- Ali Abdullah Saleh's nephew, General Yahia, commenting on the president's status
"The Joint Meeting Party (opposition coalition) and the ruling party are seeking their own interests. We have been sidelined as youth, although we were the ones who started the revolution."
- Ismail al-Jelaei, youth protester and head of the newly established Future Party
"The EU also emphasized the importance of proceeding with an orderly and inclusive political transition in Yemen in line with the Gulf Cooperation Council initiative, to respond to the legitimate interests of all Yemen's people. The EU called on the Yemeni leadership to follow through on their commitment to this transition."
- Disconnected EU statement on Yemen's revolution
The EU's Foreign Policy Chief is Baroness Ashton, a bizarre appointment which was a sop to Gordon Brown a couple of years ago. She has been an embarrassment in the post which gives her a salary in excess of Obama's. She is, bizarrely, the highest paid female politician in the world but is teetering on the edge of being sacked due to her ineptitude. It sticks in my mind that on her fist day in Brussels, the UK press, sensing a debacle at her press conference, asked for her assessment of the Iraq debacle. Her response(verbatim) was 'we are where we are'. No worries there, then. This goes some way to explaining the disconnect in the statement about Yemen.
ReplyDeleteCan't say I follow Ashton with regularity; the EU exerts negligible influence in many of the conflicts we study. But it's easy to tell that Ashton has little personal understanding of Yemen, as the EU copies directly from U.S. statements. The same goes for every uprising in the Arab Spring. Of course U.S.-EU policy must synchronize on a fundamental level, but the EU needs to stop following Washington's establishment blindly. It doesn't know where it's going either.
ReplyDelete