government in Sanaa is the legacy of the Civil War took place four years after the reunification in July 1994. The "little" South (then 3 million inhabitants) has never accepted the brutal military defeat inflicted by the North (then 12 million).

The authoritarian regime of President Saleh has knowingly maintained and manipulated these two crises to gain credibility rather than searching for a rational policy response. Since his success in the civil war, President Saleh also took all the bad habits of his Arab counterparts: clientelism and repression have become progressively more important as the representative institutions.

Today, the peaceful approach of the vast majority of protesters demonstrated great political maturity of "the street". Everything is not black in the landscape of transition that could begin within days. Interview by Paul Larrouturou

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