Arab Guerrillas v. Arab Governments

AMONG superstitious Arabs, the young King of Jordan is regarded with particular awe because of his uncanny gift for survival. Small wonder. As a teenager, Hussein narrowly escaped the assassin's bullets that cut down his grandfather King Abdullah outside Jerusalem's Al Aqsa mosque. Since mounting the chronically shaky throne in 1953, Hussein, now 34, has repeatedly evaded bullets and bombs.

Last week the King's luck held, but barely. Friction between cocky Palestinian guerrillas in Jordan and army troops loyal to Hussein erupted into three days of bloody warfare. The King's government--and the King as well --nearly became casualties of the battle. Hundreds died, including a U.S. embassy official machine-gunned in front of his own family. In the wake of a frenzy of fedayeen looting and beatings, Westerners were hurriedly airlifted out of Amman; among them were at least 300 Americans. In Beirut, Lebanese officials nervously wondered whether the outburst would have an echo in their capital. And in Tel Aviv, Israeli authorities were ready to move their forces toward Amman if the situation deteriorated. Defense Minister Moshe Dayan warned that Israel "cannot remain indifferent to events in Jordan"; Chief of Staff Haim Bar-Lev stated bluntly that if Jordan's government could not control the guerrillas, Israel would.

Just who started the battle between the swaggering guerrillas and Jordanian soldiers loyal to Hussein is unclear. The guerrillas were members of the ultra-militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is led by a radical Arab Christian physician named George Habash, an exponent of terror tactics against civilians, including children. In the small town of Zarka, twelve miles north of Amman, quarrels broke out between guerrillas and soldiers of the Saiqa (Thunderbolt) Regiment, a unit especially faithful to Hussein. Both sides were armed, and the confrontation quickly expanded into episodes of violence. By the time it ended, nine fedayeen and civilians had been killed, along with 13 soldiers. As hysterical funeral corteges wound through Zarka, the guerrillas' Voice of Asifa radio station in Cairo broadcast the news. When fighting spread to Amman, Hussein hurried to Basman Palace from his summer villa outside the capital. Along the way, the King and two Jeeploads of royal bodyguards were slowed by a roadblock. Shots rang out, one guard was killed and five were wounded.

By the time Hussein reached his palace, skirmishes between irregulars and regulars had broken out across Amman.

Shopkeepers pulled down their metal shutters and fled for home; Arabs wearing kaffiyehs that looked like the headdress issued to Jordanian army troops took them off to be safe. Roadblocks suddenly appeared. The army began rounding up guerrillas and brought up artillery to shell the refugee camps.

Melted Ice Cream

The fedayeen responded by invading Amman's elegant Jordan Intercontinental Hotel. There they rounded up 62 foreign guests to be held as hostages until the shelling stopped. The hostages, including the youngest son of former Lebanese President Camille Chamoun as well as 14 Americans, were confined for a time in the hotel basement, where they lived on hamburgers, beer and ice cream. It was not a particularly uncomfortable jail until the beer got warm and the ice cream melted after fedayeen rockets hit Amman's principal power station and electricity failed.

Other guerrilla detachments commandeered the less impressive Philadelphia Hotel (known fondly among visiting newsmen as the Filthadelphia) and seized 15 guests as hostages. Guerrillas also mounted two unsuccessful attacks on Amman radio on the edge of the city. "We're shooting at the station," a fedayeen leader explained, "because it is telling the people lies." The guerrillas stole dozens of cars and looted houses. Their fury, many of them said, was directed against Americans to protest what the guerrillas insist is CIA activity against their movement.

U.S. Embassy First Secretary Morris Draper, 42, was seized by guerrillas on his way to 'a dinner party and held captive for 22 hours. The single American casualty was Major Robert P. Perry, 34, an Arabic-speaking assistant U.S. Army attache in Amman. Perry was called to his door by guerrillas, who fired right through it, killing him as his wife and eleven-year-old son looked on.

Suicidal Episode

The violent conflict between Arab monarchy and Arab guerrillas brought anxious pleas for Arab unity. Speaking over Amman radio after the station switched to emergency power, Hussein said: "Continued dissension will only expose our country to destruction and annihilation. The events of these days are the most painful period of my life." In a choked voice, he added: "It is a disgrace for us all to use against Arabs arms that are entrusted to us by the blood and the funds of Arabs." Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who cabled Hussein from Cairo to congratulate him on having escaped injury, appealed to both sides in the conflict to "ring down the curtain on this suicidal episode and cease this bickering between brothers." But Nasser also paid tribute to the Palestine resistance movement as "the noblest phenomenon that has appeared in the Arab world since the setback of June 1967."

It is doubtful that Hussein would go that far. Since the Six-Day War, the Palestinian guerrilla movement has spread widely and Jordan has been particularly affected by it. It was to Jordan that Palestinian Arabs fled in 1948 when Israel won its war of independence and established a Jewish state: in 1967. tens of thousands more Arabs fled across the Jordan River after Israel occupied the West Bank. Those who could afford to, settled in Jordanian communities; the penniless have been housed in vast refugee camps that are now practically independent city-states and hotbeds of Palestine nationalism. Both groups are ardently Palestinian and pro-fedayeen. Hussein thus finds himself ruling a nation of 2,200,000 people of whom fully two-thirds consider themselves Palestinian rather than Jordanian. Nevertheless, the King has attempted to maintain a moderate attitude toward Israel, and has even met secretly with Israeli officials to explore the possibility of peace.

