SANAA: President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who said Monday he will only quit if defeated in elections despite protests, has ruled Yemen for more than three decades, making him one of the Middle East's great survivors.
Saleh has outlived the Cold War division, civil war and an al Qaeda insurgency but is now scrambling to see his term through to the end as sustained popular uprisings in Sanaa and Aden test his grip on power.
"If they want me to quit, I will only leave through the ballot box," Saleh told a news conference on Monday as thousands of protesters, including opposition MPs, gathered outside Sanaa University to demand his departure.
Protests -- a common feature of Yemen's fractured political landscape -- gained momentum in Sanaa and the port city of Aden after similar uprisings ousted veteran leaders in Tunisia and Egypt already this year.
The veteran strongman had already pledged not to seek re-election after the expiry in 2013 of his current seven-year term as head of the impoverished country, and has made other concessions aimed at stemming popular discontent.
Earlier, Saleh said he was opposed to hereditary rule, in response to suspicion among critics that the father of seven, who came to power at the head of a republican movement, was grooming his eldest son Ahmed Saleh, who commands an elite unit of the Yemeni army, to succeed him as president.
Born in 1942, Saleh has made himself a key partner in the US war on terror, and has faced and survived many other battles, both military and political, in the course of his rule.
His career has been a remarkably long one -- of his four predecessors, two were assassinated and two went into exile after coups.
Saleh first took power at the height of the Cold War as leader of the then Arab nationalist North Yemen, and in 1990, he successfully steered the country to reunification with the communist south.
He has since managed to survive a succession of crises, including Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when Saudi Arabia punished Yemen, its southern neighbour, for siding with Iraq.
Riyadh expelled some 700,000 Yemeni expatriate workers, depriving their poor country of remittances that constituted one of its main revenue sources.
In 1994, the south launched a secession bid, sparking a short-lived civil war. Saleh crushed the uprising, sealing the country's reunification under his unbridled leadership.
The south, where many residents complain of discrimination by Saleh's regime in the distribution of resources, is still the site of frequent secessionist protests.
And since 2004, Saleh has faced a sporadic rebellion in the northern mountains by members of the Zaidi Shiite minority, a community to which he himself belongs.
The conflict escalated in August 2009 before a fragile truce came into force in February 2010.
Saleh has also had to contend with an insurgency by Al-Qaeda's local franchise and has come under enormous international pressure to crack down on the group's militants.
Saleh's rule relies on the army and his General People's Congress, an amalgam of civil servants and local notables, as well as a careful balancing act among Yemen's rival tribes, which still form the backbone of society.
His ability to juggle so many different groups for so long in a country as complex as Yemen shows what a master tactician he is.
Following Yemen's unification, Saleh launched a cautious reform process, introducing a multi-party system and giving the press a margin of freedom, although in a mainly illiterate society his tight grip on the state broadcast media long allowed him to keep control of his subjects' access to information.
He organised parliamentary elections in 1993, 1997 and 2003, and a previous presidential vote in 1999 in which official results awarded him 96.3 percent of the ballots.
He won his current seven-year term in September 2006 with 77 percent of the vote, once more outliving his own experiment in democratisation amid widespread charges of fraud.
A stocky figure with piercing eyes and a moustache, Saleh has no trouble replacing his military uniform with elegant suits. Sometimes he wears the traditional dress of a long robe and jambiya, or dagger, tucked into his belt.
With only a limited education, he joined the army at an early age and took part in the 1962 coup that replaced the Zaidi imamate with an Arab nationalist republic.
His leadership skills were quickly noticed and enabled him to climb the ladder of power in short order.
After the June 1978 assassination of president Ahmad al-Ghashmi, Saleh was elected northern president by a constituent assembly.
He immediately surrounded himself with a circle of close aides, notably his brothers, whom he named to key military and security posts.
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