Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan

His Majesty King Abdullah on Tuesday instructed the government to amend the Elections Law in preparation for the upcoming parliamentary elections.In a letter to Prime Minister Nader Dahabi, the King stressed that these elections “should be a model of transparency, fairness and integrity, and a promising step in our process of reform and modernisation, the aims of which are to achieve the best for our nation and to expand the horizon of progress and prosperity for Jordanians”.

“In order to achieve this objective, we hereby give you the responsibility of taking the necessary steps, foremost of which is amending the Elections Law,” the King said.

He also directed the government to develop the electoral process “in such a manner that the next legislative elections will be qualitatively improved and all Jordanians will practise their right to campaign and to elect their representatives in Parliament”.

The government is authorised to enact temporary laws under Article 94 of the Constitution, which stipulates: “In cases where the National Assembly is not sitting or is dissolved, the Council of Ministers has, with the approval of the King, the power to issue provisional laws covering matters which require necessary measures which admit of no delay or which necessitate expenditures incapable of postponement. Such provisional laws, which shall not be contrary to the provisions of the Constitution, shall have the force of law, provided that they are placed before the Assembly at the beginning of its next session.”

Opposition leaders across the spectrum hailed the decision and called for new, fair and free elections on the basis of a revised elections law (see story on page 3).

Linked to decentralisation

Analysts, intellectuals and former lawmakers agreed that the Elections Law is likely to be amended in connection with the decentralisation law, which they expect to be endorsed as a temporary law during Parliament’s suspension.

Former Deputy Mamdouh Abbadi said: “I believe the government will endorse the decentralisation legislation as a temporary law, and to conduct elections for the governorates’ councils before amending the Elections Law.”

However, Abbadi said such a process cannot be completed within the four-month time frame for electing a new Parliament as stipulated in the Constitution, implying that the dissolution of Parliament may be extended as sanctioned under Article 73, Paragraph 4 of the Constitution, which allows such an extension under extraordinary circumstances.

Political analyst Abdullah Abu Rumman agreed with Abbadi that the government is likely to endorse the decentralisation bill before the new election, noting that the proposed law entails a major change in the role of deputies.

Under the decentralisation law, governorates will be represented by councils, which Abu Rumman said will allow parliamentarians to focus on their national legislative and monitoring roles rather than securing services for their constituents. He said the government should make “qualitative improvements” to the Elections Law in order to ensure that deputies remain focused on their constitutional roles.

Al Ghad newspaper columnist Samih Maaitah also noted a link between the decentralisation plan and possible amendments to the Elections Law.

“No one can guess now what the expected modifications to the Elections Law are. But the upcoming law might be connected to the decentralisation plan,” Maaitah told The Jordan Times on Tuesday.

“If this was the scenario, the number of House representatives should be decreased, as the governorates will be represented in the governorates’ councils according to the proposed decentralisation law,” he added.

However, Maaitah said a strong political reform programme requires a strong government that can prepare for better elections, and expressed doubt that the current government is “strong enough to do so”.

“We have experienced the work of this government over the past two years, and there has been weakness in its performance. It has had internal and economic problems,” he said, adding that a Cabinet reshuffle alone will not solve the problem.

Saad Hayel Srour, a member of the recently dissolved Lower House, said: “The current law makes deputies hostages to demands for services from their constituents, and people have started to judge them based on what they provide for them and not on their legislative and monitoring performance.”

Changes to Elections Law

Srour told The Jordan Times yesterday that the Elections Law is one of several factors negatively impacting the quality of the Parliament, adding that redistributing seats among the electoral districts might help improve the chamber’s performance.

Meanwhile, other analysts and deputies called for cancelling the one-person, one-vote system.

In August 1993, Parliament passed an amendment to the Elections Law that adjusted Jordan’s electoral system to the principle of “one-person, one-vote”. The law ended the previous voting system, under which voters were entitled to as many votes as the number of parliamentary seats allocated for their district.

Former deputy Azzam Hneidi, a member of the Islamic Action Front, called for a “democratic and modern” law, suggesting that the current formula be replaced with a voting list system, under which citizens would vote for slates of candidates rather than individuals.

