Yemen Holds an “Election” – One Candidate Major General Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi

(archived from February 21, 2012)

by Scott Creighton

The people of Yemen are some of the poorest in the world (46.7% of the population living on less than $2 per day  listed 142nd poorest in the world by the CIA Factbook in 2010) and by far the poorest in the Middle East, and yet their president/dictator has become one of the wealthiest men on the planet with his family’s fortune running into the billions of dollars range. There is no real reason for this abject poverty as Yemen has an abundance of natural resources and it’s geographical location makes it a prime asset to the Saudi’s for pumping oil and LNG to the Gulf of Aden (read about Ray Lee Hunt, Bush family friend and CIA asset who has an 8 billion dollar pipeline operating in Yemen aka “our national interests“). But that is what neoliberal dictatorships are good for; separating the wealth and the resources of the land from the people who inhabit it.

 

There are two separate popular movements inside Yemen to depose Western backed Field Marshal Ali Abdullah Saleh – Dictator of Yemen for the past 30 years – one from the north looking to oust the corrupt Saleh and his family like Mubarak of Egypt and Ben Ali of Tunisia and a southern separatist movement looking to break away from neoliberalized Yemen altogether.

In Dec. of 2009, Barack Obama authorized the used of our cruise missiles on targets in the north to help put down the uprising against our favorite dictator. That strike killed many civilians, included 23 children. The cruise missiles were the type that used cluster munitions, indiscriminate killing, weapons of mass destruction.

The Nobel Peace Prize 2009 was awarded to Barack H. Obama (on Oct. 9th 2009) “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples” Nobel Peace Prize website

Today, President Peace Prize has given his left-cover stamp of approval to the one candidate “election’ sham in Yemen. The “candidate” the the U.S. has been pushing for 4 months, Major General Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi has been in President Saleh’s corrupt cabinet since 1994 as his vice president.

Our good president sent a letter to the newly “elected” leader of Yemen which included this statement:

“I know you face challenges ahead, but I am optimistic that Yemen can emerge as a model for how peaceful transition in the Middle East can occur when people resist violence and unite under a common cause,” President Obama

The Yemeni people are resisting this “election” sham, that is, most of them are, the ones living like animals in abject poverty due to the greed and corruption of our 30 year dictatorship. They know that this farce is just window dressing on an imperialist dictatorship. People are dying at the polls but over at CNN and other “news’ outlets, they are celebrating the Obama brokered “peaceful transition” of power in Yemen.

“A New President for a New Yemen,” read a large banner that hung from (CHANGE) Square, which had been the epicenter of the anti-government movement last year” CNN “news”

Notice how they incorporated that winning slogan from 2008 into the public square? I can’t wait for them to bring this model of peaceful transitions to American politics. Imagine the joy we will feel when we are offered up but one candidate in our election cycles.