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The young men hauled tires and debris across a street and set the barricade alight so that black smoke curled up under a bright sun. A jeep full of soldiers pulled to a halt, and the men poured from it with their automatic rifles, scanning the roofs of the square, bleached-stone homes for rock throwers.
''This is our intifada,'' said a gnarled man in a checkered headdress and long white robes, speaking of the Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The remark was accompanied by a sardonic smile.
Since Tuesday, southern Jordan has been wracked by protests in which eight people have been reported killed 30 hurt in areas east of the Jordan River and the Dead Sea.
The authorities said today that the situation was under control and, for the first time, acknowledged that there were fatalities, but the official count was put at only two. Villages north and south of here were again the sites of protests and confrontation, witnesses said, and one fatality was reported at a funeral in Mazar. Neglect and Austerity
But the comparison to events in the West Bank seemed flawed.
The tactics of rock throwing and burning tires seemed familiar, but the protest in this town 77 miles south of Amman, the capital, has been bred by the politics of economic neglect and austerity, not those of occupation, residents say.
Continue reading the main storyThe soldiers and the protesters come from the same Bedouin stock that has long been the core of support for King Hussein in a land where more than half the population is of Palestinian origin.
''The people are angry with the Government,'' said a 20-year-old student who joined the protests. Nearly everything associated with the authorities -banks and the police station, education ministry offices and the veterinary service - were attacked with rocks.
''Look,'' said an older man, waving a pack of cigarettes. ''This is expensive now.'' He pointed to a car. ''The fuel, that is expensive.'' Squeeze Is Acute in the South
The riots in southern towns like Kerak, Tafila and Maan, where as many as 4,000 people rampaged through the streets and battled the police, erupted two days after the Government announced price increases to meet the terms of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund. The accord will help Jordan reschedule its $6 billion foreign debt and obtain loans of $275 million over the next 18 months.
The increases did not affect basic foods but meant increases of 15 percent to 50 percent in the cost of gasoline, alcohol, cigarettes and licence fees, increases intended to raise revenue and reduce budget deficits.
But those complexities seemed lost in this town, crowned by the soaring ramparts of a 12th century fortress built by Crusaders that commands a valley winding down to the Dead Sea.
Since late last year, Jordan has been straining under an austerity plan to combat an economic crisis caused largely by Government overspending, Western economists say. The currency, the dinar, has lost a third of its value in the last year, pushing up the prices of imported food and other goods.
Many Jordanians, particularly in Amman, a city once flush with Arab money sent by Jordanians working in the oil-rich gulf, felt a squeeze. But in these southern parts, fringed by deserts and dust-devils spiraling over the ocher plains, the strains were more severe. 'The King Must Return'
''Amman always had it better,'' said a Western diplomat in the capital. ''And the sense of neglect in the south deepened while the Government seemed to ignore popular feeling. The price rises were the last straw.''
The authorities seem to have exerted only tenuous control over this town of 20,000, whose history dates to biblical times. In one incident today, the authorities cleared a street of barricades only to find a new barricade built minutes later. When a jeep mounted with a light machine gun halted at the barricades, youths threw stones at it.
''The King must return to deal with this,'' a 30-year-old engineer called from a rooftop. ''Otherwise it will get worse.''
Continue reading the main story