by Robert Fisk
Having lost the West Bank, the king had to face the consequences: Palestinian contempt and what amounted to an attempted coup d’état by Palestinian guerrillas. With a ruthlessness that has still not been fully acknowledged, Hussein’s Bedouin troops slaughtered their way through the Palestinian camps of Jordan and crushed guerrilla power. Having learned from his rash decision to go to war in 1967, the king sat out the 1973 Middle East conflict in near silence, maintaining semi-secret contacts with Israeli leaders, just as his grandfather had done. What he had, he would hold. The preservation of Jordan—as artificial a country as Britain ever invented—became the be-all and end-all for the Hashemites. The PLK would be a friend of the West. When a Washington newspaper claimed that the king had received millions of dollars from the CIA, the stories were suppressed in Amman.
In the West, we tend to divide the Arabs into three fictitious groups that prove our own racism as much as our ignorance: the scheming, hook-nosed greedy Gulf businessmen who appear in feature films and anti-Semitic cartoons in the American press—the Arabs, like the Jews, being Semites; “fundamentalist terrorists”; and thirdly—a throwback to the original Hollywood portrayal of the Bedouin desert leader immortalised by Rudolph Valentino—as “hardy warriors of the desert.” The Hashemites were definitely in the “hardy warrior” bracket, or at least King Hussein was. A friend of the king once compared Hassan to Cecil Rhodes, a difficult personality to follow.
As for the king, he not only enjoyed sport and flying; he had a keen eye on the sport of the bedroom. Only months before his cancer was diagnosed, he was courting a Jordanian in her early twenties. Queen Noor was not amused. But it did his reputation no harm. Saudi Arabia’s princes do not lack women and the emir of Kuwait has endured a series of revolving-door marriages with tribal ladies. Yet it was impossible to separate King Hussein’s prolific love life from political gambles. Long regarded as a pliable “friend” of the West, he astonished his American allies by embracing Saddam Hussein—quite literally—after Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.176 Did he really believe that Saddam would “liberate” Jerusalem? Or that Jordan could survive without the Gulf Arabs? He grew a beard; in Amman he was called Sherif of Mecca. The Saudis were enraged. He appeared to be looking towards lost lands. He knew the Palestinians would support Iraq. He became the most popular monarch in the Arab world at the very moment he became the most unpopular monarch in the West.
The Americans were ready to roll up the Hashemite carpet. But then in 1993 came Arafat’s peace “deal” and his own treaty with Israel and overnight, the treacherous ally of the beastly Saddam had become again the Plucky Little King. Jordan was “ours” again. The Americans built a new, massive, fortified embassy on the outskirts of Amman. “Is this the new CIA headquarters?” Hussein joked to Jordanian friends one night as he looked across their gardens at the floodlit compound. He may have been right. The Hashemites may trace their ancestry back to the Prophet Mohamed—as they do—but they are Tudors rather than democrats, an oligarchy rather than a modern monarchy, however liberal and decent they are as individuals.
The wraithlike king was finally taken to hospital in Amman to die, and the storms that embraced the Middle East that first week in February 1999 seemed to presage something, the dark night that strangled the travelling lamp after Duncan’s murder. Whirlwinds moved in from the sea off Beirut; one hit my balcony just after I saw it coming and escaped indoors, hurling my glass dining table to the wall and smashing the plates. In Amman, a dark fog covered the city, wrapping itself around the thousands of shrouded figures outside the King Hussein Medical Centre. Such wind, such very thick fog, but I could hear their voices from a kilometre away. “With our blood, with our soul, we sacrifice ourselves for you.” Always the same words, the same desire for martyrdom. We had heard it from Palestinians, from Iraqis, now from Jordanians. Did they mean this when they said it?
Inside the hospital, royal courtiers struggled with a unique problem: when to turn off the king’s life-support system which was all that kept him alive. Dialysis machines and intravenous drips were still pumping life into a king who, as a deeply religious man, believed that he should die when God—not man—decided. But the science of prolonging the life of the desperately sick took no account of the Koran any more than it did of the Bible. No Muslim prelate had yet succeeded in defining Islam’s response to a development which had taken the moment of death out of the hands of Allah. In the end, he died, as a friend of the royal family told me, “in an orderly way and without any sense of shock.” Even to kings, he comes . . .
