by Robert Fisk
Sometimes the beauty of the sea off Beirut would discourage me from travelling. I would be due to leave on a 6 p.m. flight for Jordan but then, halfway through the afternoon, seduced by the sun and the bright green of the trees against the waves, I would call Ahmed Shebaro, my travel agent, and plead with him to find an early morning flight next day. And so I would sleep early and wake to the cooing of doves in the palms and then head off to that little sandpit that Winston Churchill created for the Hashemites, whose ruling family was still represented by the man we called the “PLK,” the Plucky Little King.
Dinner with the PLK. That’s how the news would go the rounds of the Middle East press corps. Informal, the royal court would insist. Off the record, we would assume. And when we turned up for dinner at the palace—this was in September 1993—and saw the candlelit table, more candles nestling amid the bookshelves, the mezze laid out along the flower-smothered marble table, it seemed that informality meant confidential. So when King Hussein ibn Talal of Jordan said “on the record,” the notebooks fluttered like doves into our laps, the pocket cassette recorders clacking onto the marble table top. If invited, the king might visit Arafat in Jericho. The Israeli government was “courageous and far-sighted” in recognising the PLO. The world should support this historic initiative. It was “a last chance.”
How often had we heard those words “last chance”? Camp David had been a “last chance.” Now the Arafat–Rabin accord was a last chance. And it was inevitable that an American reporter should enquire after the king’s health. Of course, he told us, he had returned from the United States minus one kidney. “But the last check-up did not show any trace of cancer.” There would be a check-up every six months. “I’m trying to exercise as much as I can—and I’m still trying to give up smoking.” And we all looked at the packet of Marlboro Lights that appeared in the king’s left hand at the end of the meal. Not a frail man, but the PLK was aware of his mortality, an elder statesman now with nothing to lose by speaking his mind in public. Though when the lady from the Washington Post dared to question his right to postpone elections, he quoted the Jordanian constitution—and the king’s prerogatives—in a faintly irritated way. Not a man to be crossed, one thought, not a man to brook opposition. But it was often difficult to fault the PLK. He promised equality for those Palestinians in Jordan who chose to remain Jordanians after Arafat’s self-autonomy elections. And after acknowledging in Rabat back in 1974 that the PLO was the sole representative of the Palestinian people, he remained the only Middle East leader in half a century to formally relinquish his claim to Arab lands rather than demand more.
We sat round the table and listened to all this, the half-American Queen Noor supervising the pourers of orange juice and the purveyors of spiced chicken and fruit, we scribes almost too respectful to raise, Banquo-like, the ghost of Saddam Hussein. But he had to appear at the feast. What, we asked the king, would be Saddam’s role in a Middle East peace? And out it tumbled. Jordan had suffered for its humanitarian concern for the Iraqi people during the 1991 Gulf War. Aqaba, Jordan’s only artery to the rest of the world, was moving towards desuetude. “It’s no secret that I’ve not seen eye-to-eye with the Iraqi leadership for a very long period of time, since before the war . . . my whole concern was . . . for every country in this region.” Jordan had tried and failed to persuade the Iraqis to withdraw from Kuwait. But had we read the report by UNICEF that by the end of 1993, a million Iraqi children would die as a result of UN sanctions? Yes, “in a context of peace and if Iraq can pull itself together—a democratic, pluralist Iraq, respecting human rights—the country has a tremendous part to play.” That seemed to exclude Saddam, although the king did not say so. And the PLK talked about democracy, that unique phenomenon which he claimed could save the Middle East from extremism.
Were we taken in by this? The king may not have wanted to run his country without a parliament, as he told us, but Jordan was not exactly a Western-style democracy. “More democracy, more participation, more human rights,” he said at one point. What did this mean? He hoped, he said, to live to see Jerusalem again. The candlelight gleamed off the king’s balding head. He hoped nothing would happen to “Chairman Arafat.” Mortality had made its appearance at the dinner table. King Hussein had just over five more years to live.
