Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril

by King Abdullah II

  I assembled a team of talented economic advisers, including Bassem Awadallah, a former investment banker and economist with a PhD from the London School of Economics, and Samir Rifai, a Harvard and Cambridge graduate and the son of my father’s trusted adviser Zaid Rifai, and asked them to come up with bold, innovative ideas to jump-start Jordan’s economic recovery. “We don’t have time for complex theories and debate,” I told them. “I just want to know the right thing to do.” They came back with a host of proposals that built on the measures the IMF’s structural adjustment program had introduced at the end of the 1980s: privatize state enterprises, downsize the state bureaucracy, end subsidies, improve education, promote innovative industries, remove trade barriers, and get the public and private sectors to work together to promote industries like information technology, pharmaceuticals, and new media.

  We had a basic problem. Much of what we would do was going to be very painful in the short term. Many of the benefits would take years to be felt. And we knew all too well that the previous set of structural adjustment measures had triggered riots. Comfortable with the old ways, many people would resist change—or claim that it could not be attained.

  The top priority, my advisers all agreed, was for Jordan to gain admittance to the World Trade Organization (WTO), an international organization formed in 1995 to promote free trade between countries by reducing tariffs on imports and exports. By joining, Jordan would be able to export to over one hundred countries and enjoy greatly reduced tariffs. In return, the other WTO members would be able to export to Jordan on the same terms. Jordan had begun its application in 1995, but the process was stalled. I agreed to do everything I could to get it moving again.

  In mid-May 1999, just three months after I became king, I made my first visit to the United States in my new role. My father and President Clinton had been very close. Before the trip I wrote the president a letter, telling him how much my father had valued their friendship. I do not know whether it was the letter or his fond feelings for my father, but when we met at the White House, Clinton was in an expansive mood. “What can I do to help Jordan?” he asked with a broad smile.

  “Help us become a member of the World Trade Organization,” I said quickly. I do not think he was expecting this at all. Usually countries in dire financial straits simply ask for more direct aid. But I did not want handouts. I wanted us to have a chance to help ourselves. Clinton took note of my request but gave no immediate answer. We continued our discussions of the subject with the U.S. government, which finally supported our application. Eleven months later, in April 2000, Jordan became a member of the WTO.

  Switching from economics to regional politics, I told the president about my recent trip to Damascus and of President Hafez al-Assad’s desire to meet with him. Clinton smiled, thanked me for passing on the message, and said he would see what he could do. True to his word, he met Assad for the first time in Geneva the following year. Syrian-Israeli peace was the main subject of the meeting, which failed to achieve any breakthroughs. Assad insisted on full Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights to the borders of June 4, 1967. Israel, in previous talks with the Syrians, had demanded alterations to this border. Clinton’s attempts to change Assad’s position failed and the stalemate persisted.

  The U.S. government was a gracious host, but the contrast to my previous visits was striking. I could no longer slip out to catch a movie with a couple of friends. Instead, as I found out when I went to see The Matrix, I would have a six-car Secret Service motorcade in tow, sirens blaring. If I wanted a quiet night at the movies, I would have to shed my security detail and go in secret.

  Some Middle Eastern leaders think that dealing with the United States is just about one’s relationship with the president. In our neighborhood, it is essential to know the heads of state personally, as power tends to be highly centralized. If the top man says he wants something, it gets done. But in the United States, political power is much more dispersed. In my time at Deerfield and Georgetown, I had learned a lot about the complexities of the American political system.

  I was in the United States on a military course in 1985 when my father met with President Ronald Reagan. I saw him right after the meeting and he was elated, because Reagan had agreed to provide extensive support for Jordan in the form of a defensive arms package. I warned my father that such a proposal was unlikely to get through Congress. But he thought Reagan’s personal agreement would be enough. “I have the word of the president of the United States!” he told me. But the truth was that without the consent of Congress, even the word of the president will not get things done.

  A visit to America, done right, takes at least a week. First, you have to meet with the president and vice president, then with the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and, ideally, the national security adviser. Next come senior intelligence officials and military officers. Finally, on the political side, you also have to engage both the Senate and the House of Representatives. I typically spend two long days in Congress, meeting with members of up to ten different Senate and House committees, both Republicans and Democrats. In America, you have got to work the system. It is not just about getting the green light from the White House. The challenge is to have the support of both the White House and Capitol Hill.

  Back in Jordan there were many pressing domestic problems to deal with. I was eager to improve the lives of Jordanians, but I suspected that privatizing state-owned industries and holding officials and civil servants accountable to more vigorous sets of performance measures would not sit well with them. First I would try to make more tangible improvements that they could see and understand.

  One example of the magnitude of the challenges we faced was the Al Bashir Hospital in Amman. As the largest state-run public hospital in the capital, it was in great demand. But when I visited the hospital in April, it was in an awful state. The wards were crowded and dirty, and none of the elevators in the building worked. Doctors had long lines of patients waiting for them and very little support. I was appalled and told the health minister to fix the situation—quickly.

