Jordan is a country located in Asia. According to AbbreviationFinder, JO is the two-letter ISO code of Jordan, and JOR is the three-letter country abbreviation for Jordan.

Yearbook 1997

Jordan. According to Countryaah, the national day of Jordan is May 25. The 1994 peace agreement with Israel still did not give a concrete dividend and unemployment remained high. Support for Islamist movements grew, which worried King Hussein to such an extent that during the year he interrupted the progress towards democracy he initiated in 1989.

In March, the king dismissed Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Kabariti, according to some information due to disagreement between them about the country’s policy towards Israel. Replacement was the former Prime Minister Abd as-Salam al-Majali, who later during the year led J’s delegation in the peace talks with Israel.

In September, Israeli agents attempted to assassinate one of Hamas (Islamic Resistance Movement) leaders, Khalid Mashal, by stabbing a syringe at him on an open street in Amman. After pressure from King Hussein, Israel handed over an antidote that saved Mashal’s life. The agents were arrested and the king could, in exchange for handing them over to Israel, cause Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, to be released from Israeli prison along with some 50 other prisoners, mainly Palestinians. The drama led to increased support for both King Hussein and Hamas.

On November 4, Jordan went to election. The largest opposition party Islamic Action Front – the Muslim Brotherhood’s political branch – and other parties called for a boycott in protest at the King’s introduction of a new press law that forced 13 newspapers to close. The turnout was below 50%. The King’s supporters won 62 of the 80 seats, while the rest of the seats went to independent nationalists and Islamists who stood outside the boycott.

That the Islamic Front of Action distanced itself from the country’s political process worried analysts. The fact that the Islamists were sitting in Parliament was seen as a guarantee that they would not resort to violence, as they did in e.g. Egypt and Algeria where their movements are banned.

Following the parliamentary elections, the Islamic Action Front and eight other parties planned to launch a campaign to, among other things, stop the approach to Israel. However, the groups assured that they intended to use peaceful means.

In March, a Jordanian soldier shot seven Israeli schoolgirls on an outing at the border between the two countries. He was sentenced in July to life in prison for murder. That he was not sentenced to the death penalty was because the court judged him as mentally unstable.

• Shopareview: Offers climate information of Jordan in Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter, covering maximum and minimum temperature for each of 12 months. Also includes when is best time to visit this country.

The issue of Syrian refugees

As the fifth anniversary of the Syrian conflict dawns, Jordan has opened its border to more than 630,000 refugees. This, at least, is the partial data recorded by the United Nations High Commissioner (UNHCR, the body that, together with other non-profit organizations, deals with the reception of refugees). Government sources, however, have estimated figures in excess of one million. Amid so many and growing difficulties, the Kingdom of Jordan has shown its support for the Syrian and Iraqi people, leaving free access to its territory and offering assistance and security to refugees displaced in the refugee camps north of the country of Zaatari, Mrajeeb al-Fhood and Azraq. The Zaatari camp, in the desert governorate of Mafraq, has quickly become the second largest camp in the world: according to the UNHCRit hosts 120,000 displaced people, mainly women, children and the elderly. The most serious social problems generated by the Syrian presence in Jordan did not arise in the camps but in the communities, where most Syrians tried to settle to look for work. Jordan suffers from a high chronic unemployment rate which affects about 12% of the total population and 33.7% of young people. The fear of many Jordanians is substantiated in the fact that many Syrians could steal jobs from the locals, thus exhausting precious welfare resources reserved for them, so much so as to push parliamentarians and senior officials to ask the government to close the borders with Syria. Jordanian concerns are based on fears that mass arrivals of Syrians could pose a new threat to national identity. A situation, this, which has already been experienced in the past by Amman with the influx of Palestinians from the West Bank. To meet the needs of refugees and prevent the Syrian crisis from crossing borders, Amman has mainly resorted to foreign aid.