(MENAFN- The Peninsula) Nobel peace laureate and political activist from Yemen Tawakkol Karman said yesterday that her country will eventually overcome the fierce sectarian conflicts and remain united.
"Many people think that Yemen is going to collapse. Yemeni people have a long history of resistance and they will stand united," Karman said, speaking at a panel session at the Al Jazeera Forum which opened at St Regis Hotel yesterday.
She said as a solution to the crisis, all militias in Yemen must be disarmed. Only the government has the right to keep and handle weapons.
"Houthis must change into a political party and participate in the political process. There must be a just transition of power and legal action should be taken against all criminals. This is the only way to build a modern civil state," said Karman.
She disagreed with the view that the Arab revolutions have ended. "The Arab Spring has not failed. The revolution will continue. It is the dream of the Arab youth, said Karman.
She added that the Arab Spring is testing who has the strongest resilience and durability to achieve the full Arab Spring. Karman added that the region must work together to put an end to conflict.
The panel discussion was titled the "regional and international scope of conflict in the Arab world". "The Arab Spring or more the Arab Awakening is about justice," said Nikolay Mladenov, UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process.
Mladenov spoke about the false sense of stability that the Arab regimes demonstrated in the past. Mladenov added that people fail to recognise that the Arab region in itself is a key player in the power game and not the countries in it necessarily. "To help the Arab world, we need to fix or strengthen the institutions of the regions," he said.
Ayman Nour, founder of El Ghad Party in Egypt, started his speech challenging the title of the forum, "conflict and change in the Arab world", saying that in the Arab world, change comes first and then comes the conflict and struggles of dealing with it.
He spoke about the change being the vehicle and not the goal using the romanticism of the Arabs to the idea of revolutions.
"We did not realise that our romanticised dreams were hit with reality" in approaching the "new east" that we wanted to believe in."
Khalid Salah, the head of media relations for the Syrian National Coalition, said that the essential problem lies in the mentality of the country that believes in the change that will magically happen rather than being actively achieved.
Hassan Ahmadian, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic Research in Iran, talked about four pillars important to this region: Reducing regional dynamism; preserving the status-quo in the Middle East; creating a win-win situation in the Middle East with a constructive cooperation plan for the entire region; and diffusion of "Iranophobia".
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