Yemen accord ready as Saleh fires parting shots

Officials said yesterday a Gulf accord to end Yemen’s crisis is set to be signed, as the country’s embattled president slammed it as a “coup” that will aid Al-Qaeda in what may be parting shots from him.

“We will sign the Gulf Cooperation Council plan tonight,” said Yassin Saeed Noman, head of the Common Forum grouping of parliamentary opposition parties.

Five people representing the opposition will sign the document in the presence of GCC chief Abdullatif Zayani, who was expected in Sanaa yesterday, said Noman, head of the Yemeni Socialist Party.

A spokesman for Ali Abdullah Saleh’s ruling General People’s Congress, meanwhile, said the president would sign today.

“The signing of the plan will be on Sunday (today) in Sanaa,” Tareq al-Shami said. “Saleh will sign the document in his capacity as president of the republic and the GPC.”

GPC secretary general Sultan al-Barakani also confirmed that the government side would sign today, and that the opposition had declined to sign in the presidential palace.

Common Forum spokesman Mohammed al-Qahtan told AFP the opposition would “throw the ball in the president’s camp” by signing first, in a ceremony that is to take place at the home of the opposition’s chief negotiator, former foreign minister Mohammed Bassandawa.

Under the terms of the proposal, Saleh would hand power to the vice president 30 days after the agreement is signed, and he and his aides would be granted immunity from prosecution by parliament.

A national unity government led by a prime minister from the opposition would be formed, and a presidential election would follow 60 days after Saleh’s departure.

Noman said a commission made up of members of the regime, the opposition, the US, EU and UN would be formed to “supervise the application of the agreement over 30 days.”

Meanwhile, Saleh termed the agreement a “coup” and warned it could aid Al-Qaeda.

“The initiative is in fact purely a coup operation but we will deal positively with it for the sake of the motherland,” Saleh said of the plan offered by the GCC.

He warned the US and the EU that Al-Qaeda would benefit from the departure of his regime.

“The departure of the regime ...means the departure of Yemeni unity and the republic,” he said.

“If the regime goes, Al-Qaeda will flourish in (the provinces of) Hadramout and Shabwa and Abyan, and the situation will be worse,” he said, addressing “our friends in the US and the EU.”

Saleh has been a key US ally in the fight against Al-Qaeda’s Yemen-based franchise, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which has claimed attacks against US and other Western interests.

Mass protests in Yemen, which broke out last January, were part of “an agenda of the major powers to export their problems and impose their tutelage on the poor because of their own economic and political problems,” Saleh said.