Gregory Johnsen, the 2006 Schweisberg OPC Foundation Scholarship winner, writes an Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. Johnsen is a doctoral candidate in Near Eastern studies at Princeton and writes the blog Waq al-Waq.
Here are the first few paragraphs of Johnsen’s piece:
Late Thursday night, amid rumors that he was about to resign after almost 33 years in power, a defiant President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen went on national television to criticize demonstrators and declare a general amnesty for soldiers who had gone over to the opposition. His brief remarks were the latest act in a week of tense political drama in which scores of protesters in the capital were killed and Mr. Saleh’s most important military ally defected.
The protests in Yemen have been building since Feb. 11, when Hosni Mubarak stepped down in Egypt. What started small has now grown into a mass movement uniting, at least temporarily, the varied interests of Yemen’s fractured opposition around the single demand that President Saleh leave office. Tribesmen came together with student activists, while southern secessionists echoed northern rebels. Even clans at war for years put aside their blood feuds in favor of a common front.
The Boss, as Mr. Saleh is known by many in the country, survived three decades in the rough world of Yemeni politics by skillfully playing rivals off against one another. He tried to do the same thing this time: political concessions, bags of cash and new cars to wavering allies; violent crackdowns on demonstrators. But late last week, he overstepped.