Lion of Jordan (26 page)

Zarqa was a defining episode in the personal story of Hussein bin Talal. It was the first serious test of his leadership because it involved not only anti-royalist politicians but the army – the mainstay of the regime. Many factors enabled Hussein to emerge on top but two were of paramount importance: his own personality and the loyalty of the Bedouin element in the army. At Zarqa he demonstrated the personal courage that was to be his hallmark for the rest of his reign. He acted swiftly and decisively to re-establish his authority despite the dangers
involved in going to Zarqa in person. ‘By all accounts, the king did indeed risk his life by wading into the pandemonium… His bold action heartened loyalists and broke the spirit of any lingering rebels.'
¹⁹
The other factor that worked to Hussein's advantage was the loyalty of the Bedouin soldiers and officers who formed the backbone of the mobile ground forces – infantry and armour – and tended to mistrust the townspeople who held the senior administrative posts and got involved in politics.
²⁰
Hussein had been close to the Free Officers and they helped him to oust Glubb Pasha, but now they had outlived their usefulness and even posed a threat to the monarchy by their alignment with Nabulsi and his party. In the contest between the government and the palace, what mattered ultimately was not popularity in the country but control of the army. Sensing that he was beginning to lose that control to the Free Officers led by his erstwhile friend, Hussein staged his coup in order to purge the radical officers and make himself again master of his own troops.

A new government was successfully formed on 15 April by the independent, pro-Western Palestinian physician Dr Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi. Khalidi's cabinet consisted of royalist ‘notables' with the exception of Nabulsi, who agreed to join as minister for foreign affairs. Nabulsi's inclusion represented some sort of a reconciliation between his party and the palace. But the truce lasted just over a week. Two crises followed in rapid succession. On 20 April, after only four days in the post of chief of staff, Hiyari defected to Syria. In a press conference held in Damascus on the following day, he accused the king and palace officials of conspiring with ‘foreign military attacheés', meaning American and British, against the independence of Jordan, its sovereignty and its ties with sister Arab countries. The 32-year-old officer, who had been a Hussein favourite, also claimed that the royalist officials had fabricated the story of a military coup in order to oust their competitors from power, that the United States was behind a plan to discredit Nabulsi and his supporters, and that he himself had been ordered to ‘prepare the army against the people'. General Hiyari's charges were countered with a curt official statement that he, like his predecessor, had ‘turned traitor to his king' and, in his turn, fled to Damascus.
²¹

Two days after Hiyari left for Damascus, the political opposition in Jordan made a final bid for power. A National Congress of all the left-wing parties met in Nablus, including 23 lower house deputies and
200 opposition delegates. After a day of deliberations, the delegates adopted a breathtakingly bold anti-monarchist programme. The delegates demanded: (1) that the Khalidi government be replaced by a ‘popular government'; (2) that Sharif Nasser and Bahjat Talhouni be dismissed, and US Ambassador Lester Mallory and Military Attaché James Sweeney be expelled; (3) that all ‘nationalist officers' arrested in Zarqa be reinstated; (4) that Jordan unite with Egypt and Syria; and (5) that Jordan reject the Eisenhower Doctrine.
²²
The ‘Patriotic Congress' reinforced its resolutions by calling for nationwide strikes and demonstrations. Demonstrations against the Eisenhower Doctrine and the Khalidi government took place the following day.

On being presented with this list of demands, Khalidi realized that his government did not command the support of parliament, and he went to the palace to tender his resignation. The departure of the loyalist government left the field to the king and the powerful opposition. One historian has argued that constitutionalism in Jordan was brought to an end not by the Zarqa Affair but by the Nationalist Congress. This congress is said to have convinced Hussein that ‘nothing but brute force applied at once – with minimal time allowed for preparation – could save him and the Hashemite state from disaster.'
²³
Hussein knew instinctively that he had to resist the Congress, but before doing so he sought explicit assurances of US backing. The American ambassador had predicted that if the Khalidi government fell, the alternatives would rapidly narrow down to a choice by the king of military rule or abdication, unless he was assassinated first. The king chose military government. On 24 April he sent an urgent message to John Foster Dulles through intelligence channels in which he said he proposed to take a strong line in Jordan, including martial law on the West Bank, suspension of constitutional rights, and a firm statement against Egyptian and Syrian activities in Jordan. In his message Hussein asked if he could count on United States support if Israel or the Soviet Union intervened in the situation.

