Our Last Best Chance: The Pursuit of Peace in a Time of Peril (14 page)

 

The next day we were taken to see the village where the North Korean president had lived as a young man, then on to lunch with the Great Leader himself. Kim Il-sung was dressed in a two-piece safari outfit and greeted us warmly. He was in good spirits, and his view on the mounting crisis between North Korea and the United States was that it was not too serious. In common with isolated dictators across the world, Kim Il-sung had an unrealistic belief in the strength of his own military and a lack of understanding of the power and technological prowess of Western forces. “I’ve beaten the Americans once and I can do it again!” he said in an apparent reference to the Korean War, when he was prime minister. His rhetoric reminded me of the language used by Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, before the Gulf War in 1991.

After lunch he took us to a side room where our gifts and his were laid out on a table. Then one of the generals from the previous night appeared, holding his notepad, and said, “Please explain to the Great Leader the significance of your gifts.” I began to sweat, struggling to remember what I had said the night before.

Thankfully, I remembered the gist of it, and Kim Il-sung seemed satisfied by my explanation. He pointed to a silver soup pot and said, “I hope you get the chance to try this traditional dish before you leave.” I thanked the Great Leader for his hospitality and went to visit a North Korean Special Forces base, where I was treated to one of the most impressive demonstrations I have ever seen. They performed a live-fire exercise in which soldiers would run, jump into the air, somersault, and while in midair fire and knock down the targets. We discussed Kim Il-sung’s offer to send North Korean Special Forces to Jordan to build a new military base and train our soldiers, and then we said good-bye. In the car heading back to the guesthouse, one of the generals leaned over to me and said, “What did you think of our Great Leader?”

“He is a very charismatic man,” I replied. The general whipped out his notepad and, pencil at the ready, asked, “What do you mean by ‘charismatic’?”

I leaned over to my protocol officer, Faisal, and quietly said, “See if you can get us on an earlier flight.”

Faisal had us on a flight leaving early the next morning, and after writing a formal letter of thanks to the Great Leader for his hospitality, I headed to bed. At about 4:30 a.m. there was another knock at my door and Faisal appeared with a look of astonishment on his face, saying, “You’re not going to believe this . . .”

Waiting for me in the guest room were the same twenty generals, accompanied by a steaming pot of traditional sweet-and-sour North Korean soup. Apparently they were serious about having me try it before I left. I took a sip and said, “It’s very good.” One of the generals looked at me and said, “What do you mean by ‘very good’?” as the rest of the group raised their notepads.

We made it onto our flight that morning without any further delays and headed to Russia for the final leg of our trip. We flew on a Russian-made airplane that was similar to a TriStar, and a couple of hours into the flight I happened to look up at the cockpit. The crew were sitting on the floor playing cards and the copilot was asleep with his feet up on the dashboard. They carried on like this for most of the fourteen-hour flight. After experiencing the best of Pyongyang’s hospitality, Moscow felt almost like home, and I was happy to meet friends from the Russian army who were at the airport to receive me.

 

In June 1994, shortly after Rania and I moved into our new house, our first child, a boy, was born. We named him Hussein, in honor of my father. In Arab culture, when a man has a son, close friends and relatives often stop calling him by his own name and refer to him as the father of his son. So many people began to refer to me as “Abu Hussein,” which means “Father of Hussein.” It is hard to express how proud I was—and still am—to hear that phrase.

Not long after that, Rania left the Jordan Export Development and Commercial Centers Corporation (now Jordan Enterprise Development Corporation), where she had worked since 1993, to set up the Jordan River Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to tackling tough social issues. She decided to focus on speaking out against child abuse, which is a taboo subject in much of the Arab world, and on empowering Jordanian women by encouraging entrepreneurship. Some of the foundation’s first projects sponsored training, offered funding for craftmaking programs, and helped teach women how to set up new businesses. Once a woman starts to bring in money, she is empowered in the household, because she is also a breadwinner. If her husband wants to try to keep her down, she can demand respect by pointing out that she is contributing to the family finances. So opportunities for women to work or become entrepreneurs can have a sizable social impact.

My father was very supportive of Rania’s work. He had encouraged Jordanian women to enter professions typically regarded as male bastions, and had even sponsored women’s motor-racing teams. On his recommendation, Royal Jordanian was the first airline in the Middle East to have female pilots.

A few months before Rania began setting up her foundation, I became commander of Special Forces. I had been promoted to colonel in late January 1993 and had finally managed to persuade the army’s senior brass that I was there to stay. We trained hard, aware of the many enemies threatening Jordan, including terrorist fighters returning from the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya; smugglers; and spies. This was my chance to put into practice some of the lessons I had learned at Sandhurst and serving in the British army. The first thing I did was to insist that all of our officers lead from the front.

One morning I was at an airbase watching the men prepare for a parachute jump. Airborne operations are a crucial part of Special Forces tactics, as they allow troops to penetrate far into enemy territory. The air was thick with the smell of aviation fuel and the noise of C-130 transport plane engines. Smiling at the chance to get a parachute jump, which were rare by that time, I began to suit up. One of the young captains came up to me, grinning, and said, “This is the first time we’ve ever seen an officer above the rank of major jump with us.”

I realized then that a lot of officers were wearing jump wings on their uniforms but not necessarily carrying out the regular jumps needed to keep their parachute qualification current. I decided that in order to shape this unit into what I wanted it to become, I would need to ensure that the senior officers shared the same dangers and hardships as their men. That evening in the officers’ mess I rose to make an announcement. “From now on, anybody who wants to wear the jump wings of Special Forces has to regularly do parachute jumps,” I said. For the rest of the meeting, some of my officers were very quiet. I went on to train as a jumpmaster, somebody who supervises the paratroopers jumping out of the airplanes, and ran regular jumps for my men.