  In the army, when you say do something, it gets done. But dealing with the civilian government ministries, I was learning, required a different approach. First of all, armies march in time, so everything happens on a fixed schedule: you attack at a certain time, you wake up at a certain time, and you expect something to be done by a certain time. With the government, that is not necessarily the case.

  I made a follow-up visit a couple of weeks later, and nothing had been done. The elevators were still broken, and the place was still deeply unhygienic. I told the health minister that I was serious about seeing improvements, and made a third visit after that, on returning from my trip to the United States.

  With my third visit the hospital management began to get the message, and conditions started to improve. But inefficient public services were a challenge across the whole country, not just in Amman. A lot of information had started to come in to the Royal Court about other problems. To my frustration, many times when I raised these issues with the relevant ministers, they would tell me that the reports were exaggerated and that everything was fine. I quickly understood that I would need to see with my own eyes what was going on.

  My father used to tell me how when he wanted to take the pulse of the country, he would wrap a traditional checkered head scarf around his face and drive round Amman at night in a battered old taxi, picking people up. He would ask every new passenger, “How’s the economy going? What do you think of the Palestinian-Israeli situation? What do you think of the king’s new policy?” One time, in order to provoke conversation, my father told his passenger, “You know, this king is rubbish.” The man pulled a knife on him and said, “Listen, you speak badly about the king and I’m going to cut your throat right here!” He was only able to calm the man down by pulling off his head scarf and revealing his true identity.

  I decided I would find a way of visiting government institutions
discreetly to see what was really going on. I had several disguises made, which, because I still use them, I will not describe in detail here. But suffice it to say that anybody who met me in one of my disguises would never mistake me for a king.

  I went to government offices and facilities across the country, from the north to the south, incognito. Accompanied only by a skeleton security detail, I visited hospitals, tax offices, police stations, and many other parts of the bureaucracy. Occasionally my secret visits were discovered by the public, but more often they were not. If I found people were being treated badly, I would raise the matter with the relevant minister back in Amman, and now I knew when they were not telling me the whole story.

  One time I visited a tax office that was in complete shambles. People’s records were lying around everywhere in boxes on the floor. Wanting to see what would happen, I walked over to a box, grabbed a handful of files, and headed for the door. Sure enough, nobody stopped me. I don’t think any of the civil servants even noticed.

  The next day I called the ministry and demanded to know why it was handling people’s confidential information in such a sloppy way. One of the bureaucrats argued that I was misinformed. When I pulled out the tax records I had taken, he turned white and went very quiet. That visit was made public. For one thing, I had to return the tax records. And I wanted everyone to know that I was pushing hard for reform. Government employees sometimes get complacent if they feel nobody is watching them. My military training had taught me that expecting a lot from people delivers the best results.

  Over time, my penchant for secret visits resulted in “Elvis” sightings. For each visit I actually made, there were reports that I had been spotted in another thirty or forty places. We heard of one such sighting at a tomato-packing plant up in the north of Jordan. A long line of farmers were waiting in their trucks for the plant to process their cargo, which might spoil in the sun. One farmer, as he pulled in to the gate, said he thought he had seen the king in disguise, waiting in one of the trucks. Whether he actually thought he had seen me or was just being cunning, no one will ever know, but the effect was the same. Pretty soon the line started moving at top speed.

  Across the country civil servants started panicking. If the next person in line could be the king, they figured, they had better treat everyone like royalty. The message to the bureaucrats was: you are there to serve the people, not the other way around. One newspaper ran a cartoon showing me dressed as a road sweeper, a prisoner, a beggar, and so on. The secret visits were popular with many Jordanians, but I knew that I could not end all inefficiencies and make the kind of changes Jordan needed by myself. The private and public sectors would have to begin working together.

  On November 26, 1999, we held our first National Economic Forum, a two-day conference at the Mövenpick Hotel, on the shores of the Dead Sea. Newly opened that year, the Mövenpick had a spa with impressive health facilities, but the delegates had little time for relaxing. They were too busy arguing. We’d invited about 160 representatives from the government and every part of Jordan’s private sector: industrial farmers, IT companies, pharmaceutical companies, and many others. What the business community was asking for from the government seemed like common sense, but when the meetings expanded to include civil servants, the two groups started shouting at each other.

  Halfway through the first day, it was clear that this approach wasn’t working. So I tried a different approach. I let the delegates know that nobody would be leaving until they came up with some solutions. I would lock the door and throw away the key until they sorted things out. When they realized that I was serious, and that they would be stuck there for the next two days unless they came to terms, the delegates put aside their differences and started coming up with a plan that would benefit all of Jordan. There was no press, so everybody could speak openly.

