Category Archives: Yemen

American teenager killed in drone strike

An American teenager gets blown up in a US drone strike and the only explanation provided for why he was killed is that his father was alleged to be a terrorist. And given the small amount of reporting on yesterday’s killings it appears that having covered the Obama-kills-an-American story last month, Obama-kills-another-American is a story of no great interest. But this isn’t just a story about the abuse of executive power. It would now appear that individuals can be snuffed out just because the US government objects to what they are saying.

The New York Times reports: Airstrikes, believed to have been carried out by American drones, killed at least nine people in southern Yemen, including a senior official of the regional branch of Al Qaeda and an American, the 17-year-old son of a Qaeda official killed by the United States last month, according to the government and local reports on Saturday.

Fighting also escalated in the capital, Sana, where at least 12 antigovernment protesters were killed by security forces near the Foreign Ministry and at least four civilians were killed in a battle near the airport, opposition officials said.

The fighting in Sana was the deadliest since President Ali Abdullah Saleh returned to the country last month, and coincided with rising political tensions as all sides await a statement by the United Nations Security Council expected in weeks.

Yemen has been in turmoil for months, as protesters demanding the ouster of Mr. Saleh, who has ruled for 33 years, have filled the streets, and rival political factions have fought for power. Despite tremendous domestic opposition, international pressure and an assassination attempt that severely wounded him in June, Mr. Saleh has refused to step down.

Islamic militant groups, including Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the Yemeni branch of the terrorist organization, have exploited the chaos, taking over large regions in Shabwa and Abyan Provinces in the south.

The American drone strike last month that killed the Qaeda official, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been particularly controversial in the United States. Despite being an American citizen, Mr. Awlaki, a Qaeda propagandist, was killed without a trial. The United States has argued that he had taken on an operational role in the organization, plotting attacks against Americans, which made him a legitimate target.

The killing of his son in a drone attack on Friday night, if confirmed, would be the third time an American was killed by such a United States attack in Yemen, although it was not clear if the son was an intended target. A second American, Samir Khan, the editor of Al Qaeda’s online magazine, was killed in the attack on Mr. Awlaki, which was launched from a new secret C.I.A. base on the Arabian Peninsula.

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White House clarifies when it’s OK for Obama to kill Americans

A week after the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki — “a great day for America,” as one senior Obama administration official put it — and then a flurry of headlines about Obama killing US citizens, the White House clearly sees the need to change the narrative. Although it had already been stated that the president was exerting powers in accordance with legal advice, the administration wants to assure everyone that this was sound advice — the kind that would require the thoroughness of a 50-page memo drafted by a team of lawyers.

In other words, to those who are concerned about the suspension of the rule of law, the consolation is rule by procedure. It’s not due process, but it involved meetings, legal opinions, documentation, signatures — all the essential ingredients to ensure that those involved can later point to the ways in which they diligently followed procedures and ultimately no one can be held responsible. The buck stops nowhere.

Even so, since this is a presidency where secrecy often appears to be cherished more than anything else, we don’t get to actually read the Justice Department’s memorandum describing the circumstances in which Obama has the discretion to suspend the constitution. Instead, the contents of the memo get selectively revealed to a reporter.

It’s not exactly a leak — more like a drip.

The New York Times reports: The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama — to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.

The Obama administration has refused to acknowledge or discuss its role in the drone strike that killed Mr. Awlaki last month and that technically remains a covert operation. The government has also resisted growing calls that it provide a detailed public explanation of why officials deemed it lawful to kill an American citizen, setting a precedent that scholars, rights activists and others say has raised concerns about the rule of law and civil liberties.

But the document that laid out the administration’s justification — a roughly 50-page memorandum by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, completed around June 2010 — was described on the condition of anonymity by people who have read it.

The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him.

The memorandum, which was written more than a year before Mr. Awlaki was killed, does not independently analyze the quality of the evidence against him.

The administration did not respond to requests for comment on this article.