Jumping-off Point

This has hardly endeared Hussein to the Palestinians. At the same time, the fedayeen have made things difficult for him by using Jordan as a jumping-off point for raids across the border. Before the latest confrontation, Hussein twice attempted showdowns with the guerrillas. Both times he lost.

Last week made it three defeats in a row. Yasser Arafat, who heads the Al-Fatah guerrillas and last week was named commander in chief of the twelve major guerrilla organizations, flew into Amman from Cairo to arrange a truce. In an all-night session at the palace, he and Hussein hammered out a ten-point pact, mostly favorable to the fedayeen.

In a major concession, the King agreed to accept the "resignation" of his uncle, Major General Sherif Nasser Ben Jamil, as commander in chief of Jordan's army. The fedayeen and many other Jordanians despise the obese Sherif Nasser, who became rich enough from smuggling guns and hashish to build a $900,000 palace for himself and his young second wife. Mainly, however, the fedayeen feared that Sherif Nasser was using his relationship and access to the King's ear to provoke a showdown with them. They were almost surely right. Sherif Nasser apparently feared that the guerrillas were rapidly growing strong enough to topple Hussein, and he proposed that they be stopped. Together he and Hussein started visiting army camps two months ago to reinforce loyalty to the King and to Jordan. On a visit to the Saiqa regiment, the King presented each soldier with a bonus of $140.

Fedayeen leaders also insisted that Hussein order the resignation of his cousin, Brigadier General Sherif Zeid Ben Shaker, an anti-fedayeen royalist whose 3rd Armored Division guards Amman. Hussein yielded, but warned that this was the last time he would comply with fedayeen demands. Announcing that he was personally taking over as commander in chief of the armed forces, he vowed: "This is the last chance. There will be no other."

The guerrillas seemed unimpressed.

For their part, they did little more than promise to stop snooting. "Ruling Jordan is not our ambition," said Arafat. "But we will never give up Jordan as a base of operations." He added: "We want Amman to become the Hanoi of the Arabs, but we do not want it to be come another Saigon."

After Arafat and the King reached their agreement, the battle flared up again, then finally faded. At the Jordan Intercontinental, sleepy hostages were roused from bed and assembled to meet P.F.L.P. Leader Habash. "We believe that we had the right to use you and your lives to put pressure on the Jor danian government and on the Amer icans," he told them. "I must be frank and tell you that we were near to executing our plan. We were determined to blow up the hotels. You must try to understand why we did it. For 23 years, we have been living in tents and huts, and this has conditioned the way we think and act. We believe we have the right to do anything to serve our cause." Breaking into a grin, Habash concluded: "I hope you were treated well. Our men have no experience in running a hotel."

Ideological Split

At week's end, convoys bearing the symbol of the International Red Cross escorted foreigners to the Amman airport to be flown to Beirut and Athens aboard airliners sent by the U.S. and West German governments. Relief workers added up the casualties in three days of civil war. The Red Crescent (the Arab Red Cross) estimated 200 dead and 500 wounded. "There was so much shooting," said one medical worker, "that we couldn't even bury the dead." About 50 wounded were treated in hospitals in Damascus, where they were taken by ambulance when Jordanian hospitals became overcrowded.

Hussein still held his throne, but it seemed less secure than ever. And he was not the only one to suffer. The disturbances pointed up a serious ideological split between Habash's extreme leftist outfit and Arafat's bigger, more moderate Fatah. To make matters worse, the twelve biggest fedayeen groups range from Maoist to moderate in their political views; unless they can achieve something more than paper unity, their quarrels will surely bring more violence to the Middle East. Last week, for example, observers in Amman insisted that they had seen guerrilla groups shooting at one another.

Familiar Refrain

Jordan's troubles also threatened to engulf Lebanon. In Beirut, guerrillas gathered in front of the Jordanian embassy to demonstrate against Hussein. They ultimately became so agitated that they burned down the building. Though directed against Jordan, the demonstration was probably a message to the Lebanese government as well. This week Beirut is scheduled to begin enforcing a tough new decree forbidding guerrillas to fire across the border into Israel, plant mines along the frontier or carry arms in populated areas. Such decrees have been issued before to discipline the fedayeen and avoid Israeli retaliation, but they have always been quickly ignored. This time the Lebanese army, embarrassed by continuing Israeli patrols inside Lebanon, has orders to make the decree stick.

Whether it can do so is doubtful.

"There's no question that we could crush the commandos," said a senior Lebanese army officer last week, "but that's not the whole problem. Any move we make against them brings 300,000 Palestinian refugees out of their camps and down on our necks. Most of them are armed, and we cannot cope with them and with the commandos." That was becoming a sadly familiar refrain in the tormented Middle East.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.