Tawakul Karman has a strong message to deliver to the international community and especially to the United States and Saudi Arabia, which co-sponsored the so-called Gulf Initiative to remove Ali Abdullah Saleh from power in 2011. She says they have a responsibility to force the former president and his supporters to stop fomenting a rebellion in Yemen. “They must freeze their money, they must enforce sanctions against them. Some of them really support al-Qaeda and other armed groups,” she claims. “They give them weapons, they give them money to make the transitional period unstable and impossible.”

The main challenge to Yemen’s democratic transition, she says, is current president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi’s difficulties in ridding the security forces and army of the old regime’s loyalists, including Saleh’s own family. “The army and security forces were supposed to be restructured and unified before [the] February 21 [2012 presidential election], according to the Gulf Initiative but until now it is not happening,” she laments.

When Hadi dismissed the former commander of the southern military region, Mahdi Maqwala, in early March 2012, Al-Qaeda conducted attacks in support of Maqwala who is known to back both Al-Qaeda and Ansar Al-Sharia, the next day, she points out. She sees Ali Abdullah’s direct hand in the resumption of militant attacks, saying the country had been spared in the period between the revolution and when Saleh was forced to step down in February 2012. Now, she claims the former president is using his connections within the army and security services to destabilize the country. She says Saleh’s son, Ali, who is still in charge of the Republican Guard, and the former president’s nephew, Brigadier-General Yahya Slaeh, who heads the Central Security Forces, must be sacked at once. But so far Ali Abdullah Saleh has refused to comply with President Hadi's executive orders to have his family members and supporters resign from their key military positions.

“These people should no longer have immunity, they should be on international terrorist lists and their cases should be taken to the International Criminal Court,” she insists. Only then will Yemen be able to “hold an open election, and draft a legitimate constitution.” Hadi, the former vice-president, was the sole candidate to run in the February 2012 presidential election following the negotiated departure of Saleh. “We will not leave Change Square [where the demonstrations that led to the revolution were held] until we achieve all our goals... The international community must exert more pressure if they want the Gulf Initiative to succeed,” she adds.