AMMAN — Madaba Security officials on Wednesday released
nine men who had been under arrest for four hours while going to the
Prime Ministry for a sit in demanding jobs.
اضافة اعلان
According to one
of the men, Ibrahim Tamimi, they had left their city, some 30km southwest of
Amman, to walk towards the Fourth Circle in the capital, where the prime
minister’s office is, but were rounded up near the
Foreign Ministry building on
the Airport Highway.
“We were
released four hours later after signing a pledge not to move our sit-in to
Amman,” Tamimi, 27, said.
Their protest
started a month ago and soon captured public opinion. The group’s spokesman,
Abdullah Rawahneh, said its members would sleep in the street, and during bad
weather they would sleep in a nearby small warehouse, but the owner, he
claimed, was pressured by authorities to bar them from using the facility.
“We went back to
Al-Salam Plaza [in Madaba] and would spend the nights there, but when the
security officials saw how determined we were and became aware of our plan to
walk to the Fourth Circle [in Amman], they talked to the owner of the warehouse
to allow us to continue sleeping there.”
“We have not
ended the sit-in despite the cold weather,” said Rawahneh, who had worked in
electric appliances maintenance and saved money to start his own business in
the trade, but the pandemic brought the business to a complete halt, and he
found himself unemployed.
“All we want is
jobs,” he said.
Tamimi, a
mechanical engineer by training, graduate of Mutah University, has not been
able to find a job either.
“Waking up in
the morning with no purpose and relying on my father for pocket money is
painful,” he said.
The
commissioner-general of the
National Center for Human Rights, Alaa Al-Armouti,
said that it is the right of the young people to organize sit-ins, and that
their movement and demands should not be prohibited, adding that their arrest
was illegal, and a restriction of people’s freedom of expression.
Jordan News
contacted the governor of Madaba, Nayef Al-Hdayat, but he refused to provide a
statement.
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