Annas [Archives:2003/649/Press Review]
6 July 2003
Main headlines:
– The Saudi-Yemeni meetings concluded under unordinary challenges
– A new draft law canceling local councils in the capital
– Islah's Shoura demands raising employees' salaries
– Parliament decides the issue of choosing heads of the parliament's committees
Columnist Nasser Yahya writes on the 7th of July anniversary saying as Yemenis however we might politically differ on assessing an event like the secessionism and the war that preceded it, secessionism represented for many a ghost of a calamity, for them personally and in general at the level of the homeland. Specifically it would have represented for them a human tragedy returning the state of families division between the two parts of the homeland. Personally, the 7th of July was the end of months of fears, public and personal. The return of division would have been representing for me a personal tragedy too. My family was almost halved between Aden and Sana'a. The success of secessionism was meant that to return divided as we were before the unity, belonging to two hostile states and the relation would be worse than it was before the unity. Most probably any project for a new unity would be something impossible, as what happened after the failure of the Egyptian-Syrian unity in 1961. I don't want to open the old wounds but the anniversary of July 7 is an important landmark in our contemporary history and I call for deriving lessons from it. The state of the division and separatism the Arab nation is living is not something imposed and we could not get rid of it. Here it is the Yemeni unity going ahead on its road and all the dangers threatening it to return to the state of division have disappeared. This is what confirms the success of the Arab choice of unity and its ability to face the challenges. The current events prove that the nation would not have present or future but with a unity associated with freedom and sound democracy where the people are the owner of the decision in choosing and ousting their rulers.
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