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Liberian, Yemeni women win Nobel Peace Prize

Reuters reports: Three women who have campaigned for rights and an end to violence in Liberia and Yemen, including Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

Another Liberian, Leymah Gbowee, who mobilized fellow women against the country’s civil war including by organizing a “sex strike,” and Tawakkul Karman, who has worked in Yemen, will share the prize worth $1.5 million with Johnson-Sirleaf, who faces re-election for a second term as president on Tuesday.

“We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society,” Committee chairman Thorbjoern Jagland told reporters.

“The Nobel Peace Prize for 2011 is to be divided in three equal parts between Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work.”

Johnson-Sirleaf, 72, is Africa’s first freely elected female president. Gbowee mobilized and organized women across ethnic and religious dividing lines to bring an end to the war in Liberia, and to ensure women’s participation in elections.

The Committee added: “In the most trying circumstances, both before and during the Arab Spring, Tawakkul Karman has played a leading part in the struggle for women’s rights and for democracy and peace in Yemen.”

In April, Tawakkul Karman wrote: The revolution in Yemen began immediately after the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia on 14 January. As I always do when arranging a demonstration I posted a message on Facebook, calling on people to celebrate the Tunisian uprising on 16 January.

The following day a group of students from Sana’a University asked me to attend a vigil in front of the Tunisian embassy. The crowd was shouting: “Heroes! We are with you in the line of fire against the evil rulers!” We were treated roughly by the security forces, and we chanted: “If, one day, a people desires to live, then destiny will answer their call,” and “The night must come to an end” – the mantra of the revolutionaries in Tunisia.

The demonstration was astonishing; thousands turned up, and Sana’a witnessed its first peaceful demonstration for the overthrow of the regime. “Go before you are driven out!” we cried.

That night student and youth leaders visited me, along with the human rights activist Ahmed Saif Hashid and the writer Abdul Bari Tahir. We agreed that we could not let this historic moment pass us by, and that we too could spark a peaceful revolution to demand an end to a despotic regime. We decided there was to be no backing down, despite the repression we knew would come. The rallies grew daily, even though the government deployed thugs against us.

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Arab world indifferent about death of unknown American cleric

But the headline says: “As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs.”

The New York Times, forever the trumpet of institutional power, apparently sees no need to draw a distinction between the White House and the West — even though most people in the West, like those in the Middle East, wouldn’t, until a few days ago, have been able name Anwar al-Awlaki, identify his photo or say anything about him.

The report itself is more clear-eyed:

Until about two years ago, few in Yemen or the Arab world had heard of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for Islamic radicalism whose death President Obama celebrated as a major blow against Al Qaeda.

“A dime-a-dozen cleric” was one response, by Gregory Johnsen, a Princeton professor who studies Yemen. Another: “I don’t think your average Middle Easterner knows who Anwar al-Awlaki is,” said Emad Shahin, a scholar of political Islam at Notre Dame University.

While Western officials and commentators saw the end of Mr. Awlaki as another serious loss for Al Qaeda, a very different reception in the Middle East was the latest reminder of the disconnect between American aims and Arab perceptions. In a region transfixed by the drama of its revolts, Mr. Awlaki’s voice has had almost no resonance.

“I don’t think this will really get people’s interest, I can’t imagine why it would,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center. “It seems totally irrelevant to how Arabs view the world right now. They don’t care about Awlaki.”

It is a remarkable feature in the Arab world these days how little Al Qaeda actually comes up in conversations. Even before the eruption of revolts and revolutions, a group that bore some responsibility for two wars and deepening American involvement from North Africa to Iraq was losing its significance. When Osama bin Laden died, his killing seemed more an epitaph for another era. As is often remarked, the events of Sept. 11 seem a historical note to much of an Arab population where three in five are younger than 30.

In that atmosphere, many saw Mr. Awlaki’s death as an essentially American story: here was a man that American attention helped create, and its Hellfire missiles killed, in a campaign born out of American fears of homegrown militancy. What distinguished Mr. Awlaki was not his ideas or influence but his American upbringing, passport and perfectly idiomatic English.

“When the Obama administration and the U.S. media started focusing on him, that is when Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula pushed him to the fore,” Mr. Johnsen said, referring to the group’s Yemeni branch. “They were taking advantage of the free publicity, if you will. And any stature he has now in the Arab world is because of that.”

