A divided Yemen votes

Southern separatists seize Aden polling booths as one-candidate election begins

Yemenis voted in large numbers as Ali Abdullah’s 33-year hardline rule comes to an end.

ADEN/SANAA: Yemenis began voting to replace President Ali Abdullah Saleh in an election many hope will give Yemen a chance to rebuild the country shattered by a year-long struggle that once pushed Yemen to the brink of civil war.

Although Vice President Abd-rabbu Mansour Hadi stands uncontested as a consensus candidate, the election is billed as an attempt to help Yemen turn a new page on a president who ruled the country with an iron fist for 33 years.

The vote would make Saleh, now in the United States for further treatment of burns suffered in a June assassination attempt, the fourth Arab autocrat to leave office in a year after revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

Large queues formed early in the morning outside polling stations in the capital Sanaa amid tight security, after an explosion ripped through a voting centre in the southern port city of Aden on the eve of the vote.

“We are now declaring the end of the Ali Abdullah Saleh era and will build a new Yemen,” Yemeni Nobel Peace winner Tawakul Karman said as she waited to cast her ballot outside a university faculty.

Voters dipped their thumbs in ink and stamped their print on a ballot paper bearing a picture of Hadi.

A high turnout is crucial to give Hadi the legitimacy he needs to institute changes outlined in a power transfer deal brokered by Yemen’s Gulf neighbours, including drafting a new constitution and restructuring the armed forces, in which Saleh’s relatives hold key positions.

The vote is backed by the United States and Yemen’s rich neighbours led by Saudi Arabia, who sponsored the peace deal signed in November allowing Saleh to hand over power to Hadi.

The election leaves unresolved a military standoff between Saleh’s relatives, a mutinous general and gunmen loyal to tribal notables.

There is an armed revolt in the north of the country and a secessionist movement in the south where Islamists accused of links to al-qaeda have also made advances.

It was not clear who was behind Monday’s violence. But separatists are demanding a divorce from the north with which they fought a civil war in 1994 after formal political union in 1990.

Southerners, who accuse the north of usurping their resources and discriminating against them, have said they would boycott the election because it confers legitimacy on a political process to which they were not party.

The separatists who had vowed to mark the vote as a day of “civil disobedience” have seized half of the polling booths in Yemen’s main southern city Aden, a government official said.

“Half of the polling booths in Aden have been shut down after they were seized by gunmen from the Southern Movement,” said a local government official.

He said the gunmen had closed 10 out of the city’s 20 voting stations.

Just a few hours earlier, officials and medics said four people including a child were killed in clashes in south Yemen between security forces and separatists.

Witnesses confirmed that the voting stations in Aden were stormed and ballot boxes confiscated, and that the security forces deployed to guard the booths, located mainly in the neighbourhoods of Mansura, Sheikh Othman, and Mualla, have withdrawn.

Authorities had deployed 103,000 soldiers to guard polling stations, said Mohammed Yahya, chairman of the Electoral Commission.

But Khaled Haidan, a leading activist from the pro-election youth revolt movement, said “security forces have apparently handed the booths over to Southern Movement militants.”

Activists from the Southern Movement, who say the election fails to meet their aspirations for autonomy or southern independence, are boycotting the referendum-like elections in which Hadi is the sole consensus candidate.

That prospect threatens to strip any legitimacy from the power transfer plan crafted by the Gulf Cooperation Council, with US backing, which enshrines Hadi for a two years in order to draft a new constitution and hold multi-party elections.

The vote has been denounced in advance by youth activists and regard the transfer plan as a pact among an elite they regard as partners to the crimes of Saleh’s tenure. — Agencies