Outside the hospital, the crowd’s posters portrayed the dead king who lay only a few hundred metres from us: fighter pilot Hussein, Bedouin warrior Hussein, Field Marshal Hussein. But not a single photograph of the king and his son together. The new King Abdullah—how strange the name sounded that day—was not in the thoughts of the screaming men or of the old woman who prostrated herself in a torrent of freezing water streaming down the roadway.
King Abdullah. It had a strange resonance; of another king almost half a century earlier at the Al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, Abdullah’s great-grandfather, with a bullet in his head and his turban rolling away from him, while a teenage boy—now the bald corpse inside the hospital behind us—collapses in horror. Jerusalem still lay only 70 kilometres away through the suffocating, frozen fog, as lost to the Jordanians today as it was when King Hussein’s army retreated more than three decades ago.
So now this odd, fragile, brave little land had another British military graduate to run its affairs. Sandhurst, Oxford, Georgetown, tank commander and general with his very own Praetorian Guard. His special forces—one of those supposedly “crack” units that breed all over the Middle East—had put down a riot or two over the past few years. You only had to watch those people outside the hospital—and the uncontrollable nature of their grief—to understand how heavy would be the burden for King Abdullah. The people pushed at the police lines and sobbed into their hands and collapsed fainting into the mud around the gates. To a Westerner, to a tourist, Jordan is a friendly sandpit of Roman ruins, rock palaces, camels and an old railway line blown up by Colonel Lawrence. But its people had been wounded; 65 per cent of them could count Palestinian dispossession in their family tree. All day, the rain fell out of those cold, lowering clouds. And there was something about Hussein’s funeral that betrayed a fearful reality for those who saw it.
Two Jordans buried their king. There was the formal, Westernised nation with its Scottish-style bagpipers and new, English-accented monarch who invited the world’s statesmen to bury the “fallen warrior” on his polished gun carriage, Hussein’s Arab steed—empty boots reversed in the stirrups—clopping obediently behind the coffin. And what the world saw—indeed, what the world was supposed to see—was the adoration of kings, presidents, prime ministers and princes: Clinton, Bush Senior, Blair, Assad, Yeltsin, Chirac, Shamir, Netanyahu, Mubarak, Weizman, Arafat, Sharon, Carter, Ford, the Prince of Wales . . . After all, had not President Clinton already consigned this man to paradise in his latest pronouncement on Jordan’s loss?
Then there was the other Jordan. Outside the gate, sweating and shrieking to God, smashed back by gun butts, sworn at by the descendants of Glubb Pasha’s Arab Legion as they clawed their way towards King Hussein’s coffin, the other Jordan did not quite fit in with the pageantry on the other side of the palace wall. When the Jordanians broke through the troops and charged in their thousands towards the gates, they were confronted by hundreds more armed soldiers. “In the name of God, help me!” an old woman moaned as the crowd stamped her into the mud.
So which was the real Jordan? Was it the nation enshrined just above the marble floor of the Rhagadan Palace, where the coffin of the “little king” was honoured, prayed to, watched and nodded at by all the dangerous, untrustworthy allies who had variously loved, hated or plotted against him? Such sincerity, such affection, they all showed. There was Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who had sent his
killer squad into Jordan only a few months earlier to assassinate a Hamas official, bowing stiffly before the coffin. There was former president George Bush, who only eight years earlier had regarded Hussein as little more than an enemy agent. Yassir Arafat, whose gunmen once sought to destroy Hussein’s kingdom, snapped to attention in his olive fatigues, twice saluting the flag-draped coffin in front of him.
And behind the coffin, scarcely moving, was the studied, often frowning face of King Abdullah the Second and his two half-brothers, Crown Prince Hamzah and Prince Hashem. They stood there, hands out in prayer from time to time, all dressed in immaculate suits and ties and wearing the same kind of chequered red-and-white kuffiah as Arafat. It was as if they were acting out some kind of unusual ritual, more like English public schoolboys in an unfamiliar play than Arab warrior princes, trying to cut a dash among the tall men of the old Arab Legion— Hussein had renamed them the Jordan Arab Army after dismissing Glubb—who guarded the coffin and its royal standard.
