On the sidelines of the British Foreign Office annual ceremony
At the annual ceremony of the British Foreign Office on Tuesday night, December 12, many diplomats spoke to me about ''Yemen after Saleh'',
some of whom knew him closely and some who served as ambassadors or members of missions of various countries in Yemen. My reply was always that Saleh chose his end as it was, and no one forced him into it...... Who disagreed with him politically chose a different end for him, but Saleh preferred a different choice, perhaps with calculations not well seized. However, the fate of Yemen is not determined by the departure of any person whatever his position whatsoever.
Saleh is in history now, the attitude of those who have benefited from his regime will clash with the one oppressed from his system, and there is a wide middle ground that moves in this area between the beneficiaries and the oppressed. However, this is not the time to clash. The future is not determined by the polarization of the past; although it appears that some continue to be selective in determining the fate of the future, with choices that only reflect the miraculous convictions, encumber all the process of change in the most useful, not devoid of benefit.
The General People's Congress must be freed from these memories, which have governed its paths and weakened its internal dynamics, and kept it hostage to the decision formulated by the sponsors.
It was one of the deepest comment I heard from a diplomat who spent years in Yemen, said: Saleh was enjoying the sense of the person coming from the bottom of the society, but is not a disgruntled sensation of his social status, but a sense of being ashamed of this affiliation, so he lived a contradiction between the feeling of belonging to the bottom of the community on one hand and try to use the power tools that stand in contrast to this bottom that belongs to him on the other hand.
It was therefore a very slim opportunity to replace its true social component despite its use of all power, it remained in their view "Afash" coming from the bottom of the community. When he was killed, this feeling was strongly present at the force that made the decision to kill him, despite being the president of Yemen for more than three decades.
Most of the talk tonight was a great deal of interest in what is happening in Yemen, and through the talk I felt that Yemen had a great history in spite of all the attempts to minimize it and the present failure to guard this history.