The revolution that has started in the north African nation of Tunisia against entrenched dictators has now spread to Egypt and Yemen. Ethiopia’s genocidal junta also faces an imminent uprising, and reportedly many of the ruling party officials have already taken most of their looted money out of the country. The following is a video report by AP about mass protest in Yemen today.
Egypt, Yemen Protests Unnerve U.S. Officials
(ABC) — The spark was lit in Tunisia, where protests led to the ouster of strongman president Ben Ali. But now, just across the continent, Egypt is on fire, and for Americans that could pose a huge problem.
The tens of thousands of protesters are trying to bring down the man who has held power in Egypt for 30 years, President Hosni Mubarak. They want better living conditions.
But for the U.S., alarm bells are sounding. Egypt is one of the strongest U.S. allies in the Arab world, supporting a Mideast peace process and fighting terrorism.
“If the Egyptian government falls, then all bets are off throughout the region,” said David Bender, an analyst with the Eurasia Group.
“Whatever government comes next is likely to be more suspicious, if not outright hostile, but certainly more suspicious of the U.S. than the current regime,” Bender said.
Today, President Obama reiterated his support for Egypt, but urged peaceful reform.
“Egypt’s been an ally of ours on a lot of critical issues,” Obama said at a YouTube town hall. “President Mubarak has been very helpful on a range of tough issues in the Middle East. But I’ve always said to him that making sure that they are moving forward on reform — political reform, economic reform — is absolutely critical to the long-term well being of Egypt.
“My main hope right now is that violence is not the answer in solving these problems in Egypt,” Obama said. “So the government has to be careful about not resorting to violence, and the people on the streets have to be careful about not resorting to violence.”
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley also gently urged government reform.
“We want to see political, economic and social reform that opens up the opportunity for Egyptian people, just as the people of other countries, to more significantly influence who will lead their country in the future and the direction of that country and the opportunities generated in that country,” Crowley said Thursday.
The United States is not only worried about Egypt as the chorus of discontent spreads. Now, it’s crossed the water and the deserts to Yemen, where today thousands of protesters were calling for their president to step down.
“Yemen presents one of the most difficult policy problems for the U.S. right now,” Bender said. “On one hand, the regime is a strong ally of U.S. in the fight against terrorism. … For the U.S., ensuring Yemeni stability is one of the most important policy goals going forward.”
Yemen is a growing training ground for al Qaeda and is the home of Anwar al-Alawki, the man considered every bit as dangerous — if not more — than Osama bin Laden. He helped the failed Christmas Day bomber, inspired the Times Square bomber, and has called for more attacks on Americans. Bombs discovered on board cargo planes last October also came from Yemen.
Yemeni troops are going after al Qaeda, but that is at risk if the government is overthrown in the poverty stricken nation.
“The fear is that the Yemeni government collapses and suddenly Yemen becomes an absolute mess,” Bender said.
“It’s a place with little political order once the central government were to fall,” Bender said. “You have AQAP [al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula]. You have a complex tribal structure, rebels in the north, secessionsists in the south.
“I think the fear is that this would simply fall apart and, of course, you have Somalia right across the water,” Bender added. “And the idea of having two chaotic states in the same place makes policy makers rightly very nervous.”
Yemen’s Opposition Goes to Code Pink
By J. DAVID GOODMAN and NADA BAKRI | The New York Times
The protesters who filled the streets of Sana, the Yemeni capital, on Thursday demanding the resignation of the country’s authoritarian leader claimed inspiration from similar large antigovernment protests that have rattled Egypt and toppled the government in Tunisia this month.
But among the details distinguishing these marchers — including a higher degree of organization and, at least for now, no major clashes — was the preponderance of pink. Headbands, sashes, banners of cloth or paper, even the ink of the blaring slogans were a delicate pastel pink.
The color — commonly associated in the United States with breast cancer awareness and princess outfits — was both a unifying symbol and an indication of the level of planning underlying the protests.
Weeks ago, as the Tunisian protests were still escalating, a committee of the Joint Meeting Parties, an umbrella group of opposition parties that helped organize Thursday’s protests, settled on an escalating scale of protest colors.
Opposition lawmakers began by wearing purple hats and scarves to during sessions of Parliament. They moved, as planned, to pink for Thursday’s protest, choosing the color to represent love and to serve as a signal that the protests were peaceful, according to Shawki al-Qadi, a lawmaker and opposition figure.
The final stage of the color plan will be a strong, dark red, Mr. Qadi said, though he did not rule out other hues before that. He said the opposition had not yet decided what actions would correspond with the move to red, but insisted that the protests would remain peaceful.
Thursday’s demonstrations followed days of smaller protests by students and opposition groups calling for the removal of President Ali Abdallah Saleh, a strongman who has ruled this fractured country for more than 30 years and is a key ally of the United States in the fight against the Yemeni branch of Al Qaeda.
Other colors appeared in photos of marches as well, but apart from the red, black and white of the country’s flag and scattered pockets of green, none dominated the march so much as pink.
The opposition parties may have had other considerations in mind as well when choosing from the softer side of the palate.
“Pastels in general have been chosen to avoid associations that come from primary colors that have already been linked to existing political movements or factions,” said Stacey Philbrick Yadav, a political science professor at Hobart & William Smith Colleges whose field research has focused on opposition parties in Yemen.
In the region, she said, strong associations can come with donning primary colors such as, in certain contexts, green for Islam or yellow for Hezbollah or black for ritual mourning, and the organizers may have sought to avoid any such connections.
“People are running out of colors,” said Professor Yadav.