“Vulnerable” was the word that came to mind. The princes did not look old enough, or hard enough, or cynical enough, to handle the sleek men who passed before them to honour their father, some of them gentlemen, others venal dictators, quite a few with an awful lot of blood on their hands, the harmless and the harmful, one after the other, parading before the coffin as if waiting for passport pictures. I suppose it was not surprising that history was being rewritten for the watching world. On satellite television, the cancer-dead king was being eulogised as the man who freely made peace with Israel, whose country was praised—this from CNN—because it was now closer to Israel than to many Arab states. So we had to forget that the king once privately talked of the “manacles” of the Oslo agreement, which forced Jordan into so unpopular a peace treaty with Israel, and remember what Clinton had told us two days earlier: King Hussein was now in paradise. Which is where we were told Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had gone after his death—that being the destiny, it seems, of all Arab leaders who make peace with Israel at our behest.
The television boys—in some cases, the very same “experts” who had predicted the fall of Hussein when he refused to support America’s 1991 war—were in full flow. “Unassailable moral integrity,” “a visionary for peace,” “a man of great charisma” with an “unquestioned” legacy, a man who “always wanted to give his people the rights that they deserved.” These are, unfortunately, authentic quotations. What was that legacy again? And what political rights did Jordanians receive, save for a vote in a rubber-stamp parliament and the knowledge that if they stepped out of line in their “man-in-the-street” interviews with Western television reporters on the future of King Abdullah—just like his father, a soldier king, a chip off the old block, in fact—they would be taken off to His Majesty’s constabulary for a thumping.
As for those crowds whose voices could be heard baying beyond the palace gates by the beautifully groomed kings and presidents inside, they loved the king, some of them. But there was less enthusiasm for the new king and much less for Prince Hamzah, Hussein’s son by his last wife, Queen Noor. “Hamzah was chosen as new crown prince by the United States,” a girl insisted.177 She was a Palestinian Jordanian.
“Rubbish,” I snorted at her. “You shouldn’t believe in the moamara, ‘The plot,’” I said. But then, an hour later, I saw the full list of dignitaries at the palace and was struck by the number of State Department men, the boys from the Washington peacemaking department led by Martin Indyk, the ex-research director at the largest Israeli lobby group, who could not manage to persuade Netanyahu to stop building Jewish settlements on Arab land but who insisted Arafat must “crack down on terrorism.” So was the real Jordan, then, among the swaying mass of shabbily dressed, shouting youths on the highway to the palace, many of them poorly educated, some pathetically adorned with crinkled pictures of the dead king glued to their shirts and scarves?
For when the coffin approached, a kind of ripple, half sound and half movement, spread through the lines of tired, somehow broken faces, as if a stone had been thrown into a human pond. There was no signal from them in advance, no instruction or indication save for a line of children who suddenly moved from the trees into the road. Then en masse the people swarmed towards the coffin and its jeepload of headscarved Jordanian guards, tears streaming down their faces, hands outstretched to touch, even to seize, the flag or perhaps the coffin itself.
I remembered thinking, before a panicking soldier struck two men with his rifle and punched me in the chest as the crowd fell on us, that it was like throwing petrol onto a kitchen stove. It was a strange, frightening kind of hysteria because it combined both love and fury in almost exactly equal measure, intense loyalty married to absolute rage. When I rolled over, I found the soldier lying beside me. At the funeral of Ayatollah Khomeini almost ten years earlier, the crowds tore at his shroud. And if the Arab Legion’s descendants had not shouted in the name of their dead king and if the other soldiers had not laid into the first of the young Jordanians who tried to clamber onto the carriage, it might have happened again.
