Jordan premier under fresh pressure to resign

By ABDUL JALIL MUSTAFA | ARAB NEWS
May 27, 2011

AMMAN: Hundreds of Jordanians demonstrated in Tafileh, 180 km south of Amman, on Friday demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit’s government, eyewitnesses said.

The protesters also urged the dissolution of the lower house of Parliament and severing diplomatic ties with Israel.

“The people want the resignation of Bakhit,” one of the slogans chanted said. Another read “You should step down, Bakhit, because you have no intention of conducting reforms”.

The demonstrators celebrated the resignation on Thursday of the Justice Minister Hussein Megalli and Health Minister Yassin Hosban.

Bakhit told a press conference on Thursday the two ministers resigned in connection with the illegal departure from the country on Feb. 25 of the convicted businessman Khalid Shahin.

However, the two ministers indicated in remarks to the local media that their quitting from the Cabinet had nothing today with Shahin’s affair which dominated local politics over the past three month.

Shahin, who is currently in London, was serving a three-year jail term when the authorities caught the public opinion with surprise by declaring that he was allowed to travel abroad to receive medical treatment which he lacked locally.

Bakhit apparently had ordered the two ministers to submit their resignation after King Abdallah sent him a strongly-worded letter ordering him to take “transparent legal steps” to punish those were involved in corruption cases that surfaced recently, political sources said.

In his resignation letter to Bakhit, Megalli said he had decided to step down “after he found the government’s priorities in disarray and the path of reform deadlocked”.

The demonstrators in Tafileh also burned an Israeli flag and urged the abrogation of the peace treaty with Israel.

They said that they were responding to a move by the extremist member of the Israeli Knesset, Arieh Eldad, who on Monday approached the Jordanian Embassy in Israel with a petition calling on King Abdallah to set up a Palestinian state in Jordan instead of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

The Jordanian diplomatic mission refused to receive the document and called Israeli police who removed Eldad, a member of the National Union Party, from the area.

A similar demonstration was also staged after Friday prayers in the city of Maan, 210 km south of Amman.

Source: Arab News.
Link: http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article434739.ece.