Yemen opposition shrugs off Gulf mediation offer

ADEN/SANAA (Reuters) - Members of Yemen's political opposition dismissed an offer from Gulf Arab neighbors on Wednesday to resume mediation in the political crisis, which has brought the country to the brink of civil war.

Gulf states, fearful of a war on their doorstep, have tried repeatedly to ease President Ali Abdullah Saleh out of office after six months of protests against him and a bout of open war in the capital Sanaa.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), a bloc of neighboring monarchies, did not say how their new offer was different to several previous efforts to end the Yemen crisis.

Sultan al-Atwani, a member of a group of opposition parties which had accepted a previous deal only to see Saleh reject it, called any new bid doomed from the start.

"It would have been better for the GCC to be braver, and specify who has rejected this initiative and brought Yemen to where it is now," he told Reuters.

Saleh, undergoing treatment in Saudi Arabia for wounds suffered in an attack on his compound last month, has backed out of several previous deals to step down.

In May, fighting erupted between his forces and those of tribal leaders and army units which had turned on him, reducing parts of Sanaa to ruin. A shaky ceasefire has held since Saleh left for treatment.

Youth groups over which the opposition parties have little influence have rejected main elements of past GCC deals, including the prospect Saleh could be immune from prosecution.

SOUTHERN CONFLICTS FLARE

A prominent tribal figure, Sheikh Sadeq al-Ahmar, has called on Saleh's deputy, Vice-President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, the acting leader, to allow a transitional government to take shape.

Residents of al-Houta, a town in the southern province of Lahj, said gunmen stormed a government complex at dawn, killing three guards and wounding four others in a two-hour gun battle before escaping.

Parts of Yemen's south are barely under the control of its central government, and long-standing conflicts with separatists and Islamists have flared during the crisis over Saleh's fate, sparking Western and regional fears the country could shatter and give its al Qaeda wing a perch over oil shipping routes.

Another southern province, Abyan, has seen mass flight after Islamists took control of its provincial capital, Zinjibar. Yemen's government is struggling to provide those people, many of them sleeping in schools in Aden, with food and medicine.

The government in Sanaa, itself paralyzed by the political standoff is struggling with its own shortages of electricity, water and fuel, and few state agencies are functional.

An official of the U.N. refugee agency said the scale of the displacement was remarkable even in a country with multiple, overlapping conflicts, including an on-and-off battle with northern tribesmen that has driven many to Sanaa.

"What is very special in terms of the movement you see now is that you have an internal movement within Sanaa, as well as the movement from Abyan to Lahij and Aden," said Ann Maymann of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, who has previously estimated there are some 300,000 displaced Yemenis.

"It's not the first time it's happened with fighting in Zinjibar, but it's the first time that this many people have moved and that they've moved that far."