The General People’s Congress (GPC) presented its conception of the southern issue’s components on Tuesday.

At the NDC’s Southern Issue Working Group Tuesday meeting, GPC representative Yasser Al-Awadi said the issue amounted to a popular movement representative of all societal segments in Yemen’s southern and eastern regions.

He added, however, that the issue did not represent conflict between Yemen’s north and south.

According to Al-Awadi, the southern issue arose in response to political conflicts during the Yemeni state’s developmental stages. He also traced the southern issue’s rise in significance to mistakes by southern political groups both before and after the achievement of national unity.

Other factors cited by the GPC representative included the very ‘modernity’ of post-unity democracy and a low awareness of national unity’s inherent value.

Voicing his party’s take on the issue, Al-Awadi said that demands for rights later turned into channels for political ambitions, with unity itself left to suffer when southern factions began calling for secession.