AMMAN (Middle East Eye) – Mohammed Khalaf Hadid was quiet. The sheikh of a Jordanian tribe and head of the National Committee for the Defence of Political Prisoners, he was leading a meeting in the basement of the lawyer Musa Abdallat’s home in Amman.
Families of Jordanian political prisoners - more than 20 people in total - were gathered around a table, sat on sofas and chairs, packets of dates and boxes of water in front of them.
Some of them were fasting, waiting to break their fast when the meeting ended after two-and a half hours at 8pm. All of them were angry.
Relatives of imprisoned members of the Hirak movement, an opposition group founded in the wake of the Arab Spring to advocate democratic reform, their jailed loved ones are branded as terrorists by the authorities and accused of cybercrimes.
Hadid began to speak. He was also angry. Very, very angry.
Like the families present, Hadid wasn’t just calling for the release of the prisoners, he was aiming a broadside at the state of Jordanian society and the leadership of King Abdullah II.
As he spoke, he blamed the king for the arrest of the prisoners and castigated him for driving the Hashemite kingdom into a state of economic turmoil, while also stripping Jordanian citizens of their freedoms.
The sheikh began by denouncing what he called the excessive spending of the royal family on holidays and luxuries, all while ordinary Jordanians live in poverty.
“There are funds set aside for the royal family. How much do they spend daily? Is it one million a day for every member of the family spent on trips?” he asked.
“We have a right to know. We need to know how money is spent. This is our constitutional right to know the truth about what was published in the Pandora documents,” he said.
Last year, a massive leak of more than 11.9m confidential files revealed that between 2003 and 2017, the Jordanian king had amassed an international luxury property empire that includes 14 homes across the U.S. and UK, from California to central London.
The revelations were met in Jordan by a media blackout that journalists in the country told Middle East Eye was far from coincidental.
Hadid went on. He hit the table in front of him more than once, blaming the king again and again and repeated, with bitter sarcasm, that this was all taking place “in the era of the renaissance, in the era of King Abdullah”.
“We live in poverty and hunger, crime is on the rise, and we do not get our right to work,” he said.
“There are many sons of officials who get jobs and are paid thousands of Jordanian dinars per month without any accountability. What they do is monitor political opponents, make their lives difficult, put pressure on their work, and prevent the right of assembly which is guaranteed by the constitution.
“Where is justice in the reign of the renaissance of King Abdullah II?”