June 6, 2013
By RANA F. SWEIS
AMMAN — Two months ago, the most famous ice cream parlor in Damascus set up a new outlet amid the fast-food joints, stalls selling plastic household goods and offices lining Al Madina Al Munawara Street, a traffic-snarled road in Amman.

The original location for the ice cream shop, Bakdash, which is more than 100 years old, is in the Al Hamidiyah Souk, one of the oldest and largest markets in Syria.

As violence rages across the country, it is not only helpless refugees who are leaving for Jordan, but also skilled laborers, proficient builders and prominent chefs. “Business is dead in Damascus, and it’s going from bad to worse,” said Muhammad Abed, who worked at Bakdash in Damascus before he settled in Amman about a month ago.

“I was sent by Bakdash to come and work here, and it’s nice to see our product being sold in Jordan, because it always reminds me of home,” he said, as he rolled ice cream on a bed of crushed pistachio nuts.

Khaldoun Abbabneh, who manages the Amman shop, said it employs some Jordanians but the majority of the workers are Syrians. That includes Mr. Abed, the main ice cream beater: Using a large wooden paddle Mr. Abed vigorously churns the ice cream, made from boiled milk, sugar, vanilla flour, salt and choice pistachios, to soften and mix it before putting it in a large open freezer and serving it to customers.

Before the uprising began, more than two years ago, Jordanians were regular visitors to Damascus and other cities. They were lured by fine restaurants and eating places, along with affordable, high-quality fabric design stores and a shared social culture. The distance from Amman to Damascus is barely 175 kilometers, or 110 miles, by road.

Now, “Jordanians are no longer going to Syria because of the violence there, but we are offering the same atmosphere when it comes to the taste and the simple wooden chairs we bought from Damascus,” Mr. Abbabneh said.

“I used to visit Syria many times a year and always admired the theme and ambiance of their restaurants,” said Ibraheem Shokerat, owner of Areej Al Sham, one of several Syrian restaurants that have sprung up in Amman.

Areej Al Sham, meaning fragrance or sweet smell of Syria, has been designed — by a Syrian architect — to resemble an old Damascene home, with a small fountain in the middle, high ceilings that can open to the sky in summer and black and white wall tiles.

“I have the same kitchen staff I would have if I opened an excellent restaurant in Syria,” Mr. Shokerat said, “and that was important to me.”

“Before the uprising in Syria, it would have been impossible for these skilled Syrians to agree to come here and to accept the salaries we are offering them,” he added: “But the war changed everything.”

The United Nations has registered nearly 400,000 Syrian refugees in Jordan as of June 3, with another 83,000 awaiting registration. The government puts the number of refugees at 513,000.

After a sharp drop last week, the inflow picked up again this week, and is now running at 1,000 to 2,000 daily, according to U.N. officials.

In a country that was already short of natural resources and facing economic challenges, the refugee flow has created resentments, especially among Jordanians living in the north of the country, where most of the refugees are living, and trade with Syria has been hit hard.

Many refugees live in grim, overcrowded apartments, where their presence, intermingled with the Jordanian population, has strained school classrooms, infrastructure and health services. Local residents, once welcoming, accuse the refugees of taking their jobs and blame them for rising rents.

Still, whatever the economic benefits, the war presents daily business challenges. For Bakdash, which continues to make its ice cream in Damascus before transporting it in refrigerated trucks across the border, a worsening of the violence could force the closing of the Amman parlor. “We are not removed from the conflict,” Mr. Abbabneh said. “The trucks are already being delayed in delivering the ice cream from Syria and, so, we are forced to buy larger quantities for fear we will run out.

“In the future, the war will basically determine whether we have ice cream or not.”

For Mr. Shokerat, the owner of Areej Al Sham, there are other reminders of the conflict.

“What happens in Syria affects my employees who have families back home,” he said. “At one point at least four of them couldn’t communicate with their relatives because of the violence in their cities, so last month they decided to take a risk and return home.”

“You lose some really great employees but at the same time you understand the struggle,” he added. “Some of the ingredients also come straight from Syria, so, of course you can bring some aspects of Syria to Jordan. But at the end, you can’t separate yourself or your business from what is happening in that country.”

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RAMTHA, JORDAN — A few months ago, boxes of tomatoes, lettuce and cucumbers blocked the entrances to shops in a bustling market in Ramtha, close to the Syrian border.

Shop shelves were lined with boxes of cigarettes, and there were so many containers of goods from Syria that a storage facility was opened in the middle of the market.

Today the shops, owned by Jordanians, are closed, the streets abandoned. A main border crossing, where goods were being transported to this impoverished town, has been officially closed.

“Jordan’s economy has been devastated because of the lack of trade toward Syria going north,” said Andrew Harper, head of the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan.

Syria’s unpredictable conflict is increasingly raising tensions among Jordanians as the economy continues to suffer, and resentment toward Syrian refugees is growing.

Jordan has drawn waves of refugees in the past, but this wave is particularly difficult. The impact of the Syrian conflict has been most felt in the north, which relies heavily on trade with Syria. Jordanians in Ramtha also have strong tribal and family ties with people in Dara’a, birthplace of the Syrian rebellion.

