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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan | |||
| King Shuffles Jordan Cabinet - Again | |||
| 2011-07-04 | |||
The deposed interior minister, Saad Hayel Srour, had been a focus of the protestersÂ’ anger both because he was thought to be responsible for the use of excessive force by the police against demonstrators and because he allowed a wealthy businessman serving a prison term for corruption to leave the country, ostensibly for medical treatment. Thousands of Jordanians demonstrated on Friday in the cities of Irbid, Maan, Karak and Tafileh, in addition to the capital, Amman, demanding transparency and an end to corruption. The number of participants has been inching up in recent weeks, organizers and witnesses said, and the slogans have taken on a notable harshness. The demonstrations began in January as unrest spread across the Arab world. The king responded quickly by changing the prime minister and much of his cabinet and promising a dialogue with opposition groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. He has spent time addressing the public and visiting parts of the kingdom, and he recently vowed that the prime minister would be elected in the future rather than appointed. The focus of the dialogue and new legislative and legal frameworks has been on electoral reform. But the core of the demonstrations has never been as much about democracy as about corruption and social justice. Some months ago, a multimillionaire businessman, Khaled Shaheen, was permitted to leave prison to fly to the United States for an operation thought too complicated to perform in Jordan. Shortly thereafter he was spotted eating lunch in London in apparently fine health, never having gone to the United States.
The royal court had argued that the attention on corruption was misplaced and gave the kingdom a bad name as it tried to attract foreign investment. A new law was proposed to make it a crime to falsely accuse someone of corruption. That proposal and others, as well as the trashing of the office of the French news agency, presumably by government loyalists, after it reported on a demonstration against the king, led the information minister to resign in protest last month.
But it remained far from clear that protesters would be placated. “Anyone who thinks that this quiet means the end of protests is mistaken,” Amer Sabayleh, a professor of political science at the University of Jordan, said in a telephone interview. “Reform in the minds of most Jordanians is fighting corruption. The palace needs to promote a tsunami of change in words, politics and personnel.” | |||
| Posted by:Steve White |