Jordan Times
Sunday, October 18, 1998
Government, professional unions hold first meeting of 'national dialogue' today
By Francesca Ciriaci
AMMAN — The government today will hold talks with professional
unions' leaders in the first meeting of a national dialogue that has already drawn
criticism from two expected major players over the exclusion of controversial topics from
its agenda.
The government dialogue committee, headed by Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh, has been
working for the past two weeks on the agenda and time-frame for the dialogue, but union
leaders and the country's strongest political party, the Islamic Action Front, yesterday
questioned the government's strategy and expressed scepticism that the meeting would
achieve any results.
Official statements that amendments to the press and elections laws would not be on the
agenda of the projected dialogue cast a shadow over the eve of the meeting between the
government and the country's 13 syndicates, traditionally a hotbed for the opposition.
The Council of Presidents of Professional Associations, representing 80,000 members,
declined to issue an official statement after a preparatory meeting yesterday, “in a
bid not to spoil the atmosphere ahead of such an important meeting and to give the
government the benefit of the doubt.”
But union leaders privately were highly critical of a statement by Interior Minister Nayef
Qadi to the Arabic daily Al Ra'i on Saturday that “the press and publications and the
elections laws will not be subject to discussion during the series of meetings held by the
various sub-committees.”
“These laws were extensively debated in Parliament and by the various parties before
they were endorsed... the press and publications laws have become part and parcel of our
lives after they passed through the legislative and legal process, and we have to respect
and adhere to them,” Qadi was quoted as saying.
In a press statement issued yesterday, the IAF said it “has been following with
interest [the government's initiatives] on the national dialogue, but did not find
anything but points raising our concerns, especially statements by the premier on
fragmenting the dialogue, and statements by the interior minister scratching the press and
elections laws from the agenda.”
The IAF warned that the projected dialogue would be “meaningless, unless all
representatives of the national conscience contribute to working out the concept,
mechanism, contents, and participants in the dialogue.”
Describing dialogue along the lines set by the government as “worthless,” the
IAF asked the Cabinet to freeze all decisions on the issue “until an agreement can be
reached.”
The government dialogue committee, which includes seven ministers, has established seven
sub-committees entrusted with dealing with various public sectors, from the professional
and labour unions to women's unions, political parties, and other social and economic
activists.
The professional associations and Islamists have led a five-year campaign against the
one-person, one-vote system, introduced ahead of the 1993 parliamentary elections, on the
grounds that the electoral formula unfairly targets political parties and Islamist
candidates.
The opposition also fiercely protested against the controversial press law, endorsed by
Parliament in an extraordinary session this summer and described as restrictive by
international human rights watch-dogs.
The elections law and an allegedly low ceiling of public freedoms were among the reasons
cited by the professional unions and the Islamist-led opposition for their boycott of last
November's general elections.
“The government has declared the elections and press laws off limits,” the
president of one of the country's most influential syndicates told the Jordan Times
yesterday.
“This is not a good start. We knew the government would have the upper hand in
deciding the agenda and mechanism [for the dialogue]. But we hoped it would have left some
room for compromise,” he said.
Some centrist and moderate opposition groups have called for a new law to govern the 2001
elections that while retaining the one-person, one-vote system, would also allocate Lower
House seats to political parties on a proportional basis. Prior to the government's
announcement limiting the agenda, some analysts said such a law could have been a possible
outcome of the dialogue.