Dulles thought that America's interests would best be served by Hussein winning this fight. He immediately contacted President Eisenhower and told him that Hussein ‘has a program which is a good tough program and if it works it will be wonderful for us'. The president agreed, and Dulles sent a message to Hussein, promising to warn Israel against any intervention, stating that an overt intervention by the Soviet
Union would be viewed as a challenge under the Eisenhower Doctrine, and that, if requested by Jordan, they would intervene militarily. Eisenhower's press secretary announced that both the president and the secretary of state regarded ‘the independence and integrity of Jordan as vital'.
²⁴
This statement gave Jordan the distinction of being the first Middle Eastern country to receive support under the terms of the Eisenhower Doctrine and signalled America's commitment to underwrite the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The following day the US Sixth Fleet, with marines aboard, was ordered to set sail for the eastern Mediterranean as a show of force to deter any outside intervention in Jordan.

On the night of 24/25 April, Hussein delivered his counter-stroke against the opposition. First, he convened in the palace a conclave of nearly all the Hashemite loyalists who had served his grandfather and held the kingdom together after the murder at the mosque. Queen Zain later told Charles Johnston that that night was almost the worst of the whole crisis. The king's men were reluctant to assume the responsibilities of office and recommended instead the formation of a military government. Queen Zain reportedly rounded on them and suggested that the ministers-to-be should not be allowed to leave the palace until they had taken the oath of office. ‘It was on this not altogether encouraging basis that the new government was eventually formed.'
²⁵
Once again, as in the pre-Nabulsi era, the palace was the main locus of decision-making in Jordan

The new government was headed by Ibrahim Hashim, the elder statesman and staunch supporter of the dynasty, with Samir Rifa'i, the strong man of the right, as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. Abdel Monem Rifa'i, Samir's brother, was reappointed ambassador to the US. Akif al-Fayez became minister for agriculture. It was the first time in the nation's history that a Bedouin was appointed to a cabinet post. Akif was the son of the chief of the Bani Sakhr ‘northern' tribes and was appointed in recognition of the role that the Bedouin community had played over the past few weeks.
²⁶
Hussein emerged from the long night as the sole effective ruler of the country. The government was fervently royalist, pro-Saudi and pro-American. During the same night it banned political parties, declared martial law and imposed a nationwide curfew. Overnight Jordan was transformed into a police state. Troops were deployed in the early hours to prevent the crowds from assembling and demonstrating as they had done against the Baghdad Pact. The
result was described by the British ambassador: ‘On the morning of April 25th the streets of Amman were deserted except for large forces of troops and police. A number of the troops were Bedouin with blackened faces, a traditional measure designed to prevent recognition and family feuds in the event of bloodshed.'
²⁷
In a radio broadcast to the nation, Hussein went on the offensive. He accused the Nabulsi government of being soft on Israel and recalled that Nabulsi had prevented him from attacking Israel during its invasion of Egypt the previous year. Hussein denounced ‘international communism' as the root of Jordan's problems and charged that ‘the Communist Party here are the brothers of the Communist Party in Israel and receive instructions from them.'