The PLK was a tough man and his refusal to oppose Saddam Hussein after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait kept the Jordanians and their half population of Palestinians loyal. He had the disarming—and disconcerting—habit of calling everyone “Sir,” which must have been a hangover from his days at Sandhurst, but which led us journalists into the trap of thinking that he felt respect for his interlocutors. He had been damned by the usual American media for not supporting America’s war against Saddam; newspaper readers were then forced to make their way through endless analyses of the king’s likely fate. Was this the end of the Hashemites? Would Jordan cease to exist? The same outcome had already been predicted for Arafat. Was this the end of the PLO? But of course, the same international isolation that made Arafat weak enough to make peace with Israel also made King Hussein friendless enough to make peace with Israel.
It was a peace that froze very quickly and one that King Hussein might have preferred to wait longer to find. But Arafat’s own blundering deal at Oslo made Jordan’s treaty with Israel on 26 October 1994 inevitable. We went there, needless to say, to watch the next “last chance.” It needed a lot of signatures. Down in the heat of Araba, even the statesmen found it hard to comprehend. There were four volumes of documents, each to be signed by six hands, and pages of annexes. No wonder Bill Clinton, the desert light reflecting off the papers, kept rubbing his face, asking for sunglasses and dabbing his pained eyes with a black cloth. Then soldiers brought the maps.
Six feet in length, they were opened for more signatures. Maps of Baqura-Naharayim, of Zofar, of ground-water tables, of Yarmouk, of saltpans in the Dead Sea. Abdul Salam Majalli, the Jordanian prime minister, raised one arm in astonishment as more volumes were thumped onto the table. Clinton, overwhelmed by the light off the sheets, turned his back on his guests as an aide provided him with an eye-bath, right there in the middle of the desert. Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister, wore a sun-cap and sunglasses that made him look—as he scribbled his name again and again—like a football manager signing up a new star.
Thus did the men of Araba firmly divide Jordan from Israel, and Jordan from the land that was Palestine. Thus did King Hussein allow Israelis to go on living on strips of Jordanian territory. Thus did Jordan and Israel end their forty-six years of war, witnessed by just a single, junior PLO official from Amman, the sole representative of the people—the Palestinians—over whom they had fought each other. A minute’s silence honoured the thousands of Israelis and Jordanians—some of whom must have been Palestinians—killed in those forty-six years. “I believe they are with us on this occasion,” King Hussein said.
It was the noblest remark of the day by an ageing and tired king, a man who now thought much of death and one whose own people had the gravest reservations about this peace. Not many kilometres over the grey-brown mountains to the north-west of the seats upon which the dignitaries perched lay the city of Jerusalem, its eastern side—and the West Bank—still under the occupation of the very Israeli army that stood to attention before us. The Jordanian journalists stood unsmiling in the heat. “There’s no real jubilation on our side,” one of them said as Bill Clinton’s stretch limo swept between the old minefields of the Jordanian–Israeli frontline. “The people are looking at this like surgery—something they have to go through. For the Israelis, this is a victory. For us, it’s defeat.”
That was not how the statesmen of Araba put it. It was “a peace of the brave” (Clinton), a “source of pride,” the “dawn of a new era” and “a day like no other” (King Hussein), “the peace of soldiers and the peace of friends” (Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin). The king came across as the most dignified of men and ended with a r
emark that left an unanswered question: “This [treaty] is not just a piece of paper . . . it will be real, as we open our hearts and minds to each other.” Rabin touched on the same thought when he said that “peace between states is peace between people.” Yet both men knew that in much of the Middle East, peace between states did not necessarily mean peace between people.
An Israeli journalist threw his arms around a Jordanian bureaucrat while scores of Israeli girls distributed cold water, each bottle labelled “Israeli–Jordanian peace October 1994” in Arabic and Hebrew, but with its provenance—the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights—printed only in Hebrew. The hundreds of chairs were tied together with thin plastic handcuffs, the same handcuffs used by the Israeli army. The twenty-one-gun salute by artillery crews who could have been shooting at each other, the rumbustious Jordanian anthem played before the haunting beauty of the “Hatikvah,” the two granddaughters of Jordanian and Israeli soldiers killed in the 1967 war; they touched the elderly warriors standing next to the American president. But it needed Bill Clinton’s stock of clichés—“Turn no-man’s-land into every man’s home”—and his ritual threats against “terrorism” to remind the 5,500 guests that this was an American peace, engineered by the United States and guaranteed by the United States—whose closest Middle East ally is Israel. Only when the annexes were published later did we discover that the border between Jordan and the occupied West Bank had been marked as the frontier between Jordan and Israel.
