Amman Dispatch: Slide Rule
Even before September 11, the United States wasn't exactly finding the Arab world to be a font of good news. The governments supposedly allied with the United States--in particular, Egypt and Saudi Arabia--seemed weak in their support for the war on terrorism, not to mention just plain weak. Reports from both Cairo and Riyadh made it clear that corruption and repression were endemic, which turned the hopeless masses to jihad, which forced the regimes to distance themselves from Washington. After the World Trade Center fell, Hosni Mubarak and Prince Abdullah expressed regret, and then quickly began equivocating about America's response. Mubarak said the war should end soon; Abdullah refused to grant the United States permission to launch air strikes from its base outside Riyadh.
The only bright spot was Jordan. In late September, King Abdullah II promised President Bush that the Hashemite kingdom would stand with the United States in the "fight against evil." And, perhaps even more importantly, it looked like the young, energetic, reformist king might be able to bring his people along. Since Abdullah's ascension to the throne in 1999, Western statesmen have made frequent pilgrimages to Amman to praise him as a vital bulwark for secularism and stability. And that enthusiasm has only grown since 9/11. In late September, Bush described Abdullah as a "strong friend of America" after signing a hastily passed free trade agreement with Jordan--making the Hashemite monarchy only the fourth country in the world to have such a deal with the United States.
Which makes it all the more depressing that in Jordan, too, fundamentalism is on the march -- and for all the familiar reasons. The terrorist attacks, which have made Osama bin Laden a hero among even moderate Jordanians, merely exacerbated the popular shift toward fundamentalism that economic stagnation and government corruption had already catalyzed. "I always thought the monarchy was secure by default," says one Jordanian scholar. "But the reality of the Hashemites is the bankruptcy of the country."
To some degree, Jordan has the same problem as the rest of the Arab world: hordes of disenfranchised, unemployed, hopeless young men susceptible to poaching by extremist groups. Take Saeed Hotary, a 22-year-old electrician from Zarqa, who left home two years ago to look for work in the West Bank. Having failed to find employment, Hotary settled for divinity: On June 1, according to the Associated Press, he blew himself up in front of a Tel Aviv disco, killing 21 Israeli teenagers and injuring 90 others. Until then Hotary had no record of political activity.
Islamic political groups in Jordan say their membership has grown by more than 20 percent in the last two years. In Amman, Jordan University, once an elite academy for secular thought, is crowded with veiled female students. In the country's impoverished southern district of Maan, there is little new construction except for mosques, some with minarets made of nothing more than steel bars.
But, in some ways, Jordan's troubles are even worse. All over the Middle East, Arabs admire bin Laden's support for the Palestinian cause. But no other Arab country borders the West Bank, and no other Arab country boasts a Palestinian majority. So it's not surprising that in coffeehouses and mosques throughout the country, bin Laden is celebrated as an Arab hero, alongside the early Islamic caliphs and Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. Even many Christian Jordanians sympathize with his objectives, if not his methods. "Bin Laden has the courage to say things other leaders won't," says Nida Zreikat, a 22-year-old Christian who works in a beauty salon in an upscale section of Amman. "He is the only one telling the Americans to leave the Arabs alone and stop [Israel] from killing Palestinians.... Why shouldn't I admire him?"
King Abdullah, by contrast, is widely associated with the country's debilitated economy and with America's support for Israel. A 39-year-old product of Western boarding schools and universities, Abdullah assumed the throne after his father, King Hussein, passed away in February 1999. He inherited a kingdom whose per capita income had grown only 1.1 percent over the previous decade, but whose population had grown more than 4 percent.
Abdullah's answer to these economic woes has been to try to turn Jordan into a Singapore-style center for information technology. It's the kind of rhetoric that goes over extremely well in the American press. Unfortunately, it's not going over nearly as well in Jordan. The much-anticipated foreign investment has not come. Jordan's total debt, at just over $8 billion, remains almost as high as its gross domestic product. The official unemployment rate is 14 percent, but private economists estimate it to be as high as 20 or 30 percent. Confidence in Jordan's banking system is so low that most companies refuse to do business on credit. Few businessmen and private economists believe the economy grew at all last year, let alone by the 3.9 percent rate the government claims. "I'd say the economy shrank by a full percent," says Labib Kamhawi, an opposition lawmaker and businessmen. "Economic malaise is becoming a permanent condition." When Fawaz Hatim Zu'bi, Abdullah's communications minister and the point man in the high-tech effort, first took office one year ago, he discovered that 83 percent of his staff didn't have a high school degree. He would consider cutting the ministry's payroll by half, he says, "but then I'll have a revolution on my hands."
In the West, Abdullah is viewed as a good-government reformer. But at home many observers say high-level extravagance and corruption has grown worse. Eyebrows cocked just over a year ago when Ole Holdings, a Dubai-based food-processing and auto distribution company, won a lucrative contract to supply the government with BMWs and Land Rovers. Ole Holdings is owned by the Shaheen family, which has close ties to the palace. "The Shaheens are the talk of the town," says Farouq Kilani, an attorney and proponent of judicial reform. "There is decay in the judicial system, and it's going to get worse."
As elsewhere in the Middle East, increased public frustration has led to increased government repression. In May hundreds of Jordanians took to the streets of Amman to protest, among other things, Israel's deadly use of force against the Palestinians. In a bitter irony, police in full riot gear beat back protesters with truncheons, tear gas, and attack dogs. "Even during martial law [in the Gulf war], things were never this bad," said Abdullateef Arabiyat, secretary general of Jordan's Islamic Action Front Party. "They had dogs and hit women.... This is the most violent response to a peaceful demonstration that I remember."
Security officials also arrested journalists and confiscated their videocassettes. A man and his son were arrested for allowing a cameraman to film from the rooftop of their home. Indeed, government detainment and interrogation of the independent media has become widespread enough to earn a euphemism: being "asked in for coffee," an invitation that has been extended to the Amman-based correspondents for Western news agencies--who are all Jordanian citizens--in the past year. Maybe now they'll start informing their Western audiences that things in Jordan aren't quite as hopeful as they've been led to believe.
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