AMMAN, 5 August 2007 — Jordan’s largest political party, the Islamic Action Front (IAF), yesterday accused the United States of being behind the Jordanian government’s crackdown on the country’s Islamic movement, including the “rigging” of Tuesday’s municipal elections.
“The robbery of the Jordanian people’s will on Tuesday confirms the existence of a US ‘Dayton’ scheme that targets the Islamic movement in Jordan,” the IAF Secretary-General Zaki Bani Ershaid told an emergency meeting of the party’s top leaders.
Ershaid alluded to Gen. Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, who also supervises the training of President Mahmoud Abbas’ security forces in Egypt and elsewhere.
The Hamas group, the IAF ally in the Palestinian territories, cited a conspiracy between Dayton and Abbas’ national security adviser Mohammad Dahlan as a pretext for its premeditated takeover of the Gaza Strip two months ago.
Ershaid accused the US ambassador to Jordan David Hale of “leading a provocation scheme against the Islamic movement in Jordan by cautioning against the election of Islamists.” The IAF alleged earlier that Hale met with Jordanian tribal leaders to urge them not to vote for Islamists in the municipal or parliamentary elections, which are slated for the second half of November.
“Jordanian official institutions and executive security bodies have undertaken the achievement of the objectives of this scheme through the adoption of legislations for cracking down on Islamic establishments in an oppressive manner,” Ershaid said.
The IAF, the political arm of the influential Muslim Brotherhood movement, withdrew its 36 candidates from the municipal elections on Tuesday, five hours after the start of the polling process, citing “rigging practices” by the authorities. Islamists charged that the government used army personnel for duplicate voting and said that plain-clothed soldiers were moved from one polling station to another with the same people casting ballots in more than one center in favor of government-backed candidates.
The government denied the charges and said that voting by armed forces personal in the municipal polls was “legal” under the Municipalities Law. Ershaid said yesterday that his party has compiled rigging documents and planned to send them to Jordanian, Arab and international Parliaments and rights organizations.
