Yemen kicks off one-man presidential campaign

Yemen's sole presidential candidate, Abd-Rabbu Mansur Hadi, kicked off his advertising campaign on Tuesday for the Feb. 21 polls, as part of a UN-backed power transfer deal brokered by neighboring oil-rich Gulf countries. "We thank all foreign mediators for the power transfer deal in Yemen, whose appreciated efforts led our country to reach this satisfactory result that stave off Yemen from sliding into a civil war," Hadi said in his first television advertisement for his presidential election campaign during an official ceremony in the capital Sanaa. The impoverished Arab country has been in the grip of a one- year long political crisis triggered by mass protests demanding the ouster of President Ali Abdullah Saleh who has arrived in the United States for medical treatment. About 2,000 people have been killed and thousands of others injured since the protests began in late January 2011. Under the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) deal, signed by Saleh and the Yemeni opposition in the Saudi capital of Riyad in November 2011, the Yemeni parliament unanimously nominated Hadi as the sole presidential candidate for the upcoming elections. "The GCC deal has become a legitimate umbrella for all signed parties ... and all sides should keep commitment to implementing all its terms," he said at the ceremony with the participation of leaders of the country's ruling and opposition parties who signed the deal, as well as foreign ambassadors to Yemen. "I will work to move Yemen from the current situation to a new development stage, and I will adopt a strategy for implementing reforms to take Yemen to the threshold of the 21st century," he said. Saleh, who signed the UN-backed deal in return for immunity from prosecution, said in a farewell speech last month before his departure to the United States that he would return to Sanaa for Hadi's inauguration. Despite the planned political settlement, the deal's immunity clause sparked nationwide daily protests, demanding the prosecution of Saleh and his aides for "killing people during the year of protests."