The bullet hit 28-year old Yemeni protester Abdullah Hameed Ali in the face and shattered his brain. But his Hamdan tribe, who last year stormed and occupied a university where a soldier had killed one of their own, said this time they would not seek revenge for his death at the hands of President Ali Abdullah Saleh's security forces.
Instead they would press peaceful protests to unseat Saleh and end his 32-year rule. "The whole Hamdan tribe could have descended on Sanaa and started taking them one by one," said computer salesman Mohammad al-Hamdani, pointing at government forces manning streets leading to the protests outside the capital Sanaa's university.
"We do not want that. Saleh will fall through non-violence." The last time a Yemeni soldier killed a Hamdan member - a student at Sanaa University in 2010 - armed relatives stormed the campus and stayed until authorities arrested the killer. Members of the Hamdan tribe, once Saleh supporters, have joined protests against widespread corruption, nepotism and poverty in the Arabian Peninsula country of 23 million, which is also struggling with a northern Shi'ite rebellion, southern secessionists and a resurgent regional wing of al Qaeda.
Saleh, backed by the United States and Saudi Arabia in his fight against al Qaeda, has refused opposition calls to step down by the end of the year and remove his relatives from security services. He proposed drawing up a new constitution to create a parliamentary system, but the opposition said he could not be trusted to transform the country into a democracy.
Rabih al-Zuhairi, a protester wounded in the same attack on Tuesday, said: "It is a non-violent revolution till victory." The finance student lay in his hospital bed with gardenia flowers around his neck, given to him by volunteers who toured hospitals to check on the wounded.
Peace or guns? Hopes of peaceful change jar in a country where many people own guns and where government has responded with force against the protesters, as well as the rebels in the north and south. Around 30 people have been killed in the last month during the mass protests, which gained momentum after the successful Arab uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt.
The protesters say they are motivated by a desire to build a better society in Yemen, which struggles with dwindling oil and water resources, and an illiteracy rate of 40 percent. "Even if Saleh starts feeding us milk and honey he cannot remain president. We want a country. He destroyed all institutions," said Shakri al-Falahi, a surgeon who works at a government hospital. "The judiciary is corrupt. He runs the country as if he owns it."
"He attributes unity and stability to himself, but provinces want to break away, corruption is rife and there is no longer a social contract. Yemen cannot be worse off than that even if we tried," he said. Dozens of protesters wore white coats like Falahi and construction workers wore hard hats underlining the broad popularity of the protests.
Counter argument But not everyone is convinced that Yemen will be better off if Saleh is overthrown. At a smaller rally his loyalists defend him by saying he has brought stability to the country. The US ambassador in Sanaa, Gerald Feierstein, has said protests are not "the place where Yemen's problems will be solved".
In an interview with a government magazine, he posed a question about a Yemen without Saleh, hinting at possible chaos and Islamist militancy that might fill any ensuing vacuum. Saleh has been helping the United States in its campaign against al Qaeda, which has used Yemen as a base to stage attacks on Western targets.
But he has complex ties with Islamist militants. Mujahideen who fought in Afghanistan helped him win a civil war against southern Yemen and he has sought support from anti-US clerics. Aidarous al-Naqib, head of the Socialist MPs bloc, said mismanagement under Saleh's rule had brought Yemenis to a state of desperation that was driving some people towards militancy.
"Saleh has exaggerated the influence of Qaeda to promote himself as the man who can promote US interests, but the best cure is democracy," Naqib said. "America has to respect the will of the people, who did not fire a single bullet or raise a single knife in their quest to remove the president."
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