Another analyst, Michael Wahid Hanna, a fellow at the Century Foundation, echoed the idea that Mr. Awlaki’s fluency in English generated more interest about him. “The U.S. focus on Awlaki was a function of his language abilities and their understanding of his role as a recruiter and propagandist. If recent events can be said to further marginalize violent rejectionists such as Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, then there is very little room for a virtual unknown such as Awlaki to command any serious attention.”

Mr. Hanna said that was even more the case with the Arab world having plunged into what he described as “this transformational juncture.”

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Yemenis say they have bigger problems than al Qaeda

The New York Times reports:

On the streets of Sana, the nation’s conflict-stricken capital, the news of the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-American propagandist for Al Qaeda who inspired jihadists around the world, was largely overshadowed by the continuing domestic turmoil here.

Many Yemenis had not even heard that Mr. Awlaki had been killed, even by Friday night. And most had only a faint sense of why the United States considered him a highly significant target. If anything, Yemenis thought his death would only increase their woes.

“I don’t know why he was important, except that he was a terrorist,” said Belal Masood, who works in a restaurant in Sana’s old city. “But maybe this will create a problem for us Yemenis, because when you strike Al Qaeda they normally strike back larger. Really, we wish they could have killed him in another country.”

Another man, Walid Seneb, who was sitting on a street curb with three friends on Friday night, said, “We don’t like these terrorists who make problems for us. Mr. Seneb was the only one of the four men who had heard of the cleric’s death.

“But right now there are worse problems,” he said. “Our national crisis is the biggest problem. There is no water, electricity, everything from the government stopped.”

After eight months of antigovernment protests that began during the Arab spring, Yemen’s government has been torn apart. The armed forces are divided between those loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh and those who follow a rebel military commander. Conflict between the two sides turned into urban warfare in Sana two weeks ago, with over 100 people being killed. With fears that a large-scale civil war may break out and a debilitating economic crisis , Yemenis are sufficiently absorbed with their own problems that they do not have much time or attention to devote to the death of a man who was most known for reaching out to the English-speaking world of Muslim extremists.

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How did Obama decide to execute Samir Khan?

The fact that President Obama decided to target the US citizen Anwar Awlaki for extra-judicial execution, is a subject of considerable controversy. What is arguably even more questionable is the killing of Awlaki’s American companion at the time of the Hellfire missile strike in Yemen yesterday: Samir Khan.

Khan, who grew up in New York and North Carolina, had been the subject of a criminal investigation, yet the FBI could not find sufficient evidence to indict him. Neither had he been included on Obama’s list of people who he claims the right to execute, but he got killed anyway.

CNN says intelligence professionals “see Khan’s death as a ‘two-fer,’ with al-Awlaki being the primary target.”

If there is any kind of official explanation about what happened — not that we’re likely to hear one from a president who clearly values secrecy more than accountability — how might it go?

Khan’s presence alongside Awlaki was a happy coincidence? His shredded body was a welcome piece of collateral damage?

Or, Obama’s authorization was sought and Khan’s was a kind of two-for-the-price-of-one impulse killing.

What can reasonably be inferred is that careful consideration had already been given to whether Khan could be legitimately targeted and the conclusion was that he could not — hence, even though he had long been known to be in Yemen and been responsible for producing al Qaeda’s English-language Inspire magazine, he had not been added to Obama’s target list.

In response to the killing of Awlaki, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said yesterday:

The targeted killing program violates both U.S. and international law. As we’ve seen today, this is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process, and on the basis of standards and evidence that are kept secret not just from the public but from the courts. The government’s authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific, and imminent. It is a mistake to invest the President — any President — with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country.

The execution of Samir Khan would seem to indicate that Obama took a step even further: he claims the right to kill any American — even those whom he does not deem to present a threat to the country!

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Does Obama believe he has the right to kill anyone, anywhere, anytime?

“This is a great day for America,” says a senior Obama administration official, but not such a great day for the people of Yemen.