Parachute jumps were not just useful in training for war, but also turned out to have a valuable role to play in international diplomacy. During World War II, C Company of 156th Para, a parachute regiment of the British army, was stationed in what at the time was Transjordan. They arranged an exercise to demonstrate their capabilities to the ruler of Transjordan, my great-grandfather Abdullah. The British troops parachuted into an empty fort at Shouneh, a mile east of the River Jordan, and took it from its imaginary defenders, capturing the flag in the process. My great-grandfather was so impressed with their maneuvers that he let them keep the flag to fly in place of their regimental standard. C Company subsequently fought their way across North Africa and Europe and suffered heavy losses at the battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1944, when the British paratroopers attempted to capture a bridge over the Rhine. C Company carried the Transjordan flag into battle, but was overwhelmed by the German forces. The company adjutant stashed the flag under his clothing, kept it hidden through several years in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and brought it back safely to Britain after the war ended. I was extremely touched when I watched a dramatization of that battle in the movie
A Bridge Too Far
, as I remembered the story of how C Company raised the flag over the divisional headquarters at the town of Oosterbeek to denote its position.

Five decades later, to mark the historical connection between Jordan and the British parachute regiment, I jumped out of a Douglas Dakota aircraft in the Netherlands as part of the proceedings commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Arnhem. I landed and presented a new Jordanian flag to Prince Charles, who in turn gave it to the successor of that regiment, C Company of 1 Para. We had been celebrating the end of a historical war. But it wasn’t long before we would have the chance to celebrate a new peace.

 

On July 25, 1994, on a sunny morning in Washington, D.C., some six hundred journalists, foreign dignitaries, and U.S. government officials waited patiently in front of a raised dais on the South Lawn of the White House. Behind the stage were the flags of Jordan, Israel, and the United States. The guests clapped as my father and Rabin stepped onto the dais, accompanied by President Bill Clinton. This was the first time the two men had met publicly, although they had done so privately many times. They had both come to the White House to end the state of belligerency that had existed between Israel and Jordan for forty-six years, since 1948.

The signing of the Oslo Accords had allowed Jordan to focus on its own peace negotiations with Israel. My father was now determined to secure the peace he had long sought. On many occasions, when we spoke of his negotiations with the Israelis, he would point out how difficult they were. But he believed a breakthrough was possible.

Although initially wary of each other, over time my father and Rabin had become close. They were both military men and heavy smokers. Once my father found out that Rabin smoked almost as much as he did, they were always passing cigarettes back and forth. They met many times in secret, in both Jordan and Israel. Once they had bonded, they sat around the table as two friends, trying to see things from each other’s perspective and to work out a common ground for peace. My father did not need to see a document signed. He felt that as long as Rabin said it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

Before signing the document, known as the Washington Declaration, which formally terminated the state of belligerency between their two states and recognized Jordan’s special role in protecting the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem, my father said, “For many, many years, and with every prayer, I have asked God, the Almighty, to help me be a part of forging peace between the children of Abraham. . . . Out of all the days of my life, I do not believe there is one such as this.” He continued, “This is a dream that those before me had—my dead grandfather, and now I. . . . This is a day of commitment, and this day is a day of hope and vision.”

Rabin also addressed the gathering. “It is dusk at our homes in the Middle East,” he said. “Soon darkness will prevail. But the citizens of Israel and Jordan will see a great light.”

After the ceremony, my father and Rabin were Clinton’s guests at a White House dinner, and the next day they addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. My father told Congress that “the state of war between Israel and Jordan is over.”

Three months later, on October 26, 1994, my father and Rabin met again, accompanied by President Clinton, at the border crossing at Wadi Araba in southern Jordan for the signing ceremony of the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. It was a historic moment. Jordan became only the second Arab country, after Egypt fifteen years earlier, to make peace with Israel. Two years after signing the treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by an Egyptian radical. We all anxiously hoped my father would not pay the same price for peace.

Initially, Jordanians and Israelis had high hopes for the fruits of peace. Jordan had regained all of the territory in the East Bank that had been occupied by Israel and its fair share of water rights. The urgent need to end the occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, was being addressed in direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Thanks to its peace treaty with Israel, Jordan would now be able to help advance these negotiations.

For the first time, Jordanian planes were allowed to fly over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and flights from Amman to Europe would thus go over Jerusalem. Although I had visited Jerusalem as a young child, I have not been back since it was occupied by the Israelis in 1967. But on a clear day, sitting on the left side of a passenger plane, I could now look down and see the sun glinting off the golden Dome of the Rock. One of the three holiest sites in Islam, the ancient shrine of Al Aqsa is also the site from where the Prophet Mohammad first ascended to heaven—in the miracle of Isra and Miraj—when the angel Gabriel took him from Mecca to Jerusalem.

Jordan’s treaty with Israel opened the way to increased political and economic cooperation, and a wave of Israeli tourists washed into Jordan, visiting Aqaba and historic sights like Petra and Wadi Rum. An equally curious group of Jordanians began making their way to Israel, many visiting for the first time this neighbor who had played such a large role in our history.

But, like many things in the region, this initial optimism would soon be marred by tragedy.

On November 4, 1995, Israeli prime minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. The murderer was opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords and their follow-up, Oslo II, signed at the White House in September 1995, which gave the Palestinians partial control of over 40 percent of the West Bank. Like many from Israel’s extreme right, he opposed the withdrawal from the West Bank on religious grounds and decided to take matters into his own hands.

My father would devote the rest of his life to working for a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the only time after 1967 that he visited Jerusalem was for Rabin’s funeral. The ruthless warrior of the 1967 war had in later decades been transformed into a soldier for peace. My father believed that had Rabin lived longer, they would have made even greater strides together in bringing about a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.