Ali Abdullah Saleh

"LandepNews"

Ali Abdullah Saleh

President of Yemen Ali Abdullah Saleh has agreed on Thursday to sign a peace deal which would allow him to hand over the power to the opposition in exchange for guarantees that he would not be prosecuted for the crackdown during the last few months.

Saleh said that before he signed the peace deal proposed by the Gulf Cooperation Group he needed first guarantees from the countries in the Gulf that he would not be prosecuted, then European guarantees, and finally American guarantees that he would walk away as a free man.

According to this plan, Saleh is to transfer power to the vice president, who will organize free elections. As a result, he is to leave without prosecution.

It is believed that the GCG plan was the basis for a resolution that has been circulated by five permanent members of the UN Security Council. The Western members of the Security Council denied that the Gulf proposal is the basis for the resolution that would be voted against Saleh, but one of them admitted it was the only one proposed so far.

According to Reuters, which obtained one copy of the resolution draft, the document speaks of the accountability to which must be held all who committed acts of violence, abuses and human rights violations, which would endorse the idea that the resolution does not draw on the GCG’s peace deal. The resolution is expected, by some of the western diplomats, to be presented and voted next week.

On Tuesday, Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakul Karman, the Yemeni woman who was awarded for her part in the Yemeni revolution, made a plea by the United Nations not to agree with the plan to let Saleh walk away. She called him a “war criminal,” and added that he must be judged for what he did during these ten months of unrest in the country.

Karman said she planned to make this point in a conversation with the UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, in a meeting scheduled for Wednesday. Ban said on Tuesday that no immunity would be accepted for what happened in Yemen.

Saleh was presented with the GCG plan three times and he has rejected it three times. Now he said he would sign only if guarantees are offered to the members of his party too.

Unrest in Yemen started in January soon after the revolution in Tunisia and Egypt. On several occasions president Saleh, who ruled with a iron fist for 33 years, said he would step down and call for elections.

In June he was wounded during an assassination attempt made by the rebels. He went to Saudi Arabia to receive treatment and it was expected that he would not return. Only that he made an unexpected return and the protests against him began anew.

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