Nor did Hussein have any reason to feel that Jordan was safer for the peace treaty. Only weeks before his death, he was particularly vexed when an Israeli journalist, Israel Harel, disinterred an idea that had long appealed to Ariel Sharon. Writing in Ha’aretz, Harel claimed that “Jordan was founded on part of the Jewish homeland . . . It will ultimately become apparent . . . that two nations [i.e., Israel and Palestine] cannot live on the small piece of land to the west of the Jordan and that two states cannot live there. If nations with vast stretches of land that have no need for additional acreage are feasting their eyes on Jordan, Israel must also stake its claim to Jordan . . . With that territory—even part of it—we could solve in cooperation with our peace process partners, many territorial disputes we have with the Palestinians.”
Israeli prime minister Rabin was to be assassinated by an Israeli—an “extremist,” according to Western journalists, of course, not a “terrorist”—just over a year after the Araba treaty was signed, and King Hussein would survive for only another four and a half years. He had never given up the Marlboro Lights and his death from cancer followed gruelling chemotherapy treatment in the United States and an ill-advised, rain-soaked motorcade through Amman to celebrate his supposed recovery.
It was on this initial return to Jordan that a scandal of royal proportions broke over the Hashemites. Hussein disgraced the cosy, avuncular figure of his brother Hassan by taking away his role as crown prince. Hassan knew the game of kings had ended the moment Hussein arrived at Queen Alia airport. There was a formal embrace from the man who thought he had won his battle with cancer. But he ignored Hassan’s son Rashid and then showed what he thought of his crown prince by choosing to travel into the city not with Hassan—his normal routine—but alongside Queen Noor. Hassan was left behind. The man who had waited thirty-four years to be king of Jordan was stunned.
In his American clinic, Hussein had been told that Hassan had tried to fire the chief of staff of the Jordanian army, that Hassan’s Pakistani-born wife Princess Sarvath had changed the carpets in the royal palace in anticipation of becoming queen. Both stories appear to have been untrue. Hassan had told Walid bin Talal, a Saudi billionaire, that he could not purchase the home of the chief of staff because it belonged to the field marshal. And Sarvath had been redecorating her own home—a period villa once owned by the former British ambassador Sir Alec Kirkbride—not the king’s. But far too many portraits of Crown Prince Hassan had begun to appear across Jordan and—a dangerous precedent, this—pictures of his own son as well. Hussein publicly accused Hassan of plotting little less than a coup d’état.
When word of the king’s suspicions first reached Hassan, he presented himself before his brother and asked Hussein bluntly: “How have I offended you? Here is my gun. If I have been disloyal to you, please shoot me—but do not disgrace me.” The king ordered Hassan to take his gun back and reassured him that he was still regent. The sequel to this was far more extraordinary. The king called Hassan to the royal palace at half-past midnight on 20 January 1999, to present him with his letter of dismissal. A photographer was waiting to snap Hassan handing over his insignia to the new crown prince, Hussein’s son Abdullah. Hassan returned to his car without time to read the document; driving away, he turned on the radio only to hear the contents of the unopened letter on the national news. Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.
Many Jordanians felt that the manner of his dismissal was unnecessarily cruel. As crown prince, Hassan had been ordered by the king to handle Jordan’s development projects—a role that inevitably brought him into conflict with the government of Prime Minister Abdul Karim Kabariti, who was said to dislike Hassan personally. Ministers believed that Hassan was trespassing on their prerogatives— something he had no right to do, since in Jordan the right of succession is the crown prince’s only constitutional power.