Fayza Sulieman, a protest leader fighting for democracy in Yemen told The Guardian:

We always question the timing of these announcements from our government, [Yemen’s recently returned President] Saleh is on the backfoot and on the verge of stepping down and suddenly Anwar Awlaki is killed. We all know that Saleh’s ‘fight’ against Al-Qaida is the only thread of support keeping him in office. We pray that this news does not distract the world from our struggle against this tyrannical regime.

Mary Ellen O’Connell, vice chair of the prestigious American Society of International Law, as well as a professor at the University of Notre Dame, tells Danger Room why President Obama had no legal authority to order the assassination of Awlaki.

“The United States is not involved in any armed conflict in Yemen,” O’Connell tells Danger Room, “so to use military force to carry out these killings violates international law.”

O’Connell’s argument turns on the question of whether the U.S. is legally at war in Yemen. And for the administration, that’s a dicey proposition. The Obama administration relies on the vague Authorization to Use Military Force, passed in the days after 9/11, to justify its Shadow Wars against terrorists. Under its broad definition, the Authorization’s writ makes Planet Earth a battlefield, legally speaking.

But the Authorization authorizes war against “nations, organizations, or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It’s a stretch to apply that to al-Qaida’s Yemen affiliate, which didn’t exist on 9/11. But when House Republicans tried to re-up the Authorization to explicitly bless the new contours of the war against al-Qaida, the Obama administration balked, fearing the GOP was actually tying its hands on the separate question of terrorist detentions.

“It is only during the intense fighting of an armed conflict that international law permits the taking of human life on a basis other than the immediate need to save life,” O’Connell continues. “In armed conflict, a privileged belligerent may use lethal force on the basis of reasonable necessity. Outside armed conflict, the relevant standard is absolute necessity.”

So did al-Awlaki represent an “absolute” danger to the United States? President Obama, in acknowledging Awlaki’s death on Friday morning, didn’t present any evidence that he did.

As NPR reported, at a moment when few politicians are willing to question anything that is done in the name of national security, GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul had some tough words for Obama

“I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul told reporters. “Al-Awlaki was born here; he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it’s sad.

“I think what would people have said about Timothy McVeigh? We didn’t assassinate him, who we were pretty certain that he had done it. Went and put through the courts then executed him. To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this.”

And if Obama thinks his much trumpeted overseas successes are going to help him get re-elected, as MSNBC points out, the failing economy is really the only issue that preoccupies American voters.

No president since George H.W. Bush has had more foreign-policy successes happen under his watch than President Obama. The death of bin Laden. The dismantling of al Qaeda. The ouster of Khaddafy. And the end of combat operations in Iraq. Yet when you look at polls and Obama’s approval rating, he’s getting almost no credit from the American public, a la Bush 41.

When you ask the public about Obama and foreign policy, he gets good marks. But it’s not front of voters’ minds. In a bad economy, as Bush 41 learned, what happens overseas doesn’t matter.

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Arab League parliament urges Syria suspension

Al Jazeera reports:

An Arab parliamentary body has called for the suspension of the membership of Syria and Yemen in the Arab League in a bid to put pressure on the two countries to heed popular demands for reforms.

The call was put out on Tuesday following a committee meeting of the Arab Parliament, a body to which members of the Arab League send representatives.

The head of the committee, which met at the Arab League’s headquarters in Cairo, said that “mass slaughter” was taking place in Syria and Yemen and called on the league to deal with the countries in a similar way to how it dealt with Libya.

After a crackdown by the government of Muammar Gaddafi on pro-democracy protesters, the Arab League suspended Libya’s Arab League membership in February.

“We call on the Arab states to freeze the membership of Damascus in the Arab League and urge the Arab leaders to take more active stands in that regard if the Syrian leadership did not … stop violence and withdraw its security forces and army … and form a national unity government from all political powers,” said Tawfik Abdallah of the Arab Parliamentarians Political Affairs and National Security Committee.

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Street clashes resume in Yemeni capital

Al Jazeera reports:

At least 21 people have been killed and over 100 injured in fresh clashes on the streets of the Yemeni capital, Sanaa, a day after 26 anti-government protesters were shot dead and hundreds wounded by troops and gunmen loyal to President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

According to reports, Monday’s deaths occurred as snipers fired upon passers-by and peaceful protesters demonstrating at Change Square.

