Telling Elections

Arab media:

Musa Keilani

Dark clouds are looming in the local Islamic sky. Just as predicted last week, the top decision-making post in the Jordanian Islamic movement has gone to one of the most hawkish pro-Hamas leaders, Dr Hamam Said.

The election process for the 55-man consultative council of the Muslim Brotherhood Movement has been going on since last February and resulted in 50 elected members and five others already appointed by the new leader, the general supervisor.
The significance of this election is that it brings to an end the cordial relationship between the government and the Brotherhood which lasted for nearly 60 years when the latter’s first office was opened in 1946. During those years, Brotherhood members sided with the government against Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, in the 1960s, Hafez Assad of Syria, in the 1980s, and Palestinian radical factions during Black September 1970. Moreover, during the Maan troubles of April 1989, they received through Jordan Television special appreciation from King Hussein for their political stand and counterdemonstrations against rioters who wanted to mobilise and involve the Palestinian refugee camps in the anti-government troubles.

Said’s election is a turning point that reflects the new balance of power within the Islamic movement, since he is the first leader of Palestinian origin to become the general supervisor, which shows the demographic weight within the Jordanian society. Moreover, it gives strong signals about the calibre of the new leadership as Said was in 1989 Sweileh’s elected representative to Parliament, when this was known as the bastion of Ben Laden’s supporters or the Tora Bora of Jordan.

The result of the election represents a victory for Hamas in its tug-of-war with the authorities since 1999, when four of its leadership were detained and evicted from Amman as a result of what was called smuggling of arms through Jordan and interfering in the internal affairs of the country through attempts to control the largest political groups in the country: the Islamic Action Front and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As a background to that, since the 1960s, the government tried to use the Muslim Brotherhood as a political card against the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Yasser Arafat. At a later stage, Hamas was used for the same purpose.

It was King Hussein who secured the release of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli jail. It was the King as well who managed to get Musa Abu Marzouq, a politburo member of Hamas, out of prison in the United States. It was Jordan that managed to get the antidote for Khaled Mishaal following the Israeli assassination attempt.

But now, with the election this year of Hamas’ frontman Sheikh Zaki Beni Irsheid as secretary general of the Islamic Action Front, with his big bloc within the Parliament and his extended grassroots in the refugee camps and bedouin centres, the confrontation with the authorities is one of the options that are being studied in case the Jordanian fibre of the society and the regional situation tolerates that.

It is true that the hawks among the Islamists, like Sheikh Abu Fares and Kazem Ayesh, tried to calm the authorities by appointing Dr Abdul Latif Arabiyat, the well-known moderate, as head of the consultative council, but that sugarcoating carries no weight since the reins of power are firmly with Said and Irsheid.

Usually voices of reason prevail in moments of crises, but now with the alienation, desperation and deprivations of tens of thousands of unemployed, frustrated young men, who can predict the ramifications of a headlong confrontation in a brittle society like ours?