“The main market has turned into a ghost town and all that is left is resentment and anger,” said Sami al-Mugrabi, a Jordanian who owns a small shop in the market.

Last year, he offered tea to Syrian refugees walking by and would listen empathetically to their stories of the cities and homes they had left behind.

“No more,” he said. “We welcomed them, even in our homes, but Jordanians are suffering to find work, classrooms are crammed, hospitals can barely cope, newlyweds can’t find homes to rent, and we no longer feel like we should be the ones to suffer because of them.”

Jordanian visitors to his shop — a doctor, a border guard, a businessman and an unemployed youth — echoed his resentment.

About 450,000 Syrians refugees are registered or awaiting registration in Jordan, according to the United Nations, and 1,000 to 3,000 people continue to arrive daily.

International financial support for refugees — and for the Jordanian government — does not necessarily reach the average Jordanian family.

“What we need to do is to provide not only support at the refugee camps, communities and on the government level but also alleviate the pain for the average Jordanian family,” Mr. Harper said. “They just cannot be expected to be absorbing the consequences of the international community’s ineffectiveness in Syria by themselves.”

In a recent poll conducted by the Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute at the University of Jordan, in Amman, 70 percent of Jordanian respondents said they opposed allowing more Syrian refugees into the country.

The United Nations has predicted that there could be up to 1.2 million refugees in Jordan by the end of the year — equivalent to a fifth of the country’s population.

“There is a lot of pressure on Jordan,” said Amer Sabaileh , a political analyst at the university. “The Jordanian public seems to always pay the price when it comes to the conflicts in the region — including Iraq, Palestine and now Syria.”

Analysts warn that Jordan faces other real challenges, apart from the refugee crisis. In November of last year, serious protests erupted in the capital and other cities, after the government’s decision to increase prices of fuel and cooking oil.

“Generally, Syrians are not to blame for Jordan’s chronic shortage of water or rise in electricity prices that is expected to take place in the summer,” said Manar Rachwani, a columnist and editor at Al Ghad, an independent daily. “In fact, protests against the rise of prices in Jordan took place before the Syrian crisis even began.”

Since 2011, there has been a series of labor strikes and small but regular protests to back demands for changes in the country’s electoral law to balance the representation of urban and rural areas more fairly. There have also been demands for the creation of an electoral framework that supports credible party political development and for a serious crackdown on corruption.

“The south is in a desperate situation right now and resentment in the north is growing, so it is clear there are tensions,” Mr. Sabaileh said.

Just last week, in the city of Maan, south of Amman, there were clashes between local residents and security forces over violence that had erupted at Al-Hussein bin Talal University, which left four people dead and dozens injured.

Some warn that a prolonged crisis across the border may distract the government from implementing comprehensive restructuring. In coming months, meanwhile, water shortages are likely to increase and the government is expected to raise the price of electricity.

“If politicians are going to say it’s because of refugees, it’s inevitable that we will witness some sort of violence and anger against the Syrians here,” Mr. Rachwani said.

Sandwiched between two civil conflicts, including Iraq to the west, Jordanians continue to express fears of violence spilling over their borders.

A few Syrian rockets have landed in Jordan and some residents continue to hear the sound of gunfire and shelling in the distance. A Jordanian soldier was killed in October last year in clashes with militants trying to cross the border from Jordan into Syria, according to the Jordanian government.

“The conflict is very close, therefore the status quo in Syria is a disaster for Jordan,” said Mr. Rachwani. “There are real fears and threats, so the longer the conflict drags on, the stronger the extremist groups become.”

Spillover effects from the U.S.-led war in Iraq still reverberate in the kingdom. The Iraq war also drew militants from around the world, including Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who led an insurgent group, Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and was killed by an airstrike in 2006.

Mr. Zarqawi claimed responsibility for the triple suicide bombing against hotels in Amman in 2005 that killed 60 people.

Increasingly, regional and local media have been reporting that some Jordanians have been crossing illegally into border towns to join Jabhat al-Nusra, a Syrian militant group that has pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda.

There have also been claims by the Jordanian jihadist movement that some 500 Jordanians are fighting alongside extremist groups within Syria. At least 33 have been confirmed dead.

Although the government attempts to be cautious in its policy toward Syria, that is becoming more difficult as the conflict continues. Jordan’s geographic position and weak economy can leave it squeezed between competing interests in the region.

The Jordanian public, at the same time, has expressed opposition to foreign intervention in Syria.

Last month, the U.S. secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, announced that the United States would be sending 200 troops to Jordan, a close U.S. ally, to help contain the violence. In response, a few thousand Jordanians across the country demonstrated against the deployment.

“We want the bloodshed to end, but we don’t want to see a foreign intervention in Syria and we don’t want to see American troops on our land,” said Ruweida Hassan, a member of the Jordanian Women’s Union who joined a group of demonstrators last week in central Amman.

“At the end, we blame the Arab dictators and their unjust rule, which have brought us to where we are,” she said. “But the conflict in Syria is being exploited by many countries and the people always end up paying the heavy price.”

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