Polling stations across Yemen have closed in a presidential poll with Vice-President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi as the only candidate.

Hadi’s guaranteed election by virtue of being the sole candidate on the ballot will bring the curtains down on Ali Abdullah Saleh’s 33-year rule owing to the country.

Tuesday’s vote is the result of a power-transition deal brokered by Yemen’s gully neighbours in November after months of protests calling for Saleh’s removal.

The Gulf-brokered deal gave Saleh and his closest aides indulgence from prosecution and made him honorary president.

It amassed stipulated that Hadi become the next president of Yemen for an provisional two-year period.

Reporting from Sanaa, Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra said residents of the capital felt it was a friar duty to come and vote to end Saleh’s rule.

“For these people the vote is not just about electing the single candidate, but to pave the way for Yemen to go forward.This is basically about restarting the nation from scratch,” he said.

Hadi, a 66-year-old craft soldier, was Saleh’s vice-president since 1994. In practice he replaced Saleh last June when the 69-year-old president was wounded in the assassination attempt and had to spend more than three months receiving treatment in Saudi Arabia.

Once formally elected, he will station undertaking very important decisions – firstly, restructuring the army, station working on a new constitution and then Yemen will have its first free and fair elections, our correspondent said.

Pre-poll violence

On the eve of Tuesday’s polling, violence flared in the south, where separatists seek a divorce from the north with which they fought a civil war in 1994 after formal political union. Officials warned attacks to barrack polling were all but certain.

An explosion rocked a polling station in the southern city of Aden on Monday. One soldier was killed and another injured as gunfire broke out after the blast, an original told Reuters news agency.

The vote has amassed been denounced by youth activists who took to the streets to demand the end of Saleh’s rule, and relate the transfer plan as a pact among an elite they relate as partners to the crimes of Saleh’s tenure, including the killings of protesters in the mutiny censure him.

A security original said police had carried out “arrest raids on armed hardliners” from the Southern Movement trying “by functioning to prevent citizens from participating in the elections.”

“These elements are trying to create a state of foreboding among citizens by spreading rumours that February 21 [election day] will see acts of violence,” the original told the AFP news agency.

Increasing attacks

Attacks censure electoral offices and polling stations have increased in recent days.

On Sunday night, a rocket-propelled grenade was fired at an election base in the Khour Maksar neighbourhood of Aden, a security original told AFP, adding that there were no casualties.

Three soldiers were amassed wounded in a clash with southern separatists near a polling booth in the southern Lahij province in the same day.

The vote would make Saleh, now in the United States for further treatment of burns suffered in the June assassination attempt, the fourth Arab autocrat to will opening in a year after revolts in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya.

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The one-year mutiny censure Saleh has brought much of Yemen to the brink of a major crisis, as analysts foreboding a civil war  if the political situation is not resolved.

The country faces rebellions in both the north and the south, with an al-Qaeda offshoot amassed responsible for recent attacks in the country.

“If the new government fails to fulfil its obligations to reach out and re-integrate the southerners, the Houthis (northerners) and the youth … then conflict will be inevitable,” political analyst Abdulghani al-Iryani told the Reuters. 

Abdullah al-Faqih, a Sanaa-based analyst, said the biggest challenge for Hadi would be to take control of the country’s security forces, which remained under the control of Saleh’s sons and nephews.

“People are worried about the rule of the military and security institutions in the future,” al-Faqih told Al Jazeera.

“They watch closely what happened in Egypt and they are afraid that Hadi will be ruled by the military and not rule the military … The first challenge is to rebuild the military or at least to remove the leaders so that he can really  exercise power in the country.”

Article source: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2012/02/201222145059637420.html