Tight security as Osama's ancestral homeland votes

SANAA: Nearly 90,000 police and troops are to deploy across Yemen on Wednesday as Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden's ancestral homeland goes to the polls for its first seriously contested presidential elections.             

 

In an impoverished country which has seen deadly Al-Qaeda attacks on the American destroyer USS Cole and the French oil tanker Limburg, security remains key even as Washington hails a new milestone in the democratization of the Middle East. With scores already dead during the election campaign and four French hostages still in the hands of tribal kidnappers in the south, the authorities are taking no chances.         

 

On Saturday, the government announced it had detained four suspected Al-Qaeda sympathisers in the capital.     

 

The previous day the authorities said they had foiled a plot against oil facilities in the eastern regions of Maarib and Hadramawt, the scene of US special operations in the war against terror virtually since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.           

 

The electoral commission's security chief said a total of 89,000 security personnel would be deployed in the country's 5,620 polling stations on election day.   

 

"A reserve force will be ready to intervene at a moment's notice, particularly in provinces where tensions exist," said Seif al-Sharaabi.            

 

But their task will be a difficult one in a country where the central government's writ extends with difficulty to the tribalised countryside and where private gun ownership is one of the highest in the world with some 60 million firearms for a population of 20 million.       

 

"Citizens will be required to deposit their traditional daggers and firearms with security personnel before entering polling stations," Sharaabi said.              

 

Yemen's tribes regularly kidnap the few Western tourists who make it to the impoverished Arabian peninsula republic to visit the world heritage sites of the capital and the ancient cities of the Hadramawt.      

 

In the run-up to polling day, four French holidaymakers remained in the custody of tribal kidnappers in the southern Lahij region after their demands of the central government from a previous abduction of German holidaymakers went unheeded.              

 

With more than 200 foreign election observers due in the country to oversee the conduct of the vote, more than half of them from the European Union, Sharaabi promised a major security operation to protect the monitors.             

 

President Ali Abdullah Saleh's 28-year-old regime has become a key partner in the US war on terror, allowing special forces operations from a US base in Djibouti across the Bab al-Mandab strait as long ago as 2002.         

 

But his challenger -- former oil minister Faisal bin Shamlan who has the support of the combined opposition, Islamist and former communist -- has taken issue with Saleh's focus on security arguing that the underlying roots of Islamic militancy need to be tackled.     

 

"Economic, social and political development not repression is the best way of eradicating terrorism," said Ali al-Sarari, spokesman for the Common Forum, the opposition umbrella group backing bin Shamlan.             

 

"The regime has no clear plan to tackle terrorism, its sole goal being to preserve its monopoly of power," he said.             

 

US embassy number two Nabil Khoury said Washington was "generally satisfied" with Sanaa's cooperation in the war against terror, although he acknowledged that "faults exist."          

 

Khoury said he believed the abduction of the four Frenchmen in the run-up to polling day was an attempt to "exploit the government's sensitivities over the election period".