Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Sunday old opposition parties to ease street protest sit-ins and stop blocking roads and end assassinations if they want him to transfer power peacefully, the official Saba news agency reported.
"If the opposition Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) ends street protest sit-ins, stops blocking roads, ends assassination operations and lifts
rebellion inside some of the military units, then we will be ready to discuss the process of transferring power peacefully," Saba quoted Saleh as saying.
Saleh's brief response came a day after the opposition JMP offered him a fresh initiative dubbed as a "last chance" for Saleh to peacefully
move the power to his deputy.
In their new initiative issued late on Saturday, the JMP proposed five-point terms, under which the power will be transferred peacefully from President Saleh to Vice President Abdal-Rab Mansur Al-Hadii, who is a member of Saleh's ruling General People's Congress party.
They also stipulated that the temporary president would then restructure National Security Agency, the Central Security Forces and the Republican Guards Forces.
They proposed to form a transitional national council, rewrite the constitution and form a temporary national unity government led by
opposition in order to work with the interim president to fix the financial and economic problems in the country.
"Any attempt made by us is to restore the political process to its normal path, to find a safe exit for transferring the power and meet
the demands of the people, but the supporters of the regime used the country's resources to twist the fact and appealed to force and violence under the umbrella of popular support," the JMP said in the statement.
Scores of government officials, diplomats and security and military forces have recently defected from the government and joined the
protesters after the March 18 shootings that killed 52 protesters.
Opposition spokesman Mohamed Qahtan said that "the JMP's offer is the last chance for Saleh to smoothly leave and peacefully pass the power
to his deputy, whom the president described as the safe hands."
"If Saleh rejected such a proposal for him, he would then receive the hard decision from the youth-led street protesters," Qahtan added.
Earlier Sunday, around 200 anti-government protesters and eight policemen were wounded in clashes in the southern province of Taiz when the police tried to repel a march of thousands of protesters attempted to advance to the provincial government compound in Taiz city, a local police official told Xinhua.