Armies of Liberation

Targeted assassination attempts continue:

Yemen Post: Senior Opposition Leader still in Bad Condition; Youth Blaming Government for Incident

Defected military loyal to the opposition warned on Monday that its leaders will be targets of government assassination plots.

One day after the warning, Mohammed al-Mutawakil, the secretary general of the opposition popular front (ed-PFU) party was injured in a traffic accident the opposition call as planned by the government in an effort to kill him.

He was hit by a motorcycle as he was walking down the street. Al-Mutawakil received serious injuries to the head and is now hospitalized.

Hundreds of youth and opposition leaders visited al-Mutawakil and were not happy.

“We are sure this is not an accident. His health is really bad. This is planned and he was one of the respected leaders in the eyes of the pro revolution youth,” said Abdullah Najjar, a youth activist who visited al-Mutawakil

Majority of Yemen opposition leaders have left the country knowing that Yemen is not safe for them anymore. The interior ministry denied that the incident was planned and is investigating with the motorcycle driver.

Saleh has a trail of blood behind him dating back decades. The car accident is among the most repetitive tactics. There are no moral restraints on the regime; its no surprise that the opposition is making this accusation. Its possibly true. The 1999 death of the great Yemeni activist and editor, Abdulazziz al Saqqaf is one event that generates national suspicion. Leaving a lunch with Abdubakr al Qirby (a medical doctor), Professor al Saqqaf was run over and killed by a car in a sequence that made no sense as an accident. Al Qirby later became and remains Yemen’s Foreign Minister. New information came to light in the last months about Saleh’s complicity in the death of at least one former president, prior to attaining the presidency himself. The treachery of Saleh has no bounds.

Update: The motorcycle was driven by children according to buzz. The PFU rejects the Interior Ministry’s announcements issued without conducting an investigation.

Update 2: al Mutawakil transferred to Saudi Arabia for treatement.

Yemeni Political Leader exposed to drive by assassination attempt
by Abdullah A. Qaid, for Armies of Liberation

Sana’a, 14 June- Mr. Hassan Mohammed Zeid, the Secretary-General of Al-Haq, a Yemeni opposition party, said today he escaped an assassination attempt by 4 persons. The drive-by shooing occurred in the al-Jooraf quarter of Sana’a.

Zeid was targeted by a hail of bullets from two cars with official license plates. One was numbered 4760-Army and the other 212-Government, Zeid stated in a press release.

Earlier political violence against Mr. Zeid included an assault on his land in al-Jooraf. Police were forbidden from intervening in an attempt to prevent the abuse, the release added.

Zeid accused the Yemeni authorities of being responsible for the assassination attempt.

The al-Haq Party denounced the assassination attempt on its Secretary-General, confirmed the authorities’ responsibility for protecting Zeid’s life and demanded that perpetrators to be brought to the justice.

News Yemen

The right party condemns the targeting of the Great Mosque in Sana’a, and holds the Minister of Awqaf the responsibility of creating sectarian conflicts (Read on …)

I think President Ali Saleh is insane,a delusional dissembling megalomaniac who believes his own lies. Perhaps he’s a “borderline personality.” That would fit, considering his disconnect with reality, the perpetual claims of victimization and his complete failure to take responsibility for the outcome of any of his actions.

al Sahwa – The supreme council of the Joint Meeting Parties condemned what it called “fierce media attacks” and threats against its spokesman Naif al-Qanis.

JMP demanded that authorities to bring repeated media intimidations against its spokesman and Al-Haq party to an end, bringing the authorities responsible for al-Qanis’s safety.

JMP’s supreme council discussed arrests carried out against political activists including Moamad al-Obdil who was arrested Sunday in Aden and Abdul-Rahman al-Sharafi who was arrests on Tuesday on Sana’a, expressing its solidarity with the activists.

Amazing.

al Sahwa, Hadhramout – The Yemeni authorities arrested on Wednesday a top leader of Al-Haq party and the Joint Meeting Parties in Hadhramout province Yamin BaYamim, and attacked a member of parliament and the head of the Islah party Mohsin Basora.

For its part ,JMP condemned the acts, demanding the authorities to swiftly release Ba-Yamin.

Ba-Yamin and Basora were protesting in solidarity with journalists and eight independent newspapers that are facing a raid by the authorities due to their covering of the South incidents. They are also accused by the government of expressing views favorable to southern secessionists in their coverage of recent protests.

Yemen Post: President Saleh’s call for local ruling system has met the southern mobility leaders’ rejection and criticism. Moreover they doubted its credibility and considered it as sweet promises for external consumption.”We don’t believe in Saleh’s promise for local ruling system as it has no credibility,” said a field leader in what has become known as” southern mobility”, Nasser Al-Fadhli.

The security guard of the clone aspect of the party joined the pretend opposition alliance.

