Breaking: Yemen's President Saleh fires entire cabinet in face of 150,000 protesters

[the_future_modernes]

END GAME IN YEMEN?

Yemen president fires entire cabinet as protests escalate: Calls for Ali Abdullah Saleh to stand down grow louder as tens of thousands turn out for mass funeral

Yemen's president has fired his entire cabinet amid escalating protests demanding his resignation. The announcement by President Ali Abdullah Saleh came after tens of thousands of mournersflooded the streets of the Yemeni capitalon Sunday in a mass funeral for 52 protesters killed on Friday in a sniper attack by government loyalists.

The president's office issued a statement saying he was firing his cabinet, although Yemen's official news agency reported he had asked them to remain in place until a new one could be appointed.
The 150,000 turnout for the funeral at Sana'a University was by far the largest gathering seen in Yemen since protests against Saleh began in earnest over a month ago.


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Yemen's tribes, one of the few remaining bastions of the embattled Saleh's rule, appear also to be turning against him. Sadeq al-Ahmar, the leader of Yemen's most powerful tribal confederation, issued a statement on Sunday asking Saleh to respond to the people's demands and leave peacefully.

Troops and security forces moved into the capital on Saturday to enforce a state of emergency declared by Saleh.

Tanks were also deployed across the city for the first time in five weeks of civil unrest in which over 70 people have died. In addition, hundreds of soldiers moved into the streets to set up checkpoints and enforce a ban on carrying firearms in public.MORE

Attacks against Power lines plunge Yemen into Darkness

SANA'A, March 21 (Bernama) -- Most of the Yemeni cities were plunged into darkness on Sunday after saboteurs attacked a number of the electric towers in Marib province, reports the Yemen news agency (Saba).

The attacked power lines were those supplying power from Marib gas-fired power station to Yemen's capital, plunging the Secretariat Capital into darkness and affecting the whole national power system, a source at the Ministry of Electricity and Energy said.
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Yemen president fires cabinet

Adding even more pressure on Saleh, the country's most powerful tribal confederation on Sunday called on him to step down.

Sheikh Sadiq al-Ahmar, the leader of Hashed, which includes Saleh's tribe, issued a statement asking the president to respond to the people's demands and leave peacefully. It was co-signed by several religious leaders.

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Twenty-four parliamentarians have left the ruling party.

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ANALYZING THE PHENOMENONS OF DEMOCRACY AND REVOLUTIONS

'Enough!' the Arabs say, but will it be enough?

What impresses me is how it's exploded when you had centuries when democracies didn't exist at all, and for quite a few years were restricted to a few places," Puddington said. Political scientists identify democracy's "first wave" as the revolutionary period of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the second as the post-World War II restoration of traditional democracies. The third wave, they now see, began in the mid-1970s, when people in Portugal and Spain threw off decades of military dictatorship. That upheaval helped inspire their former Latin American colonies to topple their own authoritarians-in-uniform in the 1980s, when the rhythmic banging of cookware in the Santiago night signaled that Chileans, for one, were fed up.

The wave rolled on to east Asia, to the Philippines' "People Power" revolution, South Korea's embrace of civilian democracy, Taiwan's ending of one-party rule. Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. Eastern Europe's postcommunist transition, foreshadowed by Solidarity's rise in a Gdansk shipyard, delivered a dozen nations to Puddington's democratic column. The wave then reached sub-Saharan Africa, where the number of countries with multiparty electoral systems soared from a mere three in 1989 to 18 by 1995.MORE

De-racialising revolutions: Revolutionaries often struggle to reconcile their accomplishments against those of competing 'others'.

Soon after the brutal crackdown on Iran's post-electoral uprising in June 2009, rumours began circulating in cyberspace and among ardent supporters of the Green Movement that some of the Islamic Republic's security forces, recruited to viciously attack demonstrators, were, in fact, not Iranians at all, but "Arabs".

Snapshots began circulating with red circles marking darker-skinned, rougher looking members of the security forces, who it was said were members of the Lebanese Hezbollah or Palestinian Hamas. Iranians, like me, who come from the southern climes of our homeland, look like those circled in red and remember a long history of being derogatorily dismissed as "Arabs" by our whiter-looking northern brothers and sisters, were not convinced by the allegations.

We also recalled that in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the massive influx of Afghan refugees into Iran all sorts of crimes and misdemeanours were attributed to "Afghanis", with that extra "i" carrying a nasty racist intonation in Persian.

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These travelling metaphors of racially profiled acts of violence - that violence is always perpetrated by "others", and not by "oneself" - now metamorphosing as they racialise the transnational revolutionary uprisings in our part of the world are a disgrace, a nasty remnant of ancient and medieval racism domestic to our cultures, exacerbated, used and abused to demean and subjugate us by European colonialism to further their own interests, and now coming back to haunt and mar the most noble moments of our collective uprising against domestic tyranny and foreign domination alike.

The manifestations of this racism are multifaceted and are not limited to the revolutionary momentum of street demonstrations or the anonymity of web-based activism. It extends, alas, well into the cool corners of reasoned analysis and deliberations.MORE

THE US STRIKES ON LIBYA


Can Anyone Answer Any of These Questions?

When do we know we have “won?” Who are we protecting? What do we do if Qaddafi survives? What do we do when we figure out the people we are “saving” hate us, just slightly less than they hated Qaddafi? What about civilian casualties? How much is this going to cost? How long is it going to take? Who is going to pay for it? Are we going to raise taxes, or do we just proceed with devastating cuts to the poor to finance another war. Are we going to have to stay and protect people after we “win?” Will we have to create bases to protect the war profiteers who are going to swoop in and start drilling and reconstructing what we just blew up? What is the reaction going to be in other Arab nations? What kind of blowback will there be from this? We don’t know any of that. Other than Lugar, I don’t think anyone is discussing it.
And then the meta-lesson. What lesson does Iran learn from all of this? Qaddafi gave up his nukes to protect himself from American military attacks, and we went ahead and attacked him anyway. North Korea, with their nukes, remains safe from American tampering. What lesson would you learn if you were Iranian?MORE