GCC draws road map for Saleh’s departure

The latest proposal calls for the resignation of the president within 30 days from the date of its acceptance. It guarantees that Saleh will not be prosecuted and a new government in Sanaa will be installed within 90 days from the date of Saleh’s departure.
“This new plan was presented by GCC Secretary-General Abdullatif Al-Zayani, who held wide-ranging talks with Saleh in the Yemeni capital Thursday,” said a spokesman of the GCC General Secretariat in Riyadh.
The spokesman said that Al-Zayani and Saleh discussed the proposal, which calls for installation of a unity government with 50 percent of the members from the ruling party, 40 percent from the opposition groups and 10 percent from other factions.
The proposal, supported by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, asks all parties to ensure the holding of a presidential poll within two months from the date of Saleh’s departure.
Yemen’s official Saba news agency quoted the president as welcoming the GCC’s diplomatic efforts to end the crisis and expressed his readiness to “positively deal with the efforts to restore Yemen’s stability, security and unity.”
The new GCC proposal also grants legal immunity to Saleh, members of his family and officials of his presidency as well as his close aides once power is transferred and a new government installed.
The spokesman said that Al-Zayani’s talks with other Yemeni officials including opposition members on Thursday in Sanaa also covered GCC-Yemen relations.
He said that Yemen had been in negotiations with the GCC for membership and hoped to join the group by 2016. The GCC has already approved Yemen’s accession to several GCC panels, including the GCC Standardization Authority, Gulf Organization for Industrial Consultancy (GOIC), GCC Auditing and Accounting Authority and Gulf Radio & TV Authority.
It is unclear how Yemen’s membership negotiations with the GCC will proceed during the crisis or when the new government comes to power in Sanaa.
Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has underscored the OIC’s support for the GCC initiative, which he said aimed to find a way out of the current crisis and preserve Yemen’s stability, security and unity.