AMMAN— The
elections of the
Jordan Engineers Association (JEA) were rigged and re-election
is imperative, an association president-hopeful claimed.
اضافة اعلان
Buthaina Al-Tarawneh from Watan list claimed
that there were engineers from some security agencies who voted for the
association’s council.
“They were asked
to vote for certain candidates and they were in queues; they were threatened to
lose their jobs, if they did not vote for a particular list,’’ Tarawneh told
Jordan
News.
She said the
White and Green streams boycotted the elections. Members of the two groups
refused to answer repeated
Jordan News calls for comment.
The Islamist
stream, which had a strong presence in the association in the past, has also
stayed away.
Only 8,315 out
of 74,000 engineers registered with the association, the largest among Jordan’s
professional unions, cast ballot, she pointed out.
The Nomu stream
won a vast majority of seats in JEA’s council in the one-day elections held
last Friday.
Vice President
Fawzi Masad insisted that the election was fair and that polling was carried
out in a “positive atmosphere.” He dismissed that the rumored rigging was baseless.
“The White
stream boycotted after results for the association’s branches in governorates
were evidently decisive for the Nomu stream and by a large margin,” He said.
“So, they withdrew from the elections of the engineering departments and from
all the association bodies.”
He said that the
grouping claimed that its withdrawal was prompted by the alleged intervention
of government institutions in favor of Nomu. “We believe that the real reason
is the inability of the White stream to increase the number of its supporters
in the past four years.”
Malik Amaireh, a
member of the Engineers Association and a former head of the Electrical
Engineering Department, told
Jordan News that he shunned the vote
because the “white stream I belong to has boycotted”.
He asserted that
“fraud and interference” in the electoral process was repeated for a third time
“to eliminate any free vote in our association”. He did not explain the other
two times.
Engineer Ahmad
Samara Al-Zoubi was elected president of JEA, according to the polls’ tally.
His electoral list Nomu, won 6,013 votes, compared with 1430 votes for Buthaina
Al-Tarawneh, 253 for Nayef Al-Bsoul, 239 for Ayman Al-Amro, and 41 for Najah
Al-Jitawi.
Jamal Abu Eid,
secretary-general of the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, announced the
election of the association’s president, vice-president and heads of
departments.
Masad, the vice
president, received 6,321 votes, compared with 1,395 won by Omar Al-Tahat.
The number of voters in
Amman was 3,404, Zarqa 647, Irbid 1,223, Aqaba 372, Tafileh 198, Mafraq 286,
Karak 461, Balqa 794, Madaba 267, Ma’an 118, Jerash 302, and Ajloun 243.
Read more Features
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