“If we want to have better legislative and monitoring performance in future Parliaments, the proposed elections law should end the one-vote system and the elections should be transparent, without the vote rigging that happened in some of the previous elections,” Hneidi told The Jordan Times.

Political analyst Oraib Rentawi warned that if the elections are conducted under the current system, the faces in Parliament may change but the performance will not.

Rentawi also called for establishing a higher commission to monitor the elections.

“Monitoring the elections should not be under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. There should be a high commission that monitors elections to avoid any attempt at fraud,” Rentawi explained.

Abu Rumman said, however, that election monitoring commissions are only formed in countries that are experiencing civil conflict, asserting that there is no need for such a measure in Jordan and calling the allegations of vote rigging in the last election “baseless”.

A Royal Decree was issued on Monday to dissolve the Lower House as of Tuesday, November 24.

A separate decree ordered that legislative elections be held in accordance with the existing Elections Law. No date has been set for the early vote. The Cabinet, which replied to the King’s letter vowing free and fair elections, met last night, but did not announce a date for the new polls.

His Majesty King Abdullah on Thursday inaugurated three five-star hotels and the Aqaba Logistics Village, which seek to leverage the status of the port city as a tourist attraction and a regional logistics centre.The hotels - Kempinski, Radisson Blu and Mövenpick Resort Tala Bay Aqaba - will provide around 1,500 jobs. They will also help draw larger numbers of tourists to Aqaba, especially as the city has been selected as the Arab Tourism Capital for 2011.

The logistics village was implemented by the Kuwait-based Public Warehousing Company (Agility) and the Central Logistics Company (Kawar Group) on a build, operate and transfer (BOT) basis, at a cost of around JD50 million.

Also yesterday, the King met with several Jordanian and Arab investors in the city.

During the meeting, the King stressed the need to develop methods to draw investments into the city so as to increase economic growth and launch projects that can benefit the local community as well as the national economy.

The King expressed pride in the accomplishments made despite challenges, voicing confidence in the possibility to achieve more through planned and institutionalised work.

During the meeting, also attended by HRH Prince Feisal, Royal Court Chief Nasser Lozi and the King’s Adviser Ayman Safadi, businessmen highlighted the projects achieved so far in the port city, available investment opportunities and ways to overcome obstacles.

Expressing satisfaction with the investment environment in Aqaba and its positive results, investors briefed the King on their views regarding ways to achieve progress in project execution.

Since its launch in 2001, the Aqaba Special Economic Zone has been able to draw $18 billion worth of industrial, service, hotel and education projects.

Jordan’s water resources will be depleted by climate change even if the Kingdom witnesses an increase in precipitation, a report launched on Thursday indicated.Climate change will severely impact the quantity of monthly surface water runoff, according to the report, indicating that even if current rainfall amounts remain unchanged, water basins and surface runoff will decrease due to rising temperatures.

In the Kingdom’s Second National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), experts noted that even if current rainfall levels increased by 20 per cent, it would not compensate for the water lost due to the expected rise in temperatures.

The report, prepared by the Ministry of Environment, is to serve as the foundation for an analysis of the impact of climate change on the country following the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December.

The conference is expected to yield a climate change deal building upon the first phase of the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, an international and legally binding agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions worldwide that is set to expire in 2012.

The report included an assessment of climate change vulnerability and adaptation in various sectors. It indicated that maximum and minimum temperature time series in 19 meteorological stations across the country have shown significant increasing trends over the past 45 years.

The time series recorded increasing trends in annual maximum temperatures ranging between 0.3°C and 1.8°C, while increasing trends in minimum temperatures ranged between 0.4°C and 2.8°C.

Combining this baseline data with the output of several climate models produced a projected increase in temperatures of less than 2^oC by 2050, the report added.

The assessment also indicated a decreasing trend in the country’s annual rainfall by 5-20 per cent over the past 45 years, indicating that the agriculture sector in Jordan is most vulnerable to climate change due to shrinking water resources.

The 2009 national communication to the UNFCCC said that climate change could have significant impact in particular on rain-fed agriculture, the livestock sector and overall food production.

It underscored that policies and strategies dealing with water scarcity have been developed and adopted, but highlighted that national policies, including the 2008-2022 national water strategy, did not consider stress added to the available water resources due to climate change.

