A Future Jordan - نحن الأردن

Democratic Jordan: enticing, but still not a done deal By Rami G. Khouri

A Brilliant Artciel by Rami Khoury that puts the onus on the Jordanian Leadership 'King Abdullah has again set a high bar of expectations against which his people and his friends abroad will judge him in the months and years ahead'

Democratic Jordan: enticing, but still not a done deal
By Rami G. Khouri
TEH DAILY STAR
Wednesday, May 25, 2005

When Jordan's King Abdullah II closed the three-day World Economic Forum on Sunday at a new convention center along the Dead Sea coast, he urged regional leaders to respond to popular demand for economic and political reforms, saying: "People want to move forward, they want meaningful reform, they want to see a tangible difference in their lives."

What he did not say, but seems to have felt, as evidenced by his words and some recent actions, was that ordinary Arab people also wanted their leaders to match their rhetoric with action.

King Abdullah to some extent has brought on himself some of the pressures he has felt recently. A string of recent newspaper articles around the world, coupled with increasingly frank private criticisms from foreign officials, diplomats, academics, journalists, and other genuine friends, shocked but also caught the attention of the Jordanian leadership, especially that many of the critics were loyal sons and daughters of the country.

The main thrust of the criticism has been that Jordanian political realities do not match the king's boastful depictions of his own realm as a democratic model for other Arabs. Had Jordan not marketed itself as an exemplary Arab state, it could probably have avoided the cross examination and merrily went on its way in the tradition of cruise-control one-party autocracies, like Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

The main criticisms at home and abroad have focused on several fronts.
First has been the government's attempts to legislate an end to the political role of perhaps the most genuine political institutions in the country - the professional associations of lawyers, doctors, engineers and others. Critics have also bemoaned the intelligence department's interference in fields that seem to have little if anything to do with genuine security, such as the mass media, education, or bureaucratic appointments. Fighting corruption has been a problematic area, given that the anti-corruption unit is inside the intelligence department, which recently has been linked with, or accused of, corruption and influence peddling.

Another problem is the pattern of general mediocrity in governance, with recent senior officials often talking like modern democrats but acting like Early Bronze Age patriarchs.

The gap between Jordan's lofty democratic rhetoric and its erratically democratic record had grown wide in recent years, and King Abdullah felt he had to act because the criticisms were clearly gnawing at his personal credibility, not to mention the country's overall image. He moved decisively recently on three fronts. He appointed a new government headed by Prime Minister Adnan Badran that was mandated to push forward the reform process. He replaced his intelligence department director, who had expressed displeasure with the reform push. And he revamped the royal palace senior staff, bringing in a team of proven reformers whose task is to drive and monitor the democratization process throughout the entire government.

Diplomatic sources in Amman say privately that "this is crunch time for the king, who has to prove if his rhetoric of democracy and reform will be matched by the conduct of the government and its agencies." Official sources deeply involved in the changes under way explain this as something of a relaunch of the reform and democratization process, which initially took off in 1989 and has included five general elections for Parliament since that year. Jordan's liberalization in the period 1989-93 was indeed pioneering for the Arab world, in elections, integrating Islamists into the power structure, and opening up the media and civil society. The process slowed down in 1994 when Jordan signed a peace treaty with Israel, and it has stagnated or regressed slightly in recent years.

Officials at the highest level privately complain of two reasons for the slow pace of change: a skeptical public, and the tendency of vested interests in Parliament and the bureaucracy to oppose deep changes. One sign of resistance to change has been a spirited public and private attack against the new government by parliamentarians, some political and press personalities and even some former security officers. Public apathy is also a home-grown problem: a system that liberalized to give its citizens greater rights of speech and assembly, without giving them real power to check government and security excesses, naturally bred widespread complacency and doubt.

King Abdullah has again set a high bar of expectations against which his people and his friends abroad will judge him in the months and years ahead.

When he says, as he did Sunday, that "people want meaningful reform, they want to see a tangible difference in their lives," he is right. But will his actions match his words more closely this time around?

His most urgent priority now is to start making those changes in governance that will foster genuine equality, accountability, transparency, rule of law, and participatory democracy. Perhaps he has started, with the changes at the top of the government, the intelligence department and the palace. There are many other changes that can be made quickly, and that would "make tangible differences in people's lives," including: fostering greater transparency in all state and government financial accounts, creating credible mechanisms for citizen complaints, establishing civilian-government joint councils for oversight and coordination of police-and-security-related activities, consulting Parliament earlier on policy changes, enhancing the independence of the judiciary from executive branch influence, opening the field for private-sector electronic media, fostering opportunities for private think tanks and research institutions, studying how to create a more representative Parliament, and leaving the business of human rights compliance to the courts and civil society organizations.

Jordan as a democratic model for the Arab world remains an enticing prospect, and a very realizable possibility, but it is not yet a done deal. A lot of people, including its own, are cheering for it to succeed, so that there may indeed be a home-grown Arab reform strategy that breeds a credible democracy.

Rami G. Khouri writes a weekly commentary for The Daily Star.

posted by Ashraf Zeitoon @ 2:41 AM