Friday, Sep 5, 2008
Jordan experienced a clampdown on Islamists after the killing in October of Laurence Foley, a diplomat with the U.S. Agency for International Development, in Amman. The southern city of Ma'an, a hotbed of opposition to the crown since the first King Abdallah in the beginning of the last century, has been swept for Islamist and al-Qaida elements, causing low-level resentment. Still, the authorities now claim to have caught the perpetrators, and Powell used one of the confessions in his presentation to the Security Council in an effort to prove the link between Iraq and al-Qaida. Powell also said he was not persuaded by the argument that the secular Baath and the fundamentalist al-Qaida would not cooperate.
El-Oran insists on the unity of the Arab and Muslim nation. "We are all one country," he says. "The borders are artificial." If that were true, however, El-Oran and the other opposition figures would never have been allowed to demonstrate. However much the Jordanian government clamps down on political freedoms, it offers far more liberty that Saddam's Iraq. But when pressed on the undemocratic nature of Iraq's regime, El-Oran smiles at such naiveté. "All regimes here are the same. Why single out Iraq?" he asks. And by way of proving that Saddam is a hero to his own people, El-Oran reminds that "he received every single vote in the referendum to reelect him last year."
There are others, however, who despise Saddam as much as El-Oran seems to admire him.
A group of Iraqi exiles while away a late afternoon in the Cafe Central, a first-floor gathering spot along one of downtown Amman's grubby, exhaust-blackened arteries. Through an entrance acrid with the smell of urine, they drink sweet mint-flavored tea, play sheshbesh, and smoke the arguilah, the local term for a hookah. This is where the intellectuals and the artists who oppose Saddam Hussein hang out. Most have lost everything -- all their possessions and money, and sometimes their families. They oscillate between wanting to go to a Western country to rebuild their lives and wanting to stick around to welcome the Americans who would, as they see it, liberate Iraq.
Antiwar demonstrations and opinions, whether Arab or European, are quickly dismissed at the Central's sticky metal tables. "Those people don't know what they are talking about," says one playwright. "It is easy to demonstrate if you haven't been in the torture chamber." Some denizens of the cafe have in fact been tortured and bear the scars to prove it.
Over the past decade, their hostility to Saddam has filtered down to the grassroots through much of the Arab world. In Baka'a, one of the Palestinian refugee camps near Amman, it is hard to find traces of the earlier enthusiasm for the Iraqi leader. The Palestinians were among the most ardent supporters of Saddam Hussein, partly because of his strident rhetoric toward Israel. But now, even with the intifada still blazing across the border, Baka'a stays quiet and offers few visible signs of support for Iraq.
A watchmaker on the main street of the camp, near the vegetable market, smiles when he recalls the time even a few years ago when watches with the image of Saddam Hussein on the dial were popular. "Now nobody asks for them anymore," he says. "Even the few Iraqis who still come here don't like Saddam." The problem, explains the older man, is that the regime in Iraq is now seen as "as illegitimate as the others." Especially for many Palestinians, he says, "Saddam Hussein used to be regarded as a liberator. But he didn't do anything for us. He turned out just to be another dictator."
Certainly across the Jordan River in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Palestinians seem too busy with their own problems to spend much time demonstrating in support of Iraq. Not that a demonstration would be easy in the West Bank -- most of the cities are still occupied by the Israeli army. In Hebron this week, army jeeps patrolled the street in front of the governor's office, enforcing a curfew for the third day in a row.
"The people of Iraq are our people," said Governor Areef Al-Jabari, "but we are not going to give the Israelis a pretext to carry out more aggression against us." Many Palestinians and other Arabs fear that when world attention is focused on Iraq, the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon will crack down hard in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, maybe even expelling the population. Others recognize, however, that Israel will also be pressured by the United States to keep things quiet during an operation in Iraq.
That's what happened during the Gulf War, some say. "Look at what happened during the first intifada," says Ziad Abu Amr, the chairman of the political committee of the Palestinian Legislative Council. "Everything stayed quiet." The first intifada started in 1987 and petered out after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait when the world's attention was focused on Iraq.
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