The report was launched during a workshop, titled: “National Inter-Ministerial Dialogue on Climate Change”, organised by the Ministry of Environment in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme.

The two-day workshop, which concluded on Thursday, aimed at assessing the implications of climate change for key sectors in Jordan and providing participants with an overview of current international climate change negotiations and their links with national policies.

His Majesty King Abdullah on Tuesday urged an effective role on the part of the EU, and particularly the UK, in efforts to make peace in the region that leads to the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, said.The King made the remarks during a meeting with visiting British Foreign Minister David Miliband, where they discussed efforts to overcome obstacles that obstruct the launch of Palestinian-Israeli talks.

Palestinians have this week protested what observers saw as a shift in Washington’s stand on peace talks, after US officials commended Israel’s plan to restrict, rather than freeze, the building of settlements in the West Bank.

In response, Amman insisted that all Israeli unilateral measures in the West Bank and Jerusalem end.

At the meeting with the top British diplomat, the Monarch renewed a warning against Israeli policies, especially settlement activity and measures that threaten the identity of East Jerusalem and the holy sites.

The King underlined the need for the international community to act swiftly and effectively to seize the opportunity at hand to realise peace through creating the suitable environment for peace negotiations on the basis of the two-state formula.

His Majesty also called for supporting the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas in pursuit of the Palestinian people’s right to statehood and a normal life free of Israel-imposed daily suffering.

In remarks to the press later in the day, Miliband described Israeli settlements as “illegal and an obstacle to peace” between the Palestinians and Israelis.

“Settlements are illegal in our view and an obstacle to a peace settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem,” Miliband told reporters during a press conference.

“It’s so important for all those who care about security and social justice in this region that discussions about borders and territory are restarted in a serious way, because if you can progress on border and territory, you can resolve the settlement issue,” Miliband said.

The minister, who also met with US Middle East envoy George Mitchell, said he discussed with the US official the latest developments regarding the efforts exerted to relaunch the peace talks between the Palestinians and the Israelis. He did not elaborate.

Miliband added that any alternatives to a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are “dark and unwelcome”.

“It’s important we don’t lose sight of the importance of a two-state solution for all peoples of the region. I think the alternatives are dark and unwelcome for all sides,” he said.

“We have to find a credible route to a credible state and credible peace,” the UK official said, adding that in order for peace negotiations to resume “it is important to build trust between all concerned parties in the region in the peace process”.

The Obama administration must devise a fresh plan to restart Arab-Israeli peace talks after losing face with a backtracking on its demands for a full Jewish settlement freeze, analysts said Monday.President Barack Obama’s team has disappointed many Palestinians and other Arabs who long for it to fulfil both its initial tough stance on settlements and a broader pledge to improve ties with the Muslim world, they said.

During a Middle East tour, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sought Monday to reassure Arabs after angering them with her weekend praise of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s offer to restrict settlements as “unprecedented”. The chief US diplomat insisted her administration still opposed settlements as strongly as before.

Disputing her claim is Aaron David Miller, who served as adviser on Middle East peacemaking in previous US administrations.

“Netanyahu has produced nothing short of a masterful performance. He’s outmanoeuvred us. He’s ingratiated himself to the American Jewish community and the administration,” Miller told AFP.

“He’s put [Palestinian leader) Mahmoud Abbas on the defensive and he’s said ‘no’ to the great power, without cost and without consequences,” said the analyst at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington.

The “paradox”, he argued, is that an administration which began with a tough policy towards the Israelis and a “sensitive” one towards the Palestinians has now shifted the onus to the Palestinians.

But he said the Obama administration has concluded that it must, at least for now, cooperate with rather than fight the Israelis on an issue like settlements.

The administration, he said, had hoped to revive negotiations on core issues such as the borders of a future Palestinian state by obtaining a total settlement freeze in return for steps by key Arab states to normalise ties with Israel.

Unlike settlements and normalisation, he said, borders, the status of the disputed holy city of Jerusalem, the fate of Palestinian refugees and security for Israel are the core issues.

“They [the Obama team] need to do some fundamental rethinking about what their overall objective is and how they are going to achieve it,” Miller said.

