Hundreds of demonstrators calling for reform rallied late into the evening in the Jordanian capital on Friday, a week after riot police officers and government supporters violently broke up a rally and a protest camp, leaving one man dead and scores injured.
This Friday’s demonstration, by contrast, went on for several hours without intervention, though the reformists planned to stay on at their new location, the downtown Municipality Square, into the night.
The protesters hailed mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood and the March 24 Movement, a new organization that had planned to camp out from that date until their demands for reform were met, like those who took up temporary residency in Tahrir Square in Cairo.
The Muslim Brotherhood estimated the number of protesters on Friday at 2,000. The main demands raised by the demonstrators are an end to corruption and constitutional reform that would curb the sweeping powers of King Abdullah II.
Pro-democracy demonstrations have been taking place here regularly since January, when the Tunisian revolution set off a wave of regional upheaval. Responding to public pressure, the king replaced the cabinet and ordered his new prime minister, Marouf al-Bakhit, to begin electoral reforms and reach out to all elements of Jordanian society, including the Muslim Brotherhood.
But progress has been slow, and the opposition groups have meanwhile stepped up their demands for more fundamental constitutional reform.
Security forces were out in force on Friday, and convoys of cars driven by young men and decorated with Jordanian flags and portraits of King Abdullah paraded through streets that were blocked to other traffic. But there were no clashes this time.
Zaki Saad, head of the political bureau of the Muslim Brotherhood, said that promises had been given by the authorities that demonstrators would not be attacked.
“There is now an official decision not to send thugs to attack the demonstrators,” he said in an interview. That, he said, “proves that what happened last Friday was the result of an official decision.”
He was referring to the violence of the previous week when government supporters attacked the protesters with sticks and rods. When the protesters fought back, the riot police were called in, and they broke up the fighting as well as the tent camp.
The opposition groups say there have been attempts to polarize the society and to portray the protesters as antipatriotic. Commenting on the parades of cars on Friday, Mr. Saad said it was “A continuation of the campaign to provoke division among the people, between ‘loyalists’ and ‘reformists’.”
As the effects of Tunisia and Tahrir Square continued to roil the region, there were reports of more demonstrations and arrests in Bahrain, where members of the Shiite majority have been protesting against the regime.
Bahrain, which is ruled by a Sunni royal family, is, a close American ally and home to the American Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The strategic island remains under martial law after the king called in Saudi troops to help him quell unrest by mostly Shiite demonstrators last month.
Human rights workers said that up to 400 Bahrainis had been arrested since the crackdown, including political activists, clerics, and several doctors and bloggers.
One prominent blogger, Mahmood al-Yousif, who was detained Wednesday, was released late Thursday after the State Department expressed concern about his arrest.
But at least three other bloggers remained in detention and a prominent doctor from the main Salmaniya Hospital was arrested on Friday, according to Nabeel Rajab, director of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights.
Mr. Rajab said that protesters were holding candlelight marches at night in the villages outside the capital, Manama. He said that demonstrations continued on Friday afternoon, and that they were being violently dispersed by the police.
On Wednesday night, he said, a 15-year-old boy was killed after being struck in the head by either a rubber bullet or a sound bomb, bringing the death toll up to about 24.
Hundreds of Saudi Shiites staged peaceful protests in the kingdom’s oil-producing east on Friday, Reuters reported, in support of Shiites in Bahrain and political freedoms at home.
Meanwhile, witnesses say Omani police used tear gas and water cannons to disperse hundreds of protesters demanding the release of people detained in crackdowns by security forces after Friday Prayer in Sohar, an industrial city in northern Oman where pro-reform demonstrations began in late February against tight political control.
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