SAN'A, Yemen, Sep. 5, 2007

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(AP) Riot police fired bullets and used tear gas and water cannons Tuesday to disperse thousands of protesters demanding the release of more than 200 veterans and their sympathizers detained for protesting earlier this month, a police official said.

The protesters are mostly southern Yemeni veterans who lost their jobs after a defeat by northern forces in a civil war 13 years ago.

Yemen's top security body warned that "any party, movement, group or individual who stages or carries slogans that put national unity in peril, or calls for destruction of national unity, will be tried as a traitor."

Traitors face the death penalty under Yemen's constitution.

Nasser Ba Quzquz, head of the opposition Tagammu Union Party in the southern province of Hadramawt, where demonstrators protested in several cities Tuesday, said the demonstrations will continue regardless of authorities' threats.

North and South Yemen were united in 1990, with the north's president becoming the united country's president. In 1994, rebels announced the secession of the south, and battled northern forces for several months in a civil war that ended in their defeat.

Southerners complain that they are kept out of government jobs _ a main source of employment in the south _ in favor of northerners brought in to fill the bureaucracy and security forces. Northerners also continue to hold large tracts of land in the south granted to them after the civil war.

The demonstrations started in August and have been taking place daily.

Yemen was a haven for Islamists from across the Arab world during the 1990s, but after the Sept. 11 attacks, it declared support for the U.S. campaign against terrorism.