Amjad Atallah, a former legal adviser to the Abbas-led Palestinian Authority, said the US shift on settlements has only weakened Abbas further and made him more reluctant than ever to enter peace talks with Israel.

“They [Palestinians] argue that if the United States was not prepared to back up what it said on settlements, why would it be prepared to back up what it might say on borders?” Atallah told AFP.

The members of the US administration, believing in their powers of “moral persuasion”, were caught off guard, said the analyst with the New America Foundation.

“They thought once it got into permanent status negotiations, things would go relatively quickly. What they didn’t count on was the Israeli government’s intransigence,” he added.

Now that that has happened, “how do we go about reestablishing our street cred and what’s our strategy going forward?” he asked.

The administration now needs, Atallah said, to devise a diplomatic strategy that matches the “high-minded principled recognition” that the Arab-Israeli conflict is a central threat to US national security interests.

Instead, the United States is pursuing “a business-as-usual negotiating strategy” that can only ultimately lead to a worsening situation and even violence, he warned.

Obama, in failing to deliver on settlements, seems to have reinforced the Arab narrative that the “Americans are all in the pockets of the Zionists”, according to Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

“It’s not going to be easy, but we need to find some way to change topic,” Clawson told AFP when asked about how the US can revive talks.

Jordan has granted citizenship to the wife and sons of Iraq’s jailed former deputy premier Tareq Aziz who have lived in the Kingdom since the 2003 US-led invasion, an official said on Tuesday.”The Council of Ministers granted Jordanian citizenship on Monday to Saddam Tareq Aziz and his mother Violet Yusef Nobud,” the official told AFP.

“The elder son, Ziad Tareq Aziz, and his wife, Seba Mzaffar Antwan, have been granted citizenship recently, upon their request.”

He gave no further details.

Named foreign minister in 1983 and then deputy prime minister in 1991, Aziz, 73, turned himself in to US forces in April 2003 after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

Aziz, who has been convicted for crimes against humanity, was from a Chaldean Catholic family.

One of a handful of long-term senior survivors of Saddam’s regime, Aziz is reported to have suffered two heart attacks in custody.

About 4.4 million Iraqis have fled their homes since the 2003 invasion, with about 750,000 now living in the Kingdom, according to UN and Jordanian figures.

His Majesty King Abdullah on Thursday gave instructions to extend financial support to awqaf officials attending to the affairs of religious shrines in Jerusalem, a Royal Court statement said.Under the 1994 peace treaty with Israel, Jordan is undertaking the responsibility to maintain the holy places, particularly Al Haram Al Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, where officials, including muazzens (who call for prayers) and guards are on the Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs’ payroll.

According to the statement, the King’s instructions came as “a continuation of steps seeking to protect the holy sites threatened by Israeli measures” as discussed at a meeting last month between the Monarch and several officials and key Jerusalemites.

Israeli police have razed Palestinian houses, evicted Palestinian residents from their homes in the eastern part of the city and stormed Al Aqsa Mosque compound, while the rightist Israeli government is continuing with settlement construction in East Jerusalem. The King has described Jerusalem as the “tinderbox” of the Middle East conflict.

At September’s meeting, His Majesty reiterated Jordan’s continued support for the holy places in Jerusalem and for the steadfastness of Muslim and Christian Arabs in the holy city.

The King said then that preserving the holy places in Jerusalem is a “top Jordanian Hashemite priority and that the Kingdom will spare no effort to achieve this goal”.

The Hashemite dynasty, descendants of the Prophet Mohammad, have historically taken care of Jerusalem’s shrines since the first renovation project, called Al I’maar Al Hashemi, in 1924.

Jordan will provide Bahrain with skilled medical, technical and nursing staff under a health cooperation agreement signed between the two countries on Thursday.The agreement, signed by Health Minister Nayef Fayez and his Bahraini counterpart, Yacoub Al Hamar, covers cooperation in the fields of human resources, health insurance, medical tourism and medical training.

Earlier on Thursday, His Majesty King Abdullah received the Bahraini health minister, who conveyed greetings from Bahraini King Hamad Ben Issa Al Khalifa to the Monarch as well as his keenness to strengthen ties with Jordan.

