The World: Jordan’s Hussein: Things Will Work Out

JUST a year ago, Jordan’s limestone capital of Amman was convulsed by civil strife, and King Hussein’s Hashemite throne never looked shakier. In three days of bitter street fighting between Hussein’s army and the Palestinian guerrillas, 250 people died. The King himself was nearly assassinated in a fedayeen ambush. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the most vigorous of the guerrilla organizations, occupied Amman’s two largest hotels and held 77 foreign guests hostage. A truce was arranged in which Hussein made most of the concessions, but it lasted only until September, when the P.F.L.P. hijacked three airliners, blew them up in the Jordanian desert, and openly challenged the army. This time Hussein, decrying the renewed fighting as a “shame to the Arab people,” resolved to crush the guerrillas and succeeded.

Since the September war, Hussein has been the unquestioned ruler of his troubled realm. Where the fedayeen once swaggered through Amman’s streets in tiger suits, now they are rarely seen; 3,000 of them huddle around Jerash in northern Jordan, well under the army’s control.

To demonstrate his command of the situation, Hussein last week escorted visiting Lebanese Premier Saeb Salam on a tour of a refugee camp at Zizia, 15 miles outside the capital. Twelve months ago, the King would have faced demonstrations or even death. Now a Palestinian girl presented him with a lock of her hair, symbolizing the camp’s wish that he recover their homes from Israel.

Hussein is also free to indulge in old pastimes. The King, an accomplished pilot, recently tried out the controls of the first Boeing 707 jet acquired by Royal Jordanian Airlines. He water-skis at Aqaba, tools around on a shiny motorcycle, and sends Princess Muna off every few months to refurbish her wardrobe in Paris and London. With the fedayeen defanged, he is preoccupied with international rather than domestic problems, most notably the Arab-Israeli conflict. In recent months, the world’s attention has focused on efforts to achieve an Egyptian-Israeli accommodation over the Suez Canal. Such an arrangement, however, would be only the first step, at best, in an overall settlement, for it would leave unresolved the fate of Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan River, both of which were ruled by Hussein before the Six-Day War in 1967. In an interview with TIME Correspondent Gavin Scott in the sunken living room of Al-Hummar palace, Hussein made these points: > Jerusalem. “It is the main issue,” said Hussein. The King is particularly worried because Jerusalem is the only occupied territory that Israel has formally annexed and because the Israelis are building vast housing projects for their own citizens. “Immediate action must be taken to assure that Israeli actions are frozen. I am speaking of the Judaization of Jerusalem. In a short period, the city will have changed basically and completely in such a way that it could totally complicate any progress toward peace. Jerusalem has nothing to do with the security of Israel. Obviously, Israeli motives are entirely different from concern over security. But there is an Arab part of the city, and our rights must be recognized.”

> The West Bank. “At a certain point in the future, the people on the West Bank will have three choices. They can remain with us and see what we can do to improve on the system as it was before 1967. They can help create some form of federation on both sides of the Jordan River. Or they can separate. But all this can come only after the people are able to exercise their options without harassment.” Translated from Hussein’s Harrow-Sandhurst British understatement, that means after Israel returns the West Bank and its 700,000 people to Jordan.

> The U.S. Role. Referring to the recent Middle East visit of U.S. Secretary of State William Rogers, the King said: “I haven’t the feeling that much was accomplished. There has been a concentration on the Egypt-Israeli aspects of the problem. The Israelis may feel that any compensations they make in withdrawing partially from Suez would give the world the impression that they proved themselves constructive. They would leave it at that, setting aside other Arab grievances.”

> Relations with Egypt. “Following the Six-Day War, we worked pretty closely with them. But the situation began to change after Egypt’s acceptance of the Rogers plan, which proposed the return of captured territory in exchange for the establishment of secure borders for Israel. That was a complete surprise to us. We weren’t notified in advance or consulted. Since then, there has not been the same degree of cooperation with Egypt at all. In fact, we don’t know very much about what our Egyptian friends are doing.”

Despite his plethora of problems, Hussein considers himself an optimist. “It would be madness,” he told Scott, “to face life without thinking that things will work out.” Considering that he has survived nine assassination attempts since ascending to the throne in 1953 and has emerged from last year’s showdown with the guerrillas in surprisingly good shape, that may not be as mad as it sounds.