AMMAN, 25 November 2005 — Jordan’s King Abdallah yesterday appointed his national security chief Marouf Al-Bakhit prime minister and asked him to draw a comprehensive strategy to fight terrorism that does not depend on “security means alone.” The king earlier accepted the resignation of Prime Minister Adnan Badran’s government.
“The terrorist bombings that hit part of our beloved capital’s utilities... will only augment our determination to stick to the democratic and reform approaches, which we consider irreversible,” the king said in the letter appointing Bakhit, a former army general and military strategist, premier.
“However at the same time, we are badly in need of adopting a comprehensive strategy in confronting the takfir (labeling people as atheists) culture that does not depend only on the security solution but involves intellectual, cultural and political dimensions,” he added.
Three five-star hotels in Amman were the target on Nov. 9 of suicide bombings that killed 60 people and injured more than 90.
Jordanian fugitive Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the blasts and Jordan’s own investigation into the bombings proved the involvement of three Iraqi men who entered Jordan via the land border on Nov. 5.
An arrested would-be bomber, Sajida Mubarak Al-Rishawi, also Iraqi, confessed on state TV that she tried to blow herself up at a wedding party at Radisson SAS Hotel but her explosive belt failed to detonate. Her husband succeeded in blowing himself up, killing at least 32 people.
King Abdallah urged his new prime minister to “speed up the enactment of a new anti-terror law and to launch a relentless war against the takfir schools, which embrace extremism, backwardness, isolation and darkness and are fed on the ignorance and naivety of simple people.”
He said fatwas, or religious edicts, issued by such groups constitute a “threat to society and its interests.”
The monarch urged Bakhit to stick to reforms and democracy as “an irreversible daily concept of life,” following as a guideline the National Agenda, a 2,500-page document that was handed to the king on Wednesday by a panel of politicians, lawyers, academics and intellectuals.
According to the outgoing Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher, the blueprint contained guidelines for governments to run Jordan in the coming decade.
The king also urged the new government to speed up drafting a set of new legislations, foremost among them a new election law that should replace the present controversial one-person-one-vote system.
The 58-year-old Bakhit is a retired Western-educated army general who is also a prominent academic and military strategist. He holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of London in political science and strategic studies.
He served as ambassador to Turkey between 2002 and 2005 and ambassador to Israel for two months earlier this year before the king picked him up to head his own office at the Royal Court. Last week, the king appointed him as chief of the National Security Agency that was created after the Amman bombings.
He is known to be a moderate politician, who is expected to embrace Abdallah’s policies of upholding the kingdom’s longtime alliance with the United States, strategic ties with Israel under a peace treaty signed in 1994 and close political and economic relations with Arab countries, particularly one-time business associate Iraq.
A new Cabinet is likely to be named Sunday and would be sworn in the same day, a government official said.
