Dozens of anti-government protesters in Yemen were shot and wounded in fresh clashes with police on Friday as President Ali Abdullah Saleh rejected a new deal to secure an end to his 32 years in power. Saleh, facing an unprecedented challenge from hundreds of thousands of protesters, initially accepted an offer by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Arab states as part of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) to hold talks with the opposition.
On Wednesday, Qatar's Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani said the GCC would strike a deal for Saleh to leave. "We don't get our legitimacy from Qatar or from anyone else...we reject this belligerent intervention," Saleh told a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters in the capital Sanaa.
Frustration with the impasse may push the thousands of Yemenis who have taken to the streets closer to violence. Some 21 people died in clashes this week in Taiz, south of the capital and the Red Sea port of Hudaida. "I don't think the GCC or the West want Yemen to go down the road of Libya, because that's exactly where it's going," said Theodore Karasik, an analyst at the Dubai based INEGMA group.
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