Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Thursday asked leaders of the 1994 failed secessionist rebellion to return home from self- imposed exile following a brief civil war. 'We welcome the opposition leaders who live abroad to come back and exercise their political rights,' Saleh said in a speech he delivered in the southern port city of Aden marking the 40th anniversary of southern Yemen's independence from the British occupation. 'We should open a new chapter in our political work,' Saleh said, without naming any of the exiled leaders. Senior government officials told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa that Saleh's call was addressed to his former deputy, Ali Salim al-Beedh and former prime minister Haidar al-Attas. Al-Beedh has served as vice president of the Democratic Republic of Yemen, declared in May 1994 by breakaway politicians in the southern part of Yemen only four years after the reunification of the north and south. The secession was rejected by the central government in Sana'a and went unrecognized by the international community. The attempt was quashed by forces of President Saleh after a ten- week war in which more than 10,000 people were killed.
Al-Beedh and al-Attas and 14 other top secessionist leaders fled to Syria, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Oman and the United Kingdom. They were among four southern leaders who received death sentences in absentia by a state security court in 1997.
In the aftermath of the war, Saleh announced a general amnesty, which applied to nearly 8,000 southerners who left the country after the war, but not for the 16 top dissidents. Most of the breakaway politicians who led the secession attempt were leaders of the communist Yemeni Socialist Party that ruled Southern Yemen for nearly 20 years, and shared authority with Saleh's General People's Congress party in a unity government after 1990.