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5,000 Jordanian Demonstrators Call For Israel Peace Treaty To Be Annulled
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demonstration held by the professional associations and the
opposition political parties
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AMMAN, March 16 (News Agencies) - More than 5,000 Jordanians took to the streets of Amman Saturday, March 16, in a "march of anger", calling for the Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty to be scrubbed and for jihad or holy war against the Jewish state.
In the first authorised public demonstration in Amman in almost a year, protestors carried banners demanding the Jordanian government to "expel" the Israeli ambassador to Amman and cancel the 1994 peace treaty between the two countries, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reported.
They also denounced the United States for its "bias" towards Israel and called for the March 27-28 Arab summit in Beirut to "support the Palestinian intifada and resistance against Israeli occupation."
"Yes to jihad, yes to a strike against Tel Aviv and no to the missions of Zinni and Cheney," chanted the protestors.
U.S. special Mideast envoy Anthony Zinni and U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney began separate tours to the region last week, the first trying to break the cycle of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed, the second scouting Arab support for the U.S. war on terrorism, including a possible move against Iraq.
Some of the younger protestors waved flags of the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas movements as well as portraits of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, chief suspect in last September's anti-U.S. terror attacks.
The demonstration, organised by professional trade unions and political parties lasted 90 minutes.
"Jordanians are ready to fight alongside the Palestinian people and reject any Arab initiative that does not recover all usurped rights for the Arabs," Mohammad Oran, head of the doctors' trade union, told the crowd.
One month after the start of the second intifada in September 2000, Jordanian authorities banned public demonstrations, tolerating only those organised in universities and Palestinian refugee camps.
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