People gather as fire engulfs a tent camp for anti-government protesters in the southern Yemeni port city of Aden late Saturday. — Reuters ADEN — Southern separatists in Yemen set fire to a tent camp housing anti-government protesters in the port city of Aden, witnesses said on Sunday, in opposition to an election this month to replace outgoing President Ali Abdullah Saleh. Southern separatists joined protesters calling for Saleh to leave last year, but the two sides have since grown apart. The separatists want to revive a southern socialist state that was united with the north in 1990. They fear the Feb. 21 election will not serve their goal. Anti-Saleh demonstrators broadly back the vote as a step toward ending his 33-year rule. Witnesses said hundreds of separatists marched through Aden, in southern Yemen, late on Saturday, setting fire to tents in the camp of about 100 protesters. About 10 people were injured. Weakened by months of protests, the Yemeni government has lost control of whole chunks of the country. The Southern separatists accuse northerners of monopolising power and usurping their resources. Three separatist groups issued a statement denouncing the tent camp attack as a northern ploy to weaken the southern campaign for independence. “We ask all sides not to be dragged into a colonialist plot aimed at turning the struggle of our people against the (northern) colonizer into a south-south struggle,” they said in a statement. Saleh's forces crushed a southern attempt to break away in 1994. Islamist militants executed early on Sunday three men they accused of giving the United States information used to carry out drone strikes in the area, a spokesman for the group said in a text message. Meanwhile, Al-Qaeda's Yemen branch, strongly active in the south of the impoverished nation, executed two of its members on Sunday accusing them of spying on its operations, witnesses said. The pair were accused of planting tracking devices in the vehicles of fellow Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula militants and of providing Yemeni authorities, and the Saudi and US intelligence services, with information.
