Al Mukalla: Yemeni president Abd Rabbo Mansour Hadi has said that Yemenis would resist the attempts by Al Houthis to apply the Iranian model of government in the country, adding that he regretted not taking the decision of shifting the central bank of Aden in the early days of the war against the rebel movement.
“The Yemeni people will not accept the Iranian model in Yemen,” Hadi said in an interview with Al Jazeera broadcast on Thursday. “Iran harbours dreams of controlling Bab Al Mandab Strait,” he said, referring to Yemen’s Red Sea strait. The internationally recognised president said that the aim of the current war is to force Al Houthis and the ousted president to make concession, rather kicking them out of power.
In a move towards drying up Al Houthis’ financial sources, Hadi recently ordered relocating the central bank from Sana’a to the government-controlled Aden, its temporary capital. Hadi said that if he had taken the decision early last year, the war would have ended within several months.
“There are no concerns about repercussions of the decision. We took the decision after the putschist Al Houthis and Saleh emptied the central bank’s coffers. If we had taken the decision earlier, the war would have stopped in six months,” he said.
He also said he committed himself to service the country’s internal and foreign debt after shifting the monetary authority. More than a year after the Al Houthi occupation of the capital and other provinces, Hadi still thinks that a federal system is able to address the country’s woes. “We tried division [South-North] and merging unity. [But] we have found out that the best system [of governance] is a multi-region federalism as it [equally] divides power and wealth,” he said.
The country’s establishment agreed in February 2014 to turn the war-ravaged Yemen into a federal state comprising six semi-autonomous regions. Two regions are the once communist South Yemen and four are in the former tribal North Yemen.
Hadi said that the ousted president incited the rebel Al Houthis to seize the capital and overthrow the government to obstruct the implementation of the new system.
In New York, Hadi continued his meetings with heads of intentional monetary bodies to highlight his motives for moving the central bank headquarter to Aden. On Thursday, Hadi told Christine Lagarde, the International Monetary Fund managing director, that his government is obliged to meet the country’s financial obligations including paying salaries of government employees who reside inside Al Houthis-held provinces.
Gerry Rice, Director of Communications at the IMF, said in a statement: “The Managing Director and President Hadi exchanged views on the current situation and prospects, including preserving the operational capacity of the central bank system so as to improve the financial stability and economic and social outcomes for the Yemeni people.”
