ADEN/SANAA: Yemenis began voting on Tuesday to replace President Ali Abdullah Saleh in an election many hope will give Yemen a chance to rebuild the country shattered by a year-long struggle that had pushed Yemen to the brink of civil war.
Although Vice President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi stands uncontested as a consensus candidate, the election is billed as an attempt to help Yemen turn a new page on a president who ruled the country with an iron fist for 33 years.
The vote would make Saleh, now in the United States for further treatment of burns suffered in a June assassination attempt, the fourth Arab autocrat to leave office in a year after revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.
Large queues formed early in the morning outside polling stations in the capital Sanaa amid tight security, after an explosion ripped through a voting centre in the southern port city of Aden on the eve of the vote. ‘We are now declaring the end of the Ali Abdullah Saleh era and will build a new Yemen,’ Yemeni Nobel Peace winner Tawakul Karman said as she waited to cast her ballot outside a university faculty in the capital Sanaa.
Voters dipped their thumbs in ink and stamped their print on a ballot paper bearing a picture of Hadi and a map of Yemen in the colours of the rainbow.
A pickup mounted with anti-aircraft guns and full of soldiers stood by another Sanaa University department as hundreds of men lined up to vote.(UNI)
