COMPETITIVE BID:

Technocrat Recasts Yemen's Presidential Race, Political Future (Faiza Saleh Ambah, 9/20/06, Washington Post)

When Faisal bin Shamlan was approached several months ago by a coalition of opposition groups to run in this week's presidential election, he turned down the offer. The 72-year-old economist, who had resigned as oil minister to protest corruption, was enjoying his days reading and going on long, solitary walks. Running against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, in power for more than 28 years, would be an arduous journey better suited to a younger, more energetic man, he believed.

When bin Shamlan subsequently changed his mind, it turned what was set to be a conventional, lackluster exercise into the most competitive presidential election in the Arab world -- a far cry from 1999, when Saleh was pitted against a low-ranking member of his own party and won with 96 percent of the vote.

More important, his decision has been a boon for democracy in Yemen and set up a key test for reform in the region. By going up against an all-powerful president who has maintained his grip on the country for almost three decades, bin Shamlan broke a barrier of fear. [...]

The organization backing bin Shamlan, the Joint Meeting Parties, is an alliance of five opposition groups that includes the powerful religious party known as Islah and the Yemeni Socialist Party. The disparate partners put their ideological differences aside and formed the alliance in 2004 for the sole purpose of initiating political reform, says Islah's assistant secretary general, Abdul-Wahab al-Anisi.

"We subordinated our ideological agendas to the one thing we all had in common, which was a realization that political reform was a necessity if we were to save democracy in Yemen and stop the country's descent into endemic corruption," he said.

Bin Shamlan was chosen after much deliberation, Anisi said, because of his reputation for competence and, more important, honesty -- rare in Yemeni politics.