“Help me, oh my God look at his slaughter!” said the father of a boy who died from a gunshot wound to the head.

“We were just in the car on Hayel Street (near the fighting). I stepped out to get some food and left my two boys in the car and I heard the older one scream. The little one was shot straight through the head.”

The clashes came as protesters tried to push further into territory held by government forces after extending their camp overnight.

Marc Lynch writes:

The violent crisis which many of us have been warning would result from neglecting Yemen and allowing its political stalemate to grind on has now arrived. The Sana’a massacre should be a crystal clear signal that the Yemeni status quo is neither stable nor sustainable, and that the failure to find a political resolution ensures escalating bloodshed and humanitarian crisis. It is time to push for an immediate political transition — and one which does not include immunity for Saleh’s men.

It has been difficult to get anyone to pay attention to Yemen. For months, ever since President Ali Abdullah Saleh had been rushed to Saudi Arabia for treatment of wounds from an apparent assassination attempt. Distracted by hot wars in Libya and Syria, the struggling transition in Egypt, and the diplomatic train wreck between Israel and the Palestinians, the U.S. and most of the region put Yemen on the back burner. Even though thousands of incredibly determined and resilient Yemenis continued to protest regularly, and analysts warned with increasing desperation that missing the opportunity to bring about a transition would be a disastrous mistake, the urgency faded away. Indeed, Saleh’s regime counted on that fading external urgency as part of its strategy of delay and distraction, hoping to outlast, confuse, divide, and where possible crush the protest movement. Now, Yemenis are paying for that neglect in blood.

The U.S., the GCC, the U.N., and Yemen’s opposition need to push for Saleh to leave power now and for Yemen to immediately begin a meaningful political transition. Not in a few months, not in a few years, and not empty promises of future change which no Yemeni any longer believes. This does not mean calling for military intervention. After Libya and the debate over Syria, military action has regrettably become many peoples’ first rather than last instinct even when it is very clearly neither appropriate nor likely. It means throwing full political support to Yemen’s opposition, making clear that Yemeni officials will be held accountable before international tribunals for their role in violence against civilians, and pushing hard to end a stalemate which too many saw as an acceptable state of affairs.

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Yemen on the brink of hell

The New York Times reports:

On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was wearing thin. Maqtari had been one of the first and most fearless leaders of the movement. She is a remarkable figure: a 31-year-old university administrator and fiction writer, she is also a childless divorcee who refused, until recently, to wear the abaya, the all-covering gown that is practically mandatory for women in Yemen. Tiny and frail, she has a round, lovely face, with level brows and tranquil brown eyes.

On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the city’s General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by guards — when she heard cracking sounds. She looked up and saw that the officers on the building’s roof were not just throwing rocks, as they had in the past. They were firing straight down into the crowd below. Within minutes, at least four people were dead and about 60 were wounded. Maqtari began running back toward “Freedom Square,” the intersection where thousands of protesters had been camped out for months demanding the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s strongman president. Then the real assault began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction, with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons. “People were dying all around us, and there was nothing we could do,” Maqtari told me. Some were burned alive. At around 11 p.m., Maqtari fled to her sister’s house, about 200 yards uphill from the square. There, she and other protesters watched as flames engulfed the entire square, raging for several hours. Officers stormed through the local hospital and several field clinics where protesters were being treated, firing tear gas down the corridors, shooting up the ceilings and arresting doctors and nurses. Some thrust their gun butts into patients’ wounds. Others were laughing hysterically, as if they were on drugs, Maqtari and others told me, and shouting into the darkness, “Ali is your god!” The next morning, amid the charred remains of the tents, someone had scrawled a sardonic reversal of the protesters’ chants on a wall. “The regime wants the fall of the people,” it said.

The massacre in Taiz received little attention in the West, blending in with the larger chaos and violence enveloping the Arab world. In Syria, tanks were rolling through the streets of several cities, as months of protest evolved into a bloody national insurrection. In Libya, the civil war was festering into a grim status quo, with NATO airstrikes unable to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from his Tripoli stronghold. Even Egypt and Tunisia seemed endangered, with fresh violence breaking out and their economies in tatters.