But had Hassan cast his mind back to the day nearly forty-three years earlier when another trusted servant of the Jordanian monarchy believed he was secure in his job, he might have known his fate. King Hussein was only twenty-one at the time but he had already argued with Lieutenant General Sir John Bagot Glubb, British commander of his Arab Legion and principal military adviser to his majesty. Glubb had disagreed with Hussein over strategy—the young king wanted to retaliate against the Israelis for raids on his border—and Glubb also presented Hussein with a list of Arab Legion officers who he claimed were “subversives” and should be dismissed.
Convinced that London was trying to control Jordan’s armed forces, the king fired the fifty-nine-year-old British general, along with his two top officers, the chief of staff and director of intelligence. In a tantrum, Hussein told his cabinet that his orders should be “executed” at once. Glubb Pasha was taken to the airport next morning in Hussein’s own car. The king’s anger subsided. Everything had been done in the interests of his nation. But to the sick king in the Mayo clinic in 1999, the crown prince was trying to take over the army—just as Glubb Pasha had been accused of trying to accomplish in 1956.
There was therefore nothing surprising about the dismissal of Crown Prince Hassan. The Hashemites had always lived on the edge, provoking disaster and recovery with a drama and nerve that still astonish other Arab leaders. They have a tendency to move rapidly between rage and contemplation, political folly and eternal friendship, that might be a characteristic of the Gulf Arabs rather than the Levant. But of course, Hussein’s family did indeed come from the Gulf, from the province of Hejaz, and it was his great-grandfather, also Hussein, whom the Ottomans named as emir, sherif of the holy Muslim city of Mecca. An austere religious group faithful to the al-Saud family—the “Islamic fundamentalists” of their time—were to drive the Hashemites from what was to become Saudi Arabia and Winston Churchill was to appoint King Hussein’s grandfather Abdullah as emir of Transjordan. Abdullah had wanted to be king of Palestine—for which the British had other plans. Abdullah’s brother Feisal would become king of Iraq, the consolation prize for losing the monarchy of Syria—for which the French had other plans. King Abdullah tried to make peace with the Zionists who were planning their new state on Palestinian land—and after the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948, the monarch’s life was forfeit. He had annexed the West Bank of the Jordan River; almost all the rest of Palestine had become Israel. The fifteen-year-old Hussein personally witnessed Abdullah’s assassination in Jerusalem, a killing organised by Palestinians.
The Hashemites were thus a family of loss, a dynasty used to suspicion as well as resolution.
They lost the Hejaz, they lost the west of Palestine. In Baghdad ten years later, King Feisal the Second—grandson of old Abdullah’s brother who had been appointed by the British—was murdered in a part-Baathist coup which, twenty years later, would bring Saddam Hussein to power. In 1967, King Hussein, in the greatest disaster of his career, chose to join Egypt and Syria in their war against Israel, and was driven out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank. In less than half a century, therefore, the Hashemites had lost the Hejaz, Iraq and all of Palestine.
Inevitably the story of the family became the story of the PLK. His English schooling naturally endeared him to the British, who admire courage in adversity and, even more, plucky losers. When Hussein married Antoinette Avril Gardiner, daughter of a Royal Engineers lieutenant colonel, in 1961, it felt as though Jordan had become a British protectorate once again. “Toni,” who became Princess Muna, gave birth to two sons, Abdullah—now the king—and Feisal. She was the second of four wives for a king whose marriages could be as turbulent as his nation’s politics.175 He had divorced his first and older wife Dina within eighteen months; the Jordanian ambassador to Egypt delivered the king’s goodbye letter to the queen when she was visiting a sick relative in Cairo. The marriage to “Toni” foundered when his roving eye settled on the beautiful Alia Toukan, an employee of Royal Jordanian Airlines, whose love for the king might have given him lasting peace of mind—they married in 1972—had she not been killed in a helicopter crash just over four years later. Amman’s Alia international airport is thus the only international airport in the world to be named after the victim of an air crash. Then in 1978, the king married Elizabeth Halaby, who became Queen Noor, an equally beautiful but forceful woman who physically towered over the king and who developed a strong distrust of his introverted, over-intellectualising brother Hassan. If the latter had become king, it was said in Amman, Noor would have left the country.