SANA’A, NewsYemen

The Popular Forces Union Party on Wednesday denied official media reports that it declared joining the pro-ruling party National Democratic Alliance (NDA).

The PFUP, which is one of five opposition parties that form the Joint Meeting Party, said that the party does not care about joining NDA and that those who declared their joining have been “just guards who do not represent the party at all”. The secretary-general of the PFUP, AbdulSalam Razaz, accused the ruling party, the General People’s Congress, of supporting efforts to break up the PFUP.

What was declared yesterday was a part of a series of GPC’s attempts to split the party, said Razaz.

The GPC’s news website almotamar.net claimed on Monday that the Popular Forces Union Party joined the National Democratic Alliance.

Very funny. This site is blocked in Yemen. Wimps.

YO Yemen is one of 25 countries currently blocking various websites for political or social reasons, says a new study by OpenNet Initiative. Internet filtering in the Republic of Yemen is relatively broad in scope, with pornography a principal target, according to the study. Despite the wide range of content censored, however, the depth of filtering in Yemen is inconsistent; many users of Yemen’s primary Internet service provider are not filtered when the user-licensing quota in the filtering software agreement is exceeded.

The OpenNet Initiative is a collaborative partnership of four leading academic institutions: the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies; the University of Toronto; the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge; and the Oxford Internet Institute, Oxford University. The study examined Internet censorship in a total of 40 countries. In Yemen, no one denies that pornography websites are blocked. The Minster of Telecommunication Kamal al-Jabri said that sex websites are filtered because of the religious nature of our society.

“This is normally done according to our traditions and religion,” said the al-Jabri. “I cannot say that we blocked all the porn websites 100 percent but I can say that we do it regularly,” he said. “Almost 70 percent of the websites blocked were porn, according the demands from the people and the religious scholars of mosque,” said Hassan Amer, who is responsible for public relations in the Ministry of Telecommunication. “We have banned these websites,” he said. “Commercially speaking, if we open the Internet, we will gain more money because more people will use the Internet, but because this censoring is the demand of the society, we have to do it,” he said.

“But, there are some who can get through and I can not deny this because each day, 30,000 new porn websites are made and we can follow them as soon as we go to them.” Of course, the fact that the government feels a need to ban these websites suggest that it does not trust the Yemeni people to stay away from them on their own. If these sites were not banned, perhaps Yemenis would not be able to resist them, one can logically conclude from their stance. Unethical websites are the only ones to be closed, said Amer Haza’a, the general manager of YemenNet, the public company responsible for providing Internet services.

“These are sensitive topics that hurt anyone’s religion, country, and society. We are closing the websites to protect our kids,” he said. He said that the medical websites are not blocked, as the ministry checks the websites to make sure of that. But there was a split in opinion when it came to political websites. The owners of the websites; alshora.net, the mouthpiece of the Public and Democratic Union Party, Nass Press, and eshtraki.net, the mouthpiece of the Yemeni Socialist Party say that all of those sites are blocked. The Yemen Observer checked their claims, and found that both alshora.net and eshtraki.net were blocked. Nass Press is currently not blocked.

But the Nass Press website was stopped temporarily for about 15 days during the run-up to the presidential election last fall. “It was stopped because our website covered the accident of the death of many people in Ibb during the rally of the president Ali Abdullah Saleh,” said Abdul-Basit al-Qaedi, the manger editor of the Nass Press website. Al-Shoura.net has been stopped since the election, said Mansour al-Jaradi, a member in the editing staff. “This website launched in 1991 and it is still not running until now; this is on orders from high authorities.” Eshtraki.net was more recently blocked.

“It was blocked from last Wednesday because it covered the events in Sa’ada,” said Mohammed al-Maqaleh, the deputy of the head of the media bloc of the Yemeni Socialist Party. “I personally accuse the President Ali Abdullah Saleh for ordering others to block their website,” he said. He said that the Minster of Telecommunication has no authority to do this, and so orders to block his site must be coming from higher political authorities. “The people in the Ministry of Telecommunications are liars, because they are responsible for blocking sites,” said Dr.Yassin Sa’eed No’aman, the secretary general of the YSP. “The authority is responsible for this. (Read on …)

Apparently the plan is to leave the GPC and half co-opted Islah and maybe let the Salafis form a new party while dissolving the PFU (after al-Haq, the other Zaidi party, was recently disbanded). The article also threatens the YSP. President Saleh’s GPC operates in a largely technically criminal manner and permits opposition only as long as it is not threatening to the underlying configuration of power:

Almotamar.net – Legal sources and offices close to Political Parties and Organisations Affairs Committee (PPOAC) mentioned Saturday that there is presently serious consideration of dissolving the Union of People’s Forces Party owing to discovering of examples of forgery in lists of names the party had presented to the PPOAC as founders of the party.
(Read on …)