Violence is portrayed so differently when its progenitors are outside palace walls. How, one wondered, did these masses feel about the large presence of the Israeli foreign minister, Ariel Sharon, in front of their king’s coffin, the very man who sent Israel’s Lebanese Phalangist allies into the Sabra and Chatila Palestinian refugee camps in 1982? What did they make of the arrival of President Assad of Syria, who ordered his soldiers to “eliminate” an Islamic uprising in Hama in 1982, an operation that left the dead in their thousands? Or of the former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, whose 1996 offensive against Lebanon culminated in the Israeli massacre of 109 Lebanese civilians in a United Nations camp at Qana, not to mention the dead of that ambulance in Mansouri? In every case, the victims had been Muslims, just as they had been in the war unleashed by the man who most astonished the world by turning up in Amman, whose butchery in Chechnya was still scarcely mentioned in the West. Boris Yeltsin waved to the cameras—I am alive, I am alive, he was trying to tell us—and walked falteringly into the palace. Close to him, Hussein’s favourite white stallion, Amr, briefly reared up on his hind legs behind the coffin. As a remark of respect, it was said, he would never be ridden again.
And so we had to listen to more public adulation. Arafat claimed that Hussein had been a Saladin, the warrior knight who had driven the Crusaders from Palestine. In truth, it was the Israelis who drove the Hashemites from Palestine. But Hussein was a courtly man. What king would ever have turned up at his own state security jail to drive his most vociferous political opponent home? Leith Shubeilath had infuriated the monarch and was slapped into prison for asking why Queen Noor wept at the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin when the widow of a Palestinian radical leader murdered by the Israelis in Malta “did not receive any official condolences, nor was a single teardrop shed by a princess or the wife of any official.” When the king arrived at the jail, Shubeilath delayed him for ten minutes while he said goodbye to his fellow inmates. Hussein waited patiently for him. Would Saddam have done that? Or King Fahd? Or President Mubarak? Or would Benjamin Netanyahu?
Perhaps it is this which distinguished the king: among the monsters of the Middle East, he appeared such a reasonable man. He believed that if he trusted enough in another person, his good faith would be returned; he was cruelly rewarded. He believed in Benjamin Netanyahu until the Israeli prime minister refused him permission to fly Arafat from Amman to Gaza in his private aircraft. “My distress is genuine and deep over the accumulating tragic actions which you have initiated at the head of the government of Israel, making peace—the worthiest objective of my life—appear more and more like a distant elusive mirage,” he wrote to the Israeli premier in March 1997. Netanyahu announced that he was “baffled by the personal attacks against me.” This was the same Netanyahu who turned up, bareheaded and black-coated, to mourn the king’s passing.
What is it about dictators—kings or “strongmen” if they
’re on our side—that somehow infantilises all the people who live under them? Across the Middle East I would watch this process of dictator–people love, its extreme form made manifest in Iraq, but present in the Gulf states and in that brew of Arab nationalism and Soviet friendship which produced the Baathist regime of Syria. Always derided and scorned and often hated by America’s right-wing friends of Israel, President Hafez Assad’s Syria was throughout the Eighties and Nineties an unusual mixture of paternalism and ruthlessness, a mixture of childish “adoration” for the Baathist president and fear of the state security police, an understandable and cringing respect for authority made partly genuine by the fear of all those Arab states set up by the colonial powers: of chaos, anarchy and civil destruction should the whole architecture of the one-party state suddenly fall to bits. In Assad’s case, his crown prince was his son Basil. The problem was that Basil was dead.
Syria was the only country I could reach by car from Beirut, and I travelled there when I could, always allowed a visa, my barbs and my condemnation and my occasional cynicism permitted, so a Syrian minister of information once explained to me with cloying politesse, because I wrote from “a good heart” and was not a foreign agent and because the government was prepared to forgive my “mistakes”—a charitable policy that was not extended to Arab journalists. This created inevitably missing heartbeats among the middle-aged men who worked for the minister, who knew very well that they would have to smooth my way for interviews that could—and sometimes did—go terribly wrong. “Oh God, Fisk is back again!” one of them would always shout when I put my head into his office in Damascus.
You could see his point. Under the door of every foreign guest in the three big hotels in Damascus would arrive each morning a symbol of the regime: the Syria Times. This was no flagship of new Arab democracy, no investigative organ trying to open up Baathism to the world as a free society. It was a paper with which ministers and civil servants could feel safe, at home, even bored—because life in a dictatorship is essentially boring. That is the nature of dictatorial power. Nothing ever changes. Assad’s ministers would outlast those of any other country—especially Iraq—and their loyalty was rewarded by Assad’s loyalty.