Local

AMMAN — Last month’s snowstorm took a heavy toll on the country’s forestry sector, with 4,000 trees damaged in the capital alone, an official at the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) said on Sunday.

“Thousands of trees were lost due to the heavy snow and the strong winds, the majority of which were pine trees; a truly heavy loss,” Mohammad Quteish, head of GAM’s Parks Directorate, told The Jordan Times.

Earlier this week, the municipality concluded the process of collecting broken branches and fallen trees from across the capital, with its initial estimates indicating that the cost of the damaged trees is around JD1 million.

“More than 3,000 trucks unloaded over 1,500 tonnes of wood at landfills. The wood will be then transferred to several Agriculture Ministry directorates across the country,” Quteish said.

In mid-December last year, the country was affected by a polar depression that brought heavy snow to most areas of the Kingdom.

Public and private institutions, universities and schools were closed for several days as snow accumulation reached 70 centimetres in certain areas of the capital and higher in the southern and northern regions.

Quteish said the municipality will soon launch a campaign to plant new saplings to replace the uprooted trees, noting that the initiative will coincide with Arbour Day, celebrated annually on January 15.

Meanwhile, the Ministry of Agriculture said thousands of trees were damaged in the Kingdom’s forests, especially in the north, where forest density is high.

Agriculture Ministry Spokesperson Nimer Haddadin told The Jordan Times that the Forestry Department will soon issue a report identifying the number and type of damaged trees.

AMMAN — Jordan is seeking to attract more Muslim tourists to visit historical sites such as Yarmouk and Mutah as well as the tombs of the prophet’s companions, according to the Jordan Tourism Board (JTB).

JTB Director General Abed Al Razzaq Arabiyat said in a statement made available to The Jordan Times that the board is seeking to focus more on religious tourism and to market Jordanian attractions in countries with large Muslim populations such as Indonesia and Malaysia.

To serve this goal, Arabiyat said JTB has taken part in a mobile exhibition of Hajj and umra (the greater and lesser Muslim pilgrimages) in the two countries.

JTB has organised campaigns to market visits to Jordan for pilgrims performing Hajj and umra in Mecca and Medina, following the conclusion of their pilgrimage to the holy cities in Saudi Arabia.

Participation in this touring exhibit helped JTB establish cooperation with religious tourism agencies in these countries, Arabiyat noted.

Jordan has a lot to offer religious tourists, be they Muslim or Christian, Arabiyat said, as the country is located between Mecca, the holiest of cities to Muslims, and Jerusalem, which is holy to followers of the three monotheistic religions.

The country’s status has been highlighted in the Bible as many prophets and saints mentioned in the Torah, the Bible and the Koran had links to Jordan, one way or another, the JTB director added. “They have either lived on its land, or passed through its territory,” he noted.

The Kingom hosts key sites to Christianity such as the Baptism Site and Mount Nebo, as well as some of the oldest churches in the world.

AMMAN — Scholars attribute the increasing rift among followers of different sects of Islam to attempts by one party to exclude the other, in search of power.

“One party is trying to exclude the other, and this is the main reason behind the growing tension and violence in several parts of the region such as in Iraq and Syria,” Mohammad Khateeb, dean of the University (UJ) of Jordan’s Sharia faculty told The Jordan Times in a recent interview.

“This contributed to the rise of an awakening as well as the emergence of takfirists and extremism,” Khateeb said.

The issue of one party working to exclude the other figured high in a conference seeking to bridge the gap between Islamists and advocates of secularism, which concluded in Amman on Sunday, with participants asserting the importance of accepting the other and respecting their values, regardless of their faith or religious principles.

At the conference, organised by Al Quds Centre for Political Studies and titled “A consensual vision to transition to democracy”, Rasha Awad said there is a chance to arrive at a reconciliation among the followers of various sects within the same faith, stressing that human rights violations should not be tolerated.

“Violations of human rights should be exposed and religion should be used to stimulate progress in lieu of the negative role it is playing now,” added Awad, a journalist and a researcher on Islamic thought from Sudan.

Diaa Al Assadi, a former Iraqi minister, noted that political blocs and governments should be representative of all sects and no members of any party or group should be excluded.

HRH Prince Hassan, who attended part of the conference, underlined the importance of focusing on shared values and respecting differences among various groups to offset division.

The prince, who is president of the Arab Thought Forum, reiterated the importance of diligence to achieve progress, calling for the establishment of an Arab zakat fund to help relieve part of the problems of the Arab world, stressing the importance of dealing with current problems now and not deferring them any longer.

“We are all in the same boat, regardless of our currents,” he told the attendees, stressing the need to spread love and harmony and to disseminate useful knowledge.

Echoing a similar message, Abdel Fattah Mourou from Tunisia said differences should mean that people complement each other, underscoring the significance of working to achieve reform and not to promote one sect over another.

Meanwhile, a participant from Syria, Abdul Salam Salameh said: “We are paying the price for a great deal of ignorance of what citizenship, freedom and governance actually mean.”

