Thousands protest over power cuts in Yemen’s south

AFP

6 09 2010

ADEN, Yemen — Thousands of people set car tyres ablaze and vandalised property in several areas of the southern Yemen city of Aden on Monday in protest at a power cut, an AFP journalist and local officials said.

Residents of impoverished south Yemen face daily power cuts, and every day a different district in the Aden region loses an hour of electricity a day.

But as temperatures soared to around 40 degrees Celsius (101 Fahrenheit) on Monday evening, Aden’s eight districts were all plunged into darkness at the same time.

This triggered widespread protests, with violence reported in Aden and gunfire heard in the districts of Khor Maksar, Al-Mansura, Sheikh Osman and Dar Saed, the sources said.

In Khor Maksar « protesters broke into Muftah Aden hotel and smashed its front glass door, » hotel owner Mansur al-Sharabi told AFP by telephone.

Hundreds of protesters also set tyres alight in Al-Mualla and Crater, local officials and witnesses said.

When police tried to disperse the crowds, they were peppered with stones, the sources added. There were no immediate reports of casualties.

« The people of the south are already tense and the power cuts only added to the tension, triggering protests, » a leader of the separatist Southern Movement, Yahya Ghaleb al-Shuaybi, told AFP by telephone.

South Yemen, where residents complain of discrimination by the Sanaa government in the allocation of resources, is frequently the scene of unrest.

The south was independent from 1967 until 1990 when it united with the north. It launched an abortive secession bid in 1994 and is still home to an active secessionist movement.

Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest country and the ancestral homeland of Osama bin Laden, has also been struggling to combat an Al-Qaeda resurgence as well as Shiite unrest in the north.

Lightning, rains cause blackout, protests in Yemen

Xinhua News Agency

Monday, September 06, 2010

SANAA, Sep. 6, 2010 – Heavy rains and lightning storms hit northwest Yemen and triggered a blackout Monday, leaving many southern residents in darkness and intolerable heat, officials said.

The dire weather caused a technical failure at the main power station in al-Hodeida province, which supplies about one third of the country’s electricity, an official from the station told Xinhua.

Starting at 5:00 p.m. local time (GMT 1400), power was out in the capital Sanaa and the southern provinces of Aden, Abyan, al-Dhalee and Hadramout, where residents, left in intolerable heat without power, resorted to violent protests. They cut off roads and set car tires ablaze, the official said on condition of anonymity.

It is summer time and temperatures in these provinces often surge above 40 degrees Celsius.

The blackouts lasted nearly seven and a half hours before the problem was finally fixed.

Power outage darkens large swaths of Yemen as country’s people break day’s fasting for Ramadan

CP

6 09 2010

SAN’A, Yemen — A massive blackout has darkened large swaths of Yemen just as Muslims were sitting down to break their dawn-to-dusk fast for the holy month of Ramadan.

The Electricity Authority says the outage is due to a grid failure caused by heavy rain.

Officials say millions were without power for most of Monday night in the capital and other major cities.

In the southern port of Aden, crowds blockaded roads with barricades of burning tires to demand authorities restore power. Some shouted anti-government slogans, reflecting the sentiments of the south’s secessionist movement.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

The cut occurred as temperatures hovered around 100 degrees (38 Celsius).

~ par Alain Bertho sur 7 septembre 2010.

Publié dans émeutes, riots, الشغب