At the meeting, King Abdullah expressed his commitment to further enhance bilateral cooperation at all levels, highlighting the strong relationship between the Kingdom and Bahrain.

Hamar also briefed His Majesty on efforts to boost bilateral health cooperation and the agreement signed between the two countries.

Under the accord, Bahrain will provide Jordan with a list of its actual needs for medical, nursing and technical staff.

The two sides also agreed to draw up a plan within a time frame to implement the agreement and the bilateral health protocol and form a joint committee to identify Bahrain’s needs of medical and nursing specialisations.

Under the agreement, experts from the Gulf country will be sent to the Kingdom to benefit from the Jordanian experience in the field of health insurance.

Commending the quality of medical services provided in the Kingdom, Hamar asked the Jordanian side to prepare a list of public and private hospitals to serve as a reference for Bahraini patients who wish to receive treatment in Jordan.

 US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas this weekend on her trip through the Middle East, to try to keep up pressure for a peace deal despite few signs of compromise on either side.US officials travelling with Clinton on an official visit to Pakistan said both the location and the details of the meetings were yet to be worked out, but that the time was right given that she will meet Arab foreign ministers early next week at a forum in Morocco.

“She felt that since she was going to the region, that this was an opportunity to have direct consultations with the two leaders and the Arab ministers and to continue the effort that is ongoing,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told reporters travelling with Clinton.

“The administration is committed to a comprehensive peace, including a two-state solution,” Crowley said.

Crowley said the Morocco meetings, which will take place on the sidelines of a development conference, could be important to building support among Arab states for Middle East peace moves, one of US President Barack Obama’s key foreign policy goals.

“That is a critical piece of this,” Crowley said.

Clinton last week gave Obama a less-than-glowing assessment of Middle East peace efforts after the latest efforts by Middle East envoy George Mitchell appeared to bear little fruit.

Mitchell returned to Israel on Thursday to resume meetings.

Obama set Middle East peace as a top priority at the start of his presidency in January, in contrast to his predecessor George W. Bush, who was criticised internationally for neglecting the long-running conflict. But so far, the new administration has little to show for its efforts.

Netanyahu, whose right-leaning coalition includes pro-settler parties, has resisted Obama’s calls for a total freeze on settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Abbas, politically weak because he governs only in the West Bank while Hamas Islamists control the Gaza Strip, has said he will not resume direct talks until a complete settlement freeze is implemented.

His Majesty King Abdullah on Tuesday launched the National e-Health Programme “Hakeem”, which is envisioned to create a database of medical histories of patients across the Kingdom in the long term.During a visit to Prince Hamzah Hospital, where the project was launched, King Abdullah also instructed the government to provide the state-run hospital with the equipment and staff needed to provide advanced services to citizens.

His Majesty was briefed on the project, which will be initially implemented at the hospital, Al Hussein Cancer Centre and Amman Comprehensive Healthcare Centre starting spring 2010. The plan will expand to cover all of the Kingdom’s public and military hospitals in six to seven years, according to its director, Ghassan Lahham.

The project will serve as a bank of every patient’s medical history and include all tests, procedures and surgeries undergone by patients, in addition to the diseases from which they suffer, their allergies, the medications they take and other health information.

“This will save time and effort, reduce reliance on paperwork and reduce the waste of drugs as medics will know the medical history of each patient in few seconds by using the system,” Minister of Health Nayef Fayez said Tuesday.

The system also seeks to minimise medical errors and provide accurate information on patients, said the minister, adding it will reduce pressure on medical facilities.

The project is initiated by e-Health Solutions, a nonprofit company that has as stakeholders the ministries of health and information and communications technology, the Royal Medical Services, Al Hussein Cancer Centre, the Private Hospitals Association, the Royal Health Awareness Society and the King Hussein Institute for Biotechnology and Cancer.

Lahham said the database will help “greatly” reduce waste, adding that once the project is implemented there will be no need for paper files and documents.

“Sometimes patients forget if they are allergic to a certain medicine or if they underwent particular tests in the past. The system will help medical staff find these out in no time by entering the national ID number of the patient, which will ensure efficiency in their work,” Lahham said.