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JORDAN: Chemistry of Chaos

3 minute read
TIME

The chemicals of discontent which are present throughout the whole Arab world exploded in a foreboding chain reaction last week in Jordan. The trigger was Britain’s attempt to bring Jordan into the anti-Communist Baghdad pact too fast; the effect was a setback for the West.

Britain’s General Sir Gerald Templer, an able but not always tactful man, offered to increase Britain’s economic and military aid if only Jordan would sign. When he tried to bulldoze Jordan’s Premier, the Premier resigned (TIME, Dec. 26). Jordan’s young, Harrow-educated King Hussein quickly appointed a new government to accept Templer’s proposals, but already agitators were stirring. Ambitious King Saud of Saudi Arabia maintains scores of agents provacateurs to promote his influence in Jordan; Communists, though small in number, know how to guide mobs.

Stoned to Death. In Jericho, 20,000 Arab refugees from Israel poured out of their dismally squalid camps and rampaged through a model-farm school, established for their benefit by U.S. and Middle Eastern philanthropists, breaking windows, smashing incubators, and killing or stealing 10,000 chickens and 3,000 turkeys. Next the mob burned down a warehouse containing $60,000 worth of clothing which an American Mennonite mission had planned to distribute to the refugees as gifts. In the little town of Bethlehem, usually host to thousands of Christian pilgrims at this season, another mob stormed a police station; police and Arab legionnaires opened fire, killing six rioters. One legionnaire was stoned to death.

In alarm, King Hussein fired his new government just 72 hours after it had taken office, and dissolved Parliament. But instead of mollifying the rioters, his action seemed to embolden them. The U.S. consulate in the Jordanian half of Jerusalem was attacked for a second time in a week. The American flag was hauled down from a 30-ft. pole and trampled in the streets. Then the mob swarmed on the French consulate; the consul held off the crowd with a submachine gun. At the Turkish consulate, a 14-year-old boy was killed in the garden, and a 16-year-old girl rioter was shot to death by a colonel of the Arab Legion inside the building itself.

Hope Springs Eternal. Next day the King desperately recalled one of the nation’s elder statesmen, ex-Premier Ibrahim Hashim, 67, to head a “caretaker” government, and promised an election within four months to decide whether to join the Baghdad pact. Then the King boarded his personal plane, circled over his capital city of Amman to watch the effect. Mobs continued marching through the streets, and by now professional porters were distributing stones from baskets on their backs. But by week’s end, the furor had abated, especially after the King freed 1,000 arrested rioters. The toll: at least 16 dead, more than 100 injured.

In London, a Foreign Office Under Secretary of State, Lord John Hope, told Parliament that “what is happening in Jordan will pass over,” a remark that deserved the week’s prize for complacency in the face of peril. Pravda added its ruble’s worth: “The people of this small country have acquitted themselves as courageous partisans against the new schemes of the imperialistic colonizers.”

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