Saleh forced to leave: What next?

Before dawn broke June 5, as the news spread that Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh had left for medical treatment in Saudi Arabia, fireworks filled the sky. As one Yemeni blogger put it, the party started at 6 a.m. To celebrate, people sacrificed cows and goats in “Change Square,” the site of the large encampment that had been peacefully pressuring Saleh to leave for the last four months.

One woman in a burqa explained to Reuters, “This is the best Eid we have ever had with Saleh leaving.” Eid, used here figuratively, is the Muslim festival marking the end of Ramadan.

The forces loyal to Saleh had launched eight hours of retaliatory attacks June 4 on the home of the al-Ahmar family, which has been directing the tribally based, armed opposition from the Hashid confederation against Saleh.

The June 5 Yemeni Times speculated that the attack on Saleh was an “inside job.” The June 5 New York Times published a report that the “precision of the strike and its timing — just as the officials arrived for prayers” supports the contention that some inside information about what Saleh was doing had been given to one of his opponents.

An “inside job,” otherwise known as an assassination attempt, would mean that Saleh has lost the confidence and support of some of his close collaborators.

Even though Saleh has left, along with some of his closest supporters, his sons and nephews still retain their security and military posts. According to a June 6 NPR report, there was renewed fighting in the capital, Sana’a, with six casualties.

The big bourgeois media like the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and the Wall Street Journal are all concentrating on the role of Saudi Arabia’s very small, hereditary ruling class, which has been financially supporting reactionary sheiks and local rulers in Yemen for decades (see the book “Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes”). They’re also focusing what the U.S. is doing to arrive at a “stable” arrangement between the competing tribes and the various, competing dissident factions in the army.

The fact that U.S. Ambassador Gerald Feierstein met Yemen’s Vice President Abdrabuh Mansur Hadi while the celebrations of Saleh’s departure were still going on was widely reported. What they talked about wasn’t revealed.

U.S. & Saudi Arabia cooperate in Yemen

According to the May 12 Yemen Times, the Yemen Human Rights Network reported earlier in May that “2009 and 2010 witnessed huge external interventions in Yemen by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the USA, which developed into direct military action that killed Yemeni citizens, all under the pretext of fighting Al-Qaeda and curbing the Houthi movement.”

Thousands of protesters in Yemen’s industrial center, Taiz, had gathered in that city’s central square for months to demand Saleh’s departure. Last week they were ousted from the square with live fire, bulldozers and water cannons. Dozens were killed — some estimates talk of hundreds — but there was nothing more than a brief mention in the capitalist media.

Armed tribesmen from the Taiz area gathered together and drove off the army, allowing peaceful protests to continue under armed guard.

The big-business media have played down reports of the Taiz massacre. To expose Saleh’s massacres would damage his image as the only possible force for stability in Yemen.

What is also ignored in media accounts of Yemen is that the masses are in motion, trying to push forward their demands through collective action — something that underlies all the maneuvering between the armed factions with their intricately intertwined histories and rivalries.

Videos, not just from Al-Jazeera and Reuters, are starting to appear on YouTube, showing huge mass demonstrations in places like Al Baydha, where thousands of people marched in May against Saleh.

The people of Yemen want Saleh out and an end to foreign intervention, and they are acting to get what they want.