Yemen: On Friday of Dignity, people marched saying “peace, peace”, even though they were being shot at, they did not stop but continued marching...

Yemen's Alsaidi: We cannot follow Atatürk's secular model: "Yes, about 1,200 civilians were killed. There is a supposition that (a revolution) in Yemen would have been bloodier than in other (countries) because Yemen is heavily armed and the Yemenis are tribal people. Yes, there are a lot of arms in Yemen, but this issue of tribalism is questionable. Those people have one definition of tribalism and apply it to every case. Yemen went through different stages in history. And don't forget that Yemen is older than the Roman Empire. Yemenis are law-abiding citizens. They are not tribal people who like fighting. There are tribes, but they do not fight among each other, as is wrongly perceived. They intermarry and live in harmony with one another; they rarely clash. On the “Friday of Dignity,” held on March 18, when 52 people were killed by sharpshooters, people marched saying “peace, peace.” Even though they were being shot at, they did not stop but continued marching and at the same time said “peace, peace.” You'd cry if you had seen that scene from the protest. They did not resort to arms." said, Abdullah M. Alsaidi

'via Blog this'

Abdullah M. Alsaidi, Yemen's ambassador to the UN who quit from his post after the regime killed peaceful protesters.

Currently a senior fellow at the New York-based International Peace Institute (IPI), Ambassador Alsaidi was the permanent representative of Yemen to the United Nations from 2002 until his resignation in March 2011 in response to the killings of dozens of demonstrators by pro-government forces in Sana'a. He held important government positions, including deputy minister for foreign affairs from 1999 to 2002 and member of the National Arbitration Committee with Eritrea over the Hanish Islands from 1996 to 2002. He received his BA degree in political science from Long Island University in 1975 and his MA in political science from Columbia University in 1982. Ambassador Alsaidi was also a co-chair of the IPI's task force on strengthening multilateral security capacity in 2008.

In his words: “He [Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh] used to call me at night to ask for my opinion, and when I disagreed with him -- about Iraq and Kuwait -- he said: ‘You know what? I think you're right.' Around 2005, that sort of thing stopped. Last year, when I wrote in a report to him that the UN was thinking of contingency plans for Yemen in the event of an uprising, the administration phoned me five times to say, ‘The president is not happy with your report because it isn't true'.”