Jordan opposition calls for government's resignation

By ABDUL JALIL MUSTAFA | ARAB NEWS
May 31, 2011

AMMAN: Jordan’s main opposition party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), and the country’s strongest pro-democracy coalition on Monday urged the resignation of Prime Minister Marouf Bakhit’s government for its failure to adopt the needed reforms.

“The way out of the deep crisis we experience lies in the formation of a national reform government, to be led by a national personality which believes in reforms and adopts a program with clear objectives, including the adoption of real, political and constitutional reforms,” the IAF said in a statement.

The IAF, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, considered last week’s resignation of two Cabinet ministers indicative of Bakhit’s failure to fight corruption and “the unprecedented political, economic and social crisis Jordan is grappling with.”

Bakhit said that the Justice Minister Hussein Megalli and Health Minister Yassin Hosban resigned on Thursday to concede responsibility for the ”mistakes” committed in their ministries that enabled the convicted businessman Khalid Shahin to flee from the country on Feb. 25.

In his resignation letter to the prime minister, Megalli said that he had decided to resign because he found the “path of reforms deadlocked.”

Local media on Monday expected more cabinet ministers to quit in connection with Shahin’s affair that dominated the thinking of the Jordanian public opinion over the past three months.

Shahin was serving a three-year jail term after the State Security Court found him guilty of bribery in his bid to obtain a 1.2-billion-dollar contract for the expansion of the country’s sole refinery.

The call for Bakhit’s resignation also came on Monday from the March 24 Youth group, which has set July 14 a date for a marathon rally to protest the failure to adopt the required political and constitutional reforms in the country, including an independent judiciary.

“We hereby promise our people that we will not back down in our struggle to accomplish radical reforms and disclose all corruption files and ensure punishment of those involved,” the gathering said in a strongly-worded statement.

Source: Arab News.
Link: http://arabnews.com/middleeast/article442229.ece.