Jordan Times
Tuesday, August 25, 1998
Opposition divided on direction of dialogue following Regent's meeting with
Brotherhood
By Francesca Ciriaci
AMMAN — The opposition welcomed Sunday's meeting between HRH Crown
Prince Hassan, the Regent, and Muslim Brotherhood leaders, but was divided on the
priorities on the agenda and the means for the resumption of a national dialogue.
While the powerful Muslim Brotherhood remained entrenched behind its demands for freezing
the 1994 Wadi Araba treaty and halting normalisation with Israel, other opposition
parties, including the Brotherhood's political arm, the Islamic Action Front (IAF),
extended an open hand to the newly-appointed government of Fayez Tarawneh and declared
their readiness to engage in constructive talks for the advancement of democracy.
“We welcome [Sunday's] meeting with Crown Prince Hassan,” said the Brotherhood's
overall leader, Abdul Majeed Thneibat.
“But we stress that we want a dialogue that would lead to solutions to the problems
we presented, not a dialogue for the sake of dialogue.”
During the meeting, Thneibat presented the Regent with a memorandum clarifying the
Brotherhood's views on a host of political, economic and social issues.
“We demanded more public freedoms through changes to the press and election
laws,” Thneibat told the Jordan Times in a telephone interview on Monday.
“[The memorandum] also asked for re-examining the investment law, which we believe
threatens the country's security by removing all barriers to foreign [and Israeli]
investments.”
“We demand that normalisation be halted in order to improve relations with other Arab
states, and Wadi Araba be frozen, because it is greatly harming national unity,” he
said.
Prince Hassan's meeting with Thneibat and the Muslim Brotherhood's executive committee,
the first such public meeting since 1995, conformed with the Hashemite policy of
maintaining dialogue with all shades and sectors of society — a phenomenon which
analysts agree is a rarity in this region.
Thneibat said the meeting was only the first of a series of projected exchanges aimed at
breaking the 11-month deadlock in government-opposition relations.
“The Regent promised to read the memorandum and meet [with us] again,” said
Thneibat.
In contrast with the Brotherhood's “wait and see” attitude, opposition party
leaders voiced their enthusiasm for the Regent's move and his declared intent to meet in
the coming days with representatives of different parties, unions and other civic
institutions as well as journalists.
Only one day after Prince Hassan's meeting with the Brotherhood, many party leaders said
they had already started drafting possible memoranda to forward to the Regent or the
government as a basis for a national dialogue.
Normalisation of ties with Israel — the thorny issue in government-opposition
relations for the past four years — seems to have dropped down on the list of
concerns of opposition parties, which are now concentrating on domestic issues.
“Freedoms and democracy first of all,” Abdul Latif Arabiyat, secretary general
of the Islamic Action Front (IAF), told the Jordan Times on Monday.
The IAF, Jordan's strongest party by far, stated that a serious dialogue with the
government should start with charting ways and means of raising the ceiling of public
freedoms, which it said received a heavy blow with the one-person, one-vote electoral
system introduced in 1993 and the “draconian” press bill, endorsed by Parliament
last week and still awaiting Royal ratification.
“Recent issues such as water and food security for all citizens” come next on
the agenda that the IAF would like to discuss in a possible meeting with the Regent,
Arabiyat said.
Then, “there is the need for enhancing relations with our Muslim and Arab
brothers,” said Arabiyat, citing embargo-stricken Iraq and Sudan. However, he did not
mention the Kingdom's relations with Israel.
“Surely leadership and opposition have their differences, especially when it comes to
relations with Israel, but we need to move on and build on our common goals,” said
Deputy Mohammad Ouran (Tafileh), who is also secretary general of the leftist Arab Land
Party.
“[The opposition] cannot just sit aside and criticise relations with Israel. We can
participate in solving other matters, such as poverty, unemployment and freedoms,”
said Ouran.
At a meeting with deputies, senators, and members of the newly-appointed cabinet of Fayez
Tarawneh on Saturday, Prince Hassan had declared that the doors of the Royal Palace would
be open for responsible dialogue with all parties.
King Hussein had previously indicated the resumption of a national dialogue as one of the
tasks of the new government in his letter of designation to Tarawneh late last week.
The outgoing government of Abdul Salam Majali had failed to resume dialogue with the
opposition since the latter's boycott of the November 1997 general elections.
“It is still too early to say whether a dialogue will succeed, but we are optimistic
because this government not only seems more willing [to engage in a dialogue] than the
previous one, but it has also received a clear mandate to this extent,” said the
secretary general of the Jordan Communist Party (JCP), Munir Hamarneh.
Opposition leaders ranged from cautiously to openly optimistic in predicting the course of
pluralism and public freedoms under the Tarawneh government, which includes a younger
generation of politicians.
“It is a promising start: His Majesty's letter of designation and Tarawneh's reply
[to the King's letter], in addition to the Regent's meeting with the Brotherhood and the
announcement that such meetings will continue with other parties, all raise hopes that a
solid dialogue will start,” said Arabiyat.
“We will wait and see, but we are hopeful,” said Suleiman Arar, secretary
general of the pan-Arabist Al Mustaqbal.