Translated material
Vote without a Kalashnikov
Yemen's President Faces Serious Rival
This Wednesday has been declared a gun-free day in Yemen. In honor of today's direct presidential elections and the local elections being held simultaneously with them, citizens are prohibited from appearing with weapons on the streets, much less at polling stations. It would seem a strange requirement, but not in Yemen, where for a man a Kalashnikov assault rifle or at least a pistol is more of an ornament and an obligatory symbol of authority than a means of protection. The ban does not apply to the janbiya, the large, curved knife stuck in the belt of most Yemenis young and old.The results of the vote, in which women also participate, will appear tomorrow. The position of the main candidate, the current president, 64-year-old Ali Abdullah Saleh, is strong. He has been the leader of the state for 28 years, initially of North Yemen, which under him in 1990 united with South Yemen, previously oriented toward the USSR.
In the first general elections in 1999, Ali Abdullah Saleh had no opponents; now there are four more contenders for the presidency. Three Yemeni women tried to participate in the presidential campaign for the first time. Among them there was even a journalist who harshly criticized the president, but the ladies’ candidacies did not pass parliamentary approval.
Ali Abdullah Saleh's most dangerous rival is a southern technocrat, 72-year-old Faisal bin Shamlan, a former oil minister. He is the candidate of the General Meeting Bloc, made up of five opposition parties, both secular and religious. The largest among the latter is the Islamic party “Islah” (“Reform”), so behind the block looms the figure of its powerful leader Sheikh Abdullah bin Hussein al-Ahmar, the head of all the sheikhs of the tribes of Yemen (pictured) .
“We can say that socialists and other left-wing parties united with Islamists for the first time on the basis of the fight against corruption and demands for reforms in the country,” one of the leaders of the General Meeting Bloc, Muhammad Sabri, told Vremya Novostei. According to him, the opposition is also dissatisfied with the fact that the president “went too far in cooperation with the United States in the field of security and military interaction; this foreign policy needs to be changed.” By the way, two years ago, in an interview with VN, President Saleh himself admitted: “We don’t like the United States, but they love Russia! And people are offended by America because it has become undividedly dominant in the world.”
Ali Abdullah Saleh is popular. Just look at how at rallies and meetings with voters people are ready to trample each other just to get closer to the president. Yesterday he said that these elections are “an important step towards the development of democracy in the country.” For the president, who has ensured Yemen's stability for many years, these elections are far from the end of his career, but a wake-up call.
Emotional Yemenis experience these elections as a very important event. The walls of houses and car windows are full of portraits of candidates and symbols of their parties. A bay horse on a blue background is the sign of the General People's Congress, the ruling party of the current president. The white rising sun with diverging rays is a symbol of opposition. Portraits of the leader of the Lebanese group Hezbollah, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, who this summer fought with Israel, and therefore, in the understanding of the Arabs, with the United States, also flash.