  The ideas ranged from the simple to the ambitious. One of the simplest was to introduce a two-day weekend. At that time, everyone in Jordan worked a six-day week, with Friday as a holiday. But the question being debated was, if we went to a two-day weekend like most of the world, what should the extra day off be? The Islamic holy day is Friday, so a lot of people wanted Thursday and Friday as the weekend. But many of the businessmen worked with companies in the West, so they wanted the weekend to be Friday and Saturday. After a healthy debate, the delegates settled on Friday and Saturday.

  We were not the only ones looking to move our economy more into line with international markets. Four years later, in July 2003, Qatar followed suit, shifting to a Friday-Saturday weekend. They were followed by the UAE, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, Bahrain in 2006, and Kuwait in 2007.

  The delegates discussed more ambitious goals, including building on the success of Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZs). Formed by the U.S. government in 1996, two years after the Jordan-Israel peace treaty was signed, these were manufacturing zones from which the products could enter the United States duty-free so long as at least 20 percent of the content was produced in either Israel or Jordan. The zones supplied U.S. companies such as Gap, JCPenney, and Levi Strauss. Exports from Jordan to the United States had shot up from virtually nothing to $18 million in 1998, and the delegates wondered how we could raise them still further.

  By the end of the conference the delegates had agreed on an ambitious economic development plan, including changing laws to make things easier for private companies and encouraging investment, privatization, and educational reform. They also agreed to set up the Economic Consultative Council, which would have representatives from both government and the private sector, to continue the debate and to implement reforms. Unlike many countries in the Middle East, Jordan has no oil and comparatively few natural resources. So the delegates knew that we would have to develop the true wealth of Jordan—our people—if we want to prosper in a competitive global economy.

  Two days after the conference ended, the World Trade Organization held its annual meeting in Seattle. While protesters raged outside, tossing insults and brickbats at baton-wielding riot police, inside the convention center the Jordanian delegation lobbied hard to be allowed to join. While some in America were violently rejecting globalization, we were rushing to embrace it. The next month, WTO members voted on our application, and Jordan joined on April 11, 2000. Our efforts to modernize our economy were gaining momentum.

  In January 2000, I went to Davos, Switzerland, for a meeting of the World Economic Forum, the yearly get-together of leading businessmen, politicians, academics, charity workers, and international bureaucrats. This was the first time I had attended the forum, and I had invited some young Jordanian businessmen and -women to travel with my delegation, hoping they would be able to benefit from the connections they were sure to make among the three thousand delegates.

  The guest list was as refined as the mountain air. President Clinton and UK prime minister Tony Blair were there, as well as South African president Thabo Mbeki and the leaders of some thirty other countries. There were leaders from the business world too, such as Microsoft chairman Bill Gates; John Chambers, chairman and CEO of Cisco Systems; and AOL chief executive Steve Case.

  I hosted a breakfast meeting on Sunday, January 30, with some of the leading technology executives present, and also met privately with Bill Gates, whom I invited to visit Jordan. At a session later in the day I spoke about the challenges facing the Middle East, the terrible pressure of unemployment, and how technology could help. Even in the Swiss Alps I couldn’t escape neighborhood politics. Yasser Arafat was there, meeting on the side with President Clinton. And two Iranian exiles were arrested for throwing paint bombs at the Iranian foreign minister. In 2003, Jordan hosted the World Economic Forum on the Middle East, a regional meeting that we have since hosted every other year in the summer. And that year, Rania was invited to join the board of the World Economic Forum Foundation, as the only member from the Arab world.

  Davos was a beautiful place in which to carry out the important task of persuading global
executives to consider investing in Jordan. But not all my work that first year took place in such elegant settings. A few months after becoming king, I paid a visit to Sudan. It was quite a contrast.

  As we were about to touch down at Khartoum airport, I looked down from the plane and could not see any welcoming committee. But out of the corner of one eye I caught a glimpse of an old T-55 tank rumbling toward us with soldiers clinging to its side. I was momentarily alarmed until we landed and saw the welcoming committee and I realized that this was the presidential guard, sent to patrol the area and ensure security. President Omar Al-Bashir invited us to join him in an aged Mercedes saloon car. I sat in the back with the president, the faded leather seat covered by polished wooden beads, and my brother Ali, at the time the head of my personal security detail, sat in the front, next to the driver. As we sped off to the heart of Khartoum, Ali pointed to two bullet holes in the passenger window and asked the driver what they were from. “Ah, that’s from the last assassination attempt,” he replied. He did not elaborate.

  The Sudanese were gracious hosts, and on my return to Jordan I sent them an official gift: a new armored car. A few days later I got a message from the royal protocol staff that the Sudanese had sent a present of their own: a C-130 transport aircraft had landed at Amman’s airport with two lion cubs inside. They also had sent a warden, who explained how to care for the animals and then went back to Khartoum.

  Valuing the symbolism of the gift but not quite knowing what to do with the animals, I had them put in a tennis court outside my house. When Rania noticed that they had begun to show an interest in our children, Hussein and Iman (who was born in September 1996), then five and two, she put her foot down and insisted that the lions must go. I “regifted” them to a close friend who liked to collect exotic animals.