By defeating the challenge to the monarchy, Hussein gave the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan a chance to survive. Before the royal coup Jordan was just a remnant of the age of European colonialism that was likely to be swept away by the nationalist tide sweeping through the region. But the crisis ended in such a way as to remove the question mark hanging over the country. The British ambassador was full of admiration for Hussein, describing his counter-stroke as decisive. In his annual report on 1957 the ambassador placed Hussein's actions in a longer-term historical perspective that stressed his debt to Britain:

The King's victory was complete. Seen in retrospect, it represents something which no one could have foreseen. The ramshackle Jordanian state, haphazardly formed by the union of two post-war vacuums – the ‘Transjordan' of 1918 and the ‘West Bank' of 1948 – suddenly felt itself an entity and affirmed its will to live. The conspirators had wished it to be merged in a left-wing Syrian Republic. In defeating them, King Hussein had given ‘The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan' for the first time a real meaning. For his victory he had to thank his British-trained army, and especially those elements in it from the Bedouin tribes whose loyalty to the Throne had been so laboriously won by Glubb Pasha in the 1930s. For the consolidation of his victory King Hussein had to thank a Government composed almost entirely of statesmen and administrators trained in the school of King Abdullah and the British Mandate.
²⁸

In his memoirs Charles Johnston wrote that King Hussein's determination saved him and his country three times in the course of a month: in the ‘armoured-car incident' of 8 April, in the Zarqa mutiny of 13 April and when threatened by the Syrian military on 14 April. Johnston added that, only just in time, the king struck a blow against the forces of
extremism that was to prove decisive. As a result, Jordan felt a firm hand, which it had not known since the days of King Abdullah. At the end of the long night of 24/25 April, Hussein said to the chief of the royal court that he was exhausted and thought he would go to bed. Bahjat Talhouni replied respectfully that there was one more thing that His Majesty should do: he should kneel down, recite a verse of the Koran and give thanks to Allah for his grandfather, since without King Abdullah's training there would have been no ministers to carry on the government. The king did as Talhouni suggested and then retired and slept until late in the evening.
²⁹
>

Johnston, like most Western policy-makers, looked at events in Jordan from a cold war perspective. Watching their performance, he thought that the contest between America and Russia was like a bad game of lawn tennis, in which the only points scored were from the double faults of the other side. In this particular game, America made some initial mistakes but then wisely allowed the Russians to serve. The real winner was Jordan. The cold war rescued a country on the verge of bankruptcy: ‘It had produced out of nowhere an American paymaster to replace the British one who had said goodbye and the Arab one whose cheque had bounced. A year before, Jordan had been taking British money and Egyptian advice. By now she was taking American money and was not far from a disposition to take British advice once more.' In their relationship to Jordan, Britain and the United States changed places: ‘It was now the US which bore the main burden of supporting this unviable country, and which was accordingly exposed to the full blast of Arab ingratitude.'
³⁰

The Americans had no hesitation in assuming the burden that Britain had relinquished. John Foster Dulles, the arch cold warrior, regarded non-alignment in the cold war as an obsolete, immoral and impractical concept. He insisted that in the struggle between the forces of light against those of darkness every country should proclaim its allegiance, and that if you were not with them, you were against them. Hussein made a bold stand on the side of America against the Soviet Union and international communism, and thus qualified in Dulles's eyes for support under the Eisenhower Doctrine. President Eisenhower told Dulles that the young king was certainly showing spunk and that he admired him for it. ‘Let's invite him over one of these days,' said Eisenhower, ‘when the situation is less tense.'
³¹

Eisenhower's avuncular attitude ensured a prompt response to the young king's desperate appeal for aid. On 29 April the Eisenhower administration agreed to extend to Jordan $10 million in economic assistance to assure its ‘freedom' and to maintain its ‘economic and political stability'. The speed with which the grant was made was without precedent. In late June this was followed by $10 million in military aid and $10 million in economic assistance. By now the total sum of American aid exceeded the annual British subsidy, and the American paymasters were much less strict about the way that their money was to be used than the British nanny had been. American aid was advanced with virtually no conditions attached. Moreover, to a far greater degree than the former paymaster, the Americans equated Jordan's security with the security of the king. America's toehold in Jordan depended from the beginning on the mortal existence of one man – Hussein. Yet the shift in American foreign policy was highly significant. The view of Jordan as an unviable state yielded to the assessment that it might survive against all the odds thanks to the courage and tenacity of its ruler. Jordan came to be seen for the first time as a strategic ally for America in the Middle East, but everything from that point hinged on the stability of the regime and the survival of the ruler.