Aden Falls, South Vows to Fight On

SANAA -- Northern Yemeni forces Thursday gained complete control of the last southern bastion of Aden, crushing southern bids to recreate an independent state. But Southern leaders, who fled the city after its capture by northern forces, vowed to regroup and pursue the war against the north, a southern official said.An official government source in Sanaa said a "popular uprising" had taken place in districts in the central Aden peninsula that remained in the hands of supporters of southern Yemeni leader Ali Salem al-Baidh. "The citizens of Aden stormed military camps, prisons and police stations. They forced the rebels to lay down their arms and handed these arms in turn to the forces of legality," he said of the northerners that consider themselves the only legitimate authority in Yemen. He said police forces were patrolling the seized districts and "government troops confined themselves to barracks."Correspondents visiting the city late Thursday reported no fighting and no signs of resistance.Central Aden had been crammed with heavily-armed supporters of Baidh's Yemen Socialist party, which ruled south Yemen until unity with President Ali Abdulla Saleh's north in 1990. Northern forces now control Aden and the south's only other sizeable city, Mukalla in the east, after the north's two-month campaign to force the breakaway south back into the union forged from the two Yemeni republics four years ago. Residents of Aden had said that following the northern takeover Wednesday of all Aden districts on the mainland outside the central peninsula, Saleh's forces halted their advance, perhaps to allow the southern leaders to leave.A spokesman for the Sanaa government had earlier urged rebels in central Aden "to stop fighting, halt firing, surrender their arms and take advantage of the general amnesty law."He was referring to a law that the northern government issued on May 23 -- two days after Baidh declared a breakaway state in the south -- providing for general amnesty to all those who break ranks with the rebels to join Saleh's forces. The amnesty law excluded 16 top southerners led by Baidh, Saleh's former vice-president, who the north says are traitors and should stand trial or leave the country. Political sources said the amnesty pledge aimed at persuading secessionists to give up what one said was "a lost and meaningless battle" and to dispel "any fears which the residents of Aden might still harbor of reprisals by the government forces."The south's top leaders had fled Aden late Wednesday and Baidh was reported to have taken refuge in rugged mountains in the eastern Hadramawt region after fleeing his Mukalla base. But Deputy Prime Minister Mohsen Farid of the southern breakaway government, contacted by telephone in Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, gave no hint of plans to give up the military struggle:"The war is not over," he said. "We will regroup and continue the struggle by all possible means." Since the start of the war on May 4 Saleh has been pushing to topple Baidh, who had been defying his presidential authority for more than a year and demanding a looser north-south union. Southerners led by Baidh argued Saleh's diehard conservative northerners, who outnumber southerners by five-to-one, were trying to take over the south and change its more liberal ways, instead of maintaining a 50-50 partnership agreed in the merger. Aden residents said most people in the city, which has been without fresh water and food and short of essential medicines for more than two weeks, simply wanted a return to normal. Northern soldiers who entered north Aden on Wednesday brought water and fresh fruit supplies, residents said. An Arab League mission, led by Mohammed Said Bereqdar, the league's assistant secretary-general for military affairs, left Cairo for Yemen on Thursday, probably too late to achieve any of a mission aimed at mediating a truce in the war.