Yet the events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda.

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Attack on Yemen prison frees dozens of militants

The New York Times reports:

Gunmen attacked the main prison in Yemen’s southern port city of Mukalla on Wednesday in a coordinated strike that freed at least 40 prisoners, according to security and ruling party officials.

The attack underscored the country’s worsening security situation, and came as State Department envoy, Jeffrey D. Feltman, began two days of meetings in the capital, Sana, with Yemen’s vice president and top ruling party officials. They were to discuss the political crisis here, which deepened earlier this month when President Ali Abdullah Saleh was forced to seek medical treatment in Saudi Arabia after an attack on his presidential compound.

Ahmed Sofan, a prominent ruling party official, said the jailbreak provided “another sign of what happens when a country is collapsing.”

He said many of the escaped prisoners were Islamic militants but that it was unclear whether they were members of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the local branch of the terrorist network. News agencies, citing anonymous Yemeni security sources, reported that many of the prisoners belonged to the group.

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Yemen’s unfinished revolution

Tawakkol Karman, a leader of Yemen’s democratic youth movement, writes:

After more than five months of continuous protests, I stand today in Change Square with thousands of young people united by a lofty dream. I have spent days and nights camped out in tents with fellow protesters; I have led demonstrations in the streets facing the threat of mortars, missiles and gunfire; I have struggled to build a movement for democratic change — all while caring for my three young children.

We have reached this historic moment because we chose to march in the streets demanding the resignation of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, an end to his corrupt and failed regime and the establishment of a modern democratic state. On June 4, our wish for Mr. Saleh’s departure was granted, but our demand for democracy remains unfulfilled.

Following months of peaceful protests that reached every village, neighborhood and street, Yemen is now facing a complete vacuum of authority; we are without a president or parliament. Mr. Saleh may be gone, but authority has not yet been transferred to a transitional presidential council endorsed by the people.

This is because the United States and Saudi Arabia, which have the power to ensure a peaceful transition to democracy in Yemen, have instead used their influence to ensure that members of the old regime remain in power and the status quo is maintained. American counterterrorism agencies and the Saudi government have a firm grip on Yemen at the moment. It is they, not the Yemeni people and their constitutional institutions, that control the country.

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Clans and tribes forge new Yemen unity

The New York Times reports:

After more than four months of insurrection, this tormented country may seem to be more divided than ever, with rival rallies still seizing the capital every week and fierce gun battles raging in the north and south.

But the protest sit-ins occupying Yemen’s major cities have brought Yemenis together in remarkable new ways, creating makeshift communities in which the old barriers of tribe, region, clan and gender are crumbling.

In the sprawling tent city outside Sana University, rival tribesmen have forsworn their vendettas to sit, eat and dance together. College students talk to Zaydi rebels from the north and discover they are not, in fact, the devils portrayed in government newspapers. Women who have spent their lives indoors give impassioned speeches to amazed crowds. Four daily newspapers are now published in “Change Square,” as it is called, and about 20 weeklies.

The very length of Yemen’s protests — far longer than the 18 days of Egypt’s Tahrir Square uprising — may be helping to forge new bonds and overcome this country’s deep fissures, even if the country’s political elite (and their henchmen) continue to shoot and kill one another in the near term.

“In a sense I’m happy the revolution is taking a long time, because these meetings and arguments are healthy,” said Atiaf al-Wazir, a blogger and activist. “We can’t say everything has changed, but the seeds of change are there.”

The sit-ins are taking place across Yemen, and in some areas elaborate deals have been made to allow tribesmen to join the protest without fear of being ambushed by their rivals. Many people have abandoned their jobs, adding to the economic collapse that now threatens the country.

In Sana, the protest area is virtually its own city, complete with restaurants, medical clinics, auditoriums and gardens. There are numerous art galleries and exhibits, and an endless series of seminars and lectures.

Unlike Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Sana protest area is not a central plaza. It is a dense network of streets running alongside the walls of Sana University — with pre-existing shops, homes and offices — and is therefore more sustainable as a community. Almost every tent has televisions and Internet, with wires and cords snaking over the canvas to the buildings nearby.

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