“Syria has become the battleground for conflicting regional and international schemes and it has become the burial ground for what is left of the Arab Spring,” Salameh told The Jordan Times.

Khateeb cited the absence of “a clear Arab policy vis-à-vis what is happening in Syria” as the main reason “many people decided on their own to go and join the fight there against the Syrian regime”.

“The extremist behaviour of the Sunnis has come as a reaction to the extremist behaviour of the Shiites,” Khateeb said, noting that the massacres committed in Syria propelled several to take part in the battle.

On the other hand, Alladein M. Adawi, a specialist in Islamic studies, cited the “lack of accurate knowledge about Islam and about jihad” [holy war] as one of the reasons behind their decision.

“Also, there are people who are graduates of different schools that focus on jihad and who teach this kind of thought to their followers...

Some clerics may initiate and encourage this thought, but one cannot control every mosque and every knowledge circle,” noted Adawi, who is an assistant professor at the UJ faculty of Sharia.

In reply to a question on why division has become more vivid, he said: “In contemporary times, the development of the media has made the new generations very much exposed to these issues. In the past, this electronic revolution was not there and only experts dealt with them.”

“Media is very much to blame, especially since now every problem is linked to people’s religious affiliation,” he said.

This division is not new, according to the UJ Sharia specialists, who pointed out that it has continued to re-emerge and become more visible at different intervals throughout history for various reasons, and it is exploited and manipulated nowadays to serve political interests. 

AMMAN — The Ministry of Health on Sunday concluded its second nationwide immunisation campaign against polio, and is planning to launch a third one soon.

Mohammad Abdullat, director of the Health Ministry’s communicable diseases directorate, said the campaign covered 97 per cent of the targeted group — children under the age of five.

Figures he cited showed that 790,000 children were immunised against polio over the past week.

Of the total, 82,741 children are Syrians living among host communities, and some 16,000 are Syrian children living in the camps.

Abdullat said a meeting will be held soon to decide when to launch the third campaign.

The first nationwide vaccination campaign was carried out in November last year, covering polio, measles and rubella.

During the three-week campaign, 1,093,532 children were immunised against polio, 115,150 of them Syrian.

Funded by UNICEF, the immunisation campaigns are based on WHO recommendations to give two to four doses of polio vaccine to children in countries bordering any states where cases of the disease were discovered.

In previous remarks, Abdullat said 17 cases of polio were discovered in neighbouring Syria in 2013, almost 15 years after the disease was eliminated there.

In Jordan, the last polio case was discovered in 1992.

Before the launch of the campaign, health officials and experts said the vaccines the Health Ministry gives to children in Jordan are “safe” and parents need not worry.

Representatives of the ministry, UNICEF, WHO and other partners have said that the vaccinations given in Jordan are also administered in the countries that produce them, and all the required tests have been conducted to ensure their safety.

AMMAN — The Lower House on Sunday endorsed a new provision in the Passports Law that gives the Cabinet and the interior minister the authority to grant “regular passports” to investors and for humanitarian reasons.

The move triggered strong discussion under the Dome, with some MPs expressing fears that this provision could open the door for unlawful practices by the government.

They demanded that the amendment specify the cases under which the Cabinet could grant regular passports to non-Jordanians.

Under the amended article, authorities can grant investors “regular passports” valid from one to five years, based on a recommendation from the interior minister.

The holder of the passport does not receive Jordanian nationality and the government can withdraw the passport at any time. The amendment also authorises the director of the Civil Status and Passports Department to grant “regular passports” that are valid for less than a year for humanitarian reasons.

Interior Minister Hussein Majali said this would serve a large segment of society, particularly the sons of Jordanian women married to foreigners, who seek to work outside the country or to travel.

However, Deputy Bassam Btoush (Karak, 3rd District) expressed fears that this amendment would threaten the Palestinian cause if abused by granting passports to Palestinian refugees who wish to travel, arguing that the passport is a step towards granting them nationality and harming their right to return to their homeland in Palestine.

“There are no hidden agendas behind this proposal,” Majali said, adding that it is aimed at attracting foreign investors to the Kingdom and to deal with a “very limited” number of humanitarians cases.

But some MPs said the Kingdom is hosting 35 nationalities, insisting that the amendment will open the door for abuse by future governments if not this one.

Meanwhile, the Lower House decided to refer the draft amendments to the Anti-Corruption Commission Law to its legal committee for review.

The MPs also referred proposed amendments to the 2103 Municipalities Law to the Financial Committee to examine the impact of the changes on citizens.

Prime Minster Abdullah Ensour said the new provision provides all producers and suppliers of oil derivatives with equal opportunities in connection to “fuel taxes”.

Currently, the Jordan Petroleum Refinery Company adds 8 per cent to the cost of oil derivates designated to support the municipalities.

But since that the 50-year concession agreement with the refinery has ended and there are three other companies working in this sector, it is inevitable to amend the provision in a way that addresses this.