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Yemeni Nobel Winner to the World: Stop Helping Saleh

Al-Monitor's Sophie Claudet sat down with Tawakul Karman, the 2011 Nobel Prize Peace winner who became the face of Yemen’s Arab Spring, at Brookings’ US-Islamic World Forum in Doha. The passionate yet remarkably humble 33-year-old journalist and activist spoke of her hopes for her country and the revolution.
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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.

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