AMMAN, 18 September 2007 — The Jordanian authorities have freed four members of the Islamist opposition who had been detained without charge since June as November parliamentary elections near, the group said yesterday.
Islamic Action Front Secretary-General Zaki Bani Rsheid said the four had been released on Sunday but added that another three party members who had been detained with them remained in custody.
“We hope that the arrested members of the party as well as all political detainees in Jordan will be released,” Bani Rsheid told AFP. When it detained the seven Islamists in June, the government said they were suspected of “activities targeting national security.”
The Islamists countered that the arrests were intended to harm the party in the run-up to municipal elections the following month. The IAF eventually withdrew its 25 candidates from the July 31 polls accusing the authorities of vote rigging. The IAF, which is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, has threatened to boycott the November 20 parliamentary elections too. The party had 17 of the 110 seats in the last parliament elected in 2003, which King Abdallah dissolved last month.
Meanwhile, Washington yesterday gave Jordan an extra $78 million in mostly security aid to bolster the country’s defenses, bringing total assistance this year to $532 million, officials said. Planning Minister Suhair Al-Ali told reporters after signing the agreement with US ambassador David Hale the kingdom was lobbying to raise the amount of supplemental aid it received in recent years for its strong backing of US policies in the region.
“As a government we continue to work with the US to increase that percentage of cash assistance to the budget,” Al-Ali said. The extra aid is beyond the annual economic and military aid package of $454 million that has been appropriated for the current fiscal year, which ends on Sept. 30 2007.
Most of the supplemental aid is earmarked to boost border security and anti-terrorism training, officials said. After the US led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Washington doubled its annual grants to Jordan to around $450 million — $250 million in economic aid and $200 million in military assistance.
Jordanian officials complain the kingdom gets less aid than other key regional allies, Egypt and Israel. But US officials say the aid program to Jordan is among the largest in the world and the kingdom has received a total of over $7 billion, including $4 billion in economic aid and $3 billion in military help.
Also yesterday, the US aid agency USAID granted cash-strapped Jordan $141 million in economic aid for 2007 to support the kingdom’s reforms and development, the US embassy said.
The Amman government and the US aid agency signed two grants with funds allocated to boost economic growth, develop the water sector, support the judiciary and reduce foreign debt, it said. The grants are part of more than half a billion dollars in US assistance to its regional Arab ally this year.
Last month, more than 40,000 Iraqi refugee children flooded into Jordanian schools for the first time since they had fled their homeland, amid concerns the new students could overburden the system.
