Yemen’s Saleh politically dead

A senior Iranian lawmaker says Yemen’s embattled President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who is currently in Saudi Arabia to allegedly receive medical treatment, is “politically dead.”

“Even if Saleh exploits all the means available to return to Yemen, this will not change his fate [for the better] because, politically speaking, Saleh is dead,” Head of the Iranian Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission Alaeddin Boroujerdi told Fars News Agency on Friday.

Boroujerdi noted that even in case Saleh makes a ceremonial return to Yemen, he would not be able to establish another government.

The Yemeni president relocated to Saudi Arabia allegedly for medical purposes after he suffered injuries in an attack on the presidential palace in the capital, Sana’a, on June 3.

“It was clear from scratch that such a fate would befall the Yemeni dictator, after he moved to kill his people on a large scale, resisted the will of his people and undermined his nation in the worst way possible, and ruled the country for decades as a dictator and regardless of people’s demands,” Boroujerdi pointed out.

The Iranian lawmaker called for vigilance among the Yemeni revolutionaries against the West’s plots and American stratagems, saying Saleh’s departure “is not the end of the story.”

“The revolutionaries should advance their revolution through establishing a government based on the people’s will and democracy,” he urged.

Following the popular revolution in Tunisia and Egypt in January and February respectively, Yemen too was swept with the wave of Islamic awakening that has been surging in North Africa and the Middle East, with anti-regime protests in major cities calling for an end to corruption and unemployment in the country.

Hundreds of Yemenis have been killed and many more injured in the brutal crackdown by the US and Saudi-backed government against anti-regime protesters.