[NY Times - 4/2/02] AMMAN, Jordan, April 1 - Protests against Israel and the United States intensified across the Middle East today, with the police in Amman and Cairo firing water cannons and repeated bursts of tear gas to prevent demonstrators, mostly students, from surging through the streets.
The protests took myriad forms. In Iraq, Saddam Hussein demanded that Arabs take the unlikely step of cutting off oil sales to the West. In Libya, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi led marchers through the streets of the capital, Tripoli, and challenged the Arab nations bordering Israel to open the frontiers to allow volunteer fighters to join the Palestinians.
Even in Kuwait, the most uncritical of American allies, the Parliament issued a statement suggesting that Washington be fairer in dealing with the conflict.
"The Arab masses are on the move," said Taher Masri, a former prime minister of Jordan. "It's a terrible situation. The regimes were beginning to stabilize, and the region was moving in the right direction. Now some regimes will suffer."
Not all protests were violent or unruly. Thousands of marchers moved peacefully through the streets of Khartoum, in Sudan, and demonstrators in Lebanon chanted outside the American Embassy near Beirut. Outside of Cairo, protests erupted in various Egyptian cities including Alexandria and Sohag, along the Nile.
The most violent were in Cairo and here in Amman. In Cairo, thousands of students pushed through the gates of Cairo University and headed for the Israeli Embassy a few hundred yards away, shouting for Egypt to expel the ambassador and sever diplomatic ties.
Riot police firing water cannons and tear gas and wielding truncheons drove the students back after four hours. The police said 9 officers were hit by stones and 16 protesters were taken to hospitals overcome by tear gas. Thirty protesters were arrested, the police said.
In Amman, a phalanx of police formed a barrier across the gates of the University of Jordan to prevent at least 500 protesters from leaving campus, ultimately water cannons drove them back.
The police here and in Cairo were basically successful in containing the demonstrations. Life elsewhere appeared calm, and one could easily have passed the day without realizing there were violent clashes elsewhere.
In the Palestinian refugee camp in the Jebel Hussein neighborhood, the police skirmished for much of the day with mostly young camp residents. Protesters set fire to trash containers, leaving thick black smoke billowing above the camp.
Protesters seemed especially galvanized by President Bush's remarks on Saturday. Men and women across the spectrum of age and economic status said they were appalled by the picture of Mr. Bush, relaxing on his ranch in a blue jean shirt, suggesting that Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, do more to stop terrorism while they watched Israeli tanks smashing through the West Bank and the corpses left behind by Israeli soldiers.
"Do those Americans live with us on the same earth?" said Wael Hassan, a law student protesting in Cairo. "Can't this Bush realize what the Israelis have been doing to the Palestinians for the past 50 years? Well, how could he realize the pain of the poor Palestinians who are living in the camps while he is condemning them from his ranch playing with his dogs."
Many Arabs noted a certain contradiction in American policy, with Mr. Bush occasionally saying he supported a Palestinian state but condemning anyone who wanted to fight for it.
"He had a limited vocabulary," said Mr. Masri, the retired Jordanian prime minister who concentrates on human rights for the Arab League. "He kept repeating terrorism 10 or 20 times and not mentioning occupation. It was as if the Palestinians are the aggressors."
Watching the melee, Zakaria Idrees, 45, said, "The Arab leaders supported the war against terrorism like dogs, but for our people they don't do anything to protect them from the Israelis.
"I called my family in Ramallah," Mr. Idrees said, "and I couldn't stop crying and I had to hang up because I couldn't listen any more. They have no food, no medicine and they are scared."
The protests in Jordan reflected the fact that so many residents are Palestinians with relatives across the Jordan River. Watching the scenes from there, they want to participate and protest what they see as Arab inaction.
The unions also organized a protest of several hundred people outside their building, which grew when students fled the campus of the University of Jordan because they said arrests were being made.
Throughout much of the day, protesters could be heard chanting phrases like "Let's attack our neighbor" or "Arab leaders, when are you going to learn from Hezbollah?" The organizers said they had hoped to march through downtown Amman but were denied a permit, a frequent occurrence.
With Arab leaders weighing whether to call an emergency summit of at least foreign ministers in Cairo, some chants were against area governments. "No to the Arab summit! No!" protesters yelled and "Oh Abdullah, son of the Sauds, we don't want normalization."
Both chants were against the recent summit in Beirut, where Arab leaders approved support of a peace initiative devised by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, offering Israel relations with all 22 Arab countries if it withdrew to its 1967 borders and aided the creation of a Palestinian state.
The Jordanian government has been sensitive to protests wrecking the image of Jordan as a stable country at a time when it is trying to attract foreign investment. Recent protests prompted severe censorship, with security officers confiscating the videotapes of reporters, leaving the demonstrations virtually unreported locally.
"They tell us we live in a democratic country and we have the right to express ourselves, but we don't see anything of this democracy that they are teaching us in school," said Mona Aisha, a 20-year-old science major. "The Jews took our land and the Jordanians took our voices and I feel like I don't know what to do, I just feel helpless."
The one group that was given a permit to gather held a candlelight vigil some 250 yards from the American embassy in Amman. "P.L.O., P.L.O., Israel No," they chanted and "No to the American Embassy, No to the Zionist embassy."
In a sop to public sentiment, various Jordanian officials made statements or leaked word that the government was considering downgrading relations with Israel from the ambassador level to the level of chargE d'affaires, the No. 2 post. Jordan has kept its embassy in Tel Aviv at that level since the violence erupted. But here, as in Egypt, officials said they would not break relations with Israel as long as they felt some minimum dialogue would further the Arab cause.
In Iraq, Mr. Hussein urged Arab oil producers to adopt economic measures against Israel and its supporters. Iraq's ruling Baath party called on Arab nations to wield oil as a weapon, apparently by cutting off supplies to the West as was done during the Arab-Israeli war in 1973.
But a repeat of 1973 was considered unlikely, mostly because the Arab oil producers have come to depend solely on oil revenue to keep their public welfare systems afloat.
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[posted 4/2/02]
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