Yemeni Ambassador Defects to UK
DUBAI (Reuters) - Yemen’s former ambassador to Syria said on Friday he is seeking political asylum in Britain to protest against what he said was his own government’s discrimination of its southern citizens.
Tensions have existed between the conservative north and Marxist south since the two merged in 1990 to found the Yemeni state. Hostility between the two worsened after the south attempted to secede power during the 1994 civil war.
“Territories were occupied and their riches plundered … and people were driven away from their land,” Ahmed Abdullah al-Hasani told Al Arabiya television.
“We asked for political asylum in Britain on a number of grounds,” Hasani told the Arab satellite station by telephone. He did not elaborate.
Southerners still complain that north Yemen, home to the country’s capital Sanaa, is economically more privileged and that northerners are treated preferentially in the jobs market. The Sanaa government denies that.
In Sanaa, a Foreign Ministry source said Hasani’s term as ambassador to Syria ended two months ago and that the ambassador had told officials he was going to London for medical tests.
Hasani was relieved of his post as navy commander after 17 U.S. soldiers were killed in the 2000 suicide bombing against the U.S. destroyer Cole in the southern Yemeni port of Aden.
The British government refuses to comment on individual political asylum cases.
Abdo al-Naqeeb, a spokesman for the London-based Southern Democratic Assembly, which has criticised the Yemeni government’s policy in southern Yemen and is supporting Hasani, said the former ambassador had applied for asylum on Thursday.
“It’s too early to say if the application will be successful,” he told Reuters. “At the moment he has just filled in his application form and is talking to his solicitors.”
“But we’re hopeful,” he said, adding that another former Yemeni ambassador was recently granted asylum in Britain.
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