As hundreds of thousands of demonstrators for and against President Ali Abdullah Saleh poured into the streets here in the capital for competing rallies on Friday, the Yemeni leader said he was ready to yield power if he could hand it over to “safe hands.”
His comments, to a rally of about 100,000 supporters in the center of Sana, hewed to his earlier promises to relinquish power conditionally and not immediately, terms the protesters demanding his ouster have rejected.
But as he negotiates his exit behind the scenes, talks he did not mention publicly on Friday, the rally appeared calculated to show both that he was reconciled to that eventuality and that he could still muster a strong show of support, giving him more leverage to negotiate his departure on his terms.
The antigovernment protesters, centered in front of Sana University about two miles away, also drew about 100,000 people, as they did last Friday. At the rally last week, government-linked snipers killed more than 50 protesters, prompting a wave of defections of high-level government officials. The rallies on Friday were largely peaceful, a result, analysts said, of the government’s recognition that the violence had backfired.
The pro-Saleh demonstrators gathered in Sana’s main square and in front of the president’s mosque, a grand structure commissioned by Mr. Saleh. A large number of pro-Saleh tribesmen, widely believed to be paid by the governing party, had been trucked in from the countryside over the last two days.
Mr. Saleh told them he would remain “steadfast” in challenging what he depicted as violent attempts to oust him, and took a swipe at the protesters as people who “want to gain power at the expense of martyrs and children.” But he also renewed an offer to open dialogue with the two-month-old protest movement.
“I will hand over the power to safe hands, and not to malicious forces who conspire against the homeland,” he said.
Political analysts said Mr. Saleh had come to accept his ouster, and that stating it in front of his supporters was a public acknowledgment. “But he gave himself a bit of a margin,” said Abdul-Ghani al-Iryani, a prominent political analyst here. By saying he would transfer power only to “safe hands,” Mr. Iryani said, the president reassured supporters that he was “going to leave on his terms.”
The efforts to draw a large crowd, analysts said, were aimed at reminding people of his substantial base, but also as a broad hint that his departure could precipitate a civil war. Hafez al-Bukari, director of the Yemen Polling Center, said that by “safe hands” Mr. Saleh meant his selected people, maybe even his relatives.
The negotiations over the terms of his departure, which have involved numerous political factions and military officials, paused Friday for the Muslim Sabbath and are expected to resume Saturday. They are being closely watched by Saudi Arabia, Yemen’s powerful neighbor to the north, and the United States, which has supported Mr. Saleh as an ally in the battle against Al Qaeda.
One Yemeni official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the date of Mr. Saleh’s departure appeared to be the biggest obstacle.
Mr. Saleh, who has ruled Yemen for 32 years, offered last month to leave office when his term expired in 2013, and this week he agreed to leave by the end of the year. Neither proposal was acceptable to the protesters.
Mr. Saleh did not mention a date in his speech on Friday.
In the crowd before him, large posters with his picture were plastered on the windshields of minibuses, and men riding in the trunks of cars waved Yemeni flags.
“The opposition does not represent the Yemeni people,” said Haidar Suneid, who lives in Sana’s old city. “There are many people who want to follow the Constitution, and we are among them.”
Another demonstrator, Hashid al-Asadi, from Amran, just north of Sana, complained that the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera and other news media had focused only on the antigovernment supporters and had given short shrift to Mr. Saleh’s supporters.
He added, “There will be civil war if Saleh leaves early because they,” the protesters, “don’t want democracy.”
At the antigovernment protest, photos of some of those killed last week were hanging on tents and walls, and on the main door of the house of the governor of Mahweet, a nearby district, from which a sniper was shooting last Friday. But on the same stretch of street where gunfire broke out a week ago, men sat leisurely playing chess.
A group of men chanted, “The people want to prosecute Ali Saleh,” a variation of the chant heard in antigovernment protests in the Arab world, “The people want the regime to fall.”
Most people carried red placards that read “The Friday of Departure,” the name of the rally. An old man saluted the soldiers who belong to Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, the military leader who abandoned Mr. Saleh this week and directed his troops to protect the protesters.
“Our hope is always growing,” said Mohamed al-Sharafi, a son of a sheik from Hadramawt in the southeast. “Every day, we see an increasingly better future.”
He, too, carried a message about the prospect of war.
“The expectation that there is going to be a civil war comes from the government,” he said. “It is for sure that there will not be a civil war because the north and the south have never been united as they have now.”
A friend standing next to him, a northerner, kissed him on the cheek. “The Libyan scenario will not happen here,” Mr. Sharafi said.
Laura Kasinof reported from Sana, Yemen, and Scott Shane from Washington. Alan Cowell contributed reporting from Paris.
Source: The New York Times
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