Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh is resisting popular demands for him to step down now, but will have to make good on promised reforms if he is to stem a nationwide tide of protests in which 12 people have been killed.
Anti-government protests flared again in Yemen today with thousands of marchers demonstrating across the country.
Two anti-government protesters were killed and more than 10 were wounded by gunfire during clashes with supporters of Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sanaa.
A government official told Reuters that at least one protester was shot dead and several hurt at the demonstration near Sanaa University.
Witnesses said armed Saleh loyalists opened fire on demonstrators, before police intervened to separate the two sides by shooting into the air.
President Ali Abdullah Saleh, has said that he will step down after national elections are held in 2013. But he has rejected protesters’ demands that he leave office now.
Mr Saleh said he has ordered troops not to fire at anti-government protesters, except in self defence, although medical officials say at least 11 people have been killed in demonstrations.
Protesters set fire to a car in the capital Sanaa as thousands rallied at a university campus while hundreds continued to camp out in a nearby square, mirroring marchers in Cairo during the revolt that toppled Hosni Mubarak and demonstrators in Bahrain.
Protesters in Yemen set up checkpoints around the capital square and searched those trying to enter.
In Taiz, Yemen’s second-largest city, thousands marched in the Safir square, where hundreds of activists have been camping in the square for more than a week. They have renamed it “Freedom Square.”
In the port city of Aden, schools closed, most government employees were not working and many shops were closed as hundreds gathered for another round of
protests.
An opposition spokesman has rebuffed Mr Saleh’s offer of dialogue and an influential group of Muslim clerics has called for a national unity government that would lead the country to elections. Mr Saleh has been in power for 32 years.
Mr Saleh, a US ally against a Yemen-based al-Qaeda wing, has survived many challenges to his power in a lawless country riven by tribal and regional conflicts and awash with weaponry. But the surge of people power across the Arab world has galvanised sentiment against him. Demonstrations at first organised by opposition parties have gained their own momentum.
The southern city of Aden, where many people resent being ruled from the north, has seen the deadliest clashes. But poverty, corruption and soaring unemployment have fuelled protests across the Arabian Peninsula's poorest state.
Yemen's youthful population of 23 million may be coalescing around a common determination to get rid of Mr Saleh.
Yemen is the focus of Western and Gulf Arab security worries that have intensified since 2009 when al-Qaeda militants based there began launching attacks on US and Saudi targets. Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as the Yemen-based network is known, has so far failed to capitalise on the protest wave propelled by secular discontent, not Islamist militancy.
Agencies