Reporting Jordan's Civil War
SHANOR, DONALD R.
THE WEEK IN AMMAN Reporting Jordan's Civil War BY DONALD R. SHANOR Beirut I never did get a good look at Amman. Arriving by an old Dodge taxi from Damascus the night before the fighting began, I...
...The hardest-hit section our convoy passed was the 500 yards around the Palestine Hospital...
...no one who watched and heard the countless rounds of munitions being fired every hour...
...And I remained there, a virtual prisoner, until the Red Cross and Jordanian Army arranged for evacuation of the hotel "guests" a week later...
...Small, square cement block or corrugated steel huts dotted the area in neat rows...
...Sniper fire from the villages overlooking the road forced us to duck into the temporary shelter of a government oil depot...
...Their oil-drum shanties or low, patched tents were casualties of the war no less than the homes of the affluent...
...In a few minutes, Red Cross flags were produced, nailed to sticks and, with the paint still wet, waved from the bus windows as the convoy proceeded, cbs newsman Ike Pappas was chosen to be the flag-waver in my bus, and he performed well...
...Dressed in an unusual combination of camouflaged combat clothing and traditional Arab headgear, the commandos were for the most part well-behaved, if somewhat assertive...
...Our best information, though, was provided by those who managed to make their way to the hotel from various fighting points...
...More than one correspondent on the scene who has also been in Vietnam compared the King's response to the fedayeen with that of the American officer at Ben Cay who said the village had to be destroyed to save it...
...But we were soon to learn that it takes merely a handful of fedayeen barricaded in one of the look-alike square stucco houses atop every desert hill to imperil an entire convoy...
...A deserted village--shuttered houses and bare desert rock--was all that could be seen on either side of the road...
...But in many ways he is as much a hostage of the guerrillas as were the 54 Westerners they held for three weeks last month...
...But the snipers were undoubtedly watching...
...George Habash's Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, engineers of the brazen skyjackings...
...While Hussein's border policemen looked on helplessly, they stopped every traveler entering the country to check passports...
...For the fedayeen have nothing to lose by a new outbreak of fighting except more lives, and there seem to be plenty of young Palestinians--call them brave or fanatical--ready to sacrifice themselves...
...It was the combination of the fedayeen's growing power in the north and their increased popularity as a result of the hijackings that is believed to have convinced Hussein the time to strike had come...
...The Palestinian refugees, outraged over 22 years of being kept in exile by one set of political circumstances, and in crowded refugee camps by another, felt they were about to be betrayed by a King ready to talk peace with Israel...
...Mortars knocked them down altogether...
...Thus their commandos openly challenged him to the struggle that has torn Jordan apart...
...The lampposts that once formed a ring in the interchange were now tilted at crazy angles...
...His men sat in tanks and armored cars and destroyed houses suspected of containing guerrillas...
...Since the government quickly ordered a shoot-on-sight curfew, my plans for exploring the city had to be shelved...
...All along the road from the Syrian-Jordanian border to Amman, Palestinian commandos functioned as members of a state within a state...
...The guns began to thump at 5 a.m...
...Since Hussein, too, is pledged to the return of the Palestinians to their homeland, I asked a spokesman what the guerrillas hoped to gain from their continuing provocation of the King and his predominantly Bedouin Army...
...On that day, 70 correspondents and other civilians, including myself, were loaded into three buses for a 45-minute evacuation ride to the airport via circuitous back roads...
...had they cared to fire, they would have had easy targets...
...The heavy, jeep-mounted machine guns produced fist-sized holes in plaster and slightly smaller ones in stonework...
...The situation in Jordan is unique, of course...
...After the first day of battle, thirsty Jordanian soldiers would duck into the lobby and ask for water or beer...
...The result was the devastation of the capital and much of the rest of the country...
...The slow trip through the barren village lasted about five minutes...
...As we moved ahead someone mentioned that we were on the road used by King Hussein when he goes to the airport...
...In the interim an Iraqi journalist, Samir Basouni (who had narrowly missed being shot by unruly government troops three days earlier), provided extra protection for the group...
...It was lined with Army camps, tanks and armored patrol cars...
...There was also one jeep marked with the Communist red star...
...The country harbors a large body of angry men whose actions against a common enemy, Israel, have provided the excuse for their carrying arms and training recruits--in other words, for developing a private army that today poses an impossible choice to Hussein: Either you give in to our demands, or you will be responsible for the destruction of your country...
...Commando claims should not be quickly dismissed as exaggerated...
...First, the six-story Jordan Intercontinental is built on a hillside that affords the best view there is of Amman...
...The large poured-concrete building next to the hospital, perhaps an annex or administrative building, was blackened across its entire front from flames now quenched...
...We also received both the government and Al Fatah radio broadcasts, each offering a succession of conflicting claims interspersed with martial music--from Hussein's station, oddly, the sound of Scottish bagpipes...
...Arriving by an old Dodge taxi from Damascus the night before the fighting began, I headed straight for the Intercontinental Hotel--even then it was dangerous to be out after dark...
...Looking back at my week in Amman, it occurs to me that the implications of Jordan's civil war for the future are possibly more frightening than the battle itself...
...Since invoking that choice would appear to be an effective terrorist tactic anywhere, however, Jordan's civil war may well have spawned a new principle of guerrilla warfare at a time when angry men with guns are becoming increasingly common around the world...
...The outbreak of civil war in the morning made the strike an academic issue...
...The outlying countryside--the suburbs, if you use Western standards that do not apply to medieval Jordan--had been populated by far fewer guerrillas and therefore took much less punishment...
...The true total probably will never be known...
...The great exceptions, of course, were the areas of the Palestinian refugee camps, but since these had not yet been secured, our buses and armed escort jeep avoided them...
...its young commander was issuing loudspeaker orders for a general strike scheduled to take place the next day...
...That means 20,000 commandos...
...Only the grinding motors of the old Ford buses broke the tense quiet...
...Amman was a shambles--a mass of huts, hovels and large buildings scorched by flames or demolished by gunfire...
...they rarely engaged in man-to-man or building-by-building fighting...
...Five thousand, 7,000, 10,000--the figures climbed every day...
...Thursday, September 17, only a few hours after the old cab finally deposited me in Amman...
...Hussein defeated the guerrillas with his overwhelming superiority in weapons and armor...
...And then there are the dead--most of them already buried in the rubble of the houses, offices and refugee camps where they were killed...
...18-20 hours a day for a week, can doubt that thousands must have found their mark...
...Now the King must try to build a lasting peace on the foundation of all this suffering and hate...
...Although the constant, deafening roar outside, the dozens of machine-gun bullets that struck the hotel, and the mortars that barely missed, gave ample indication of the fierceness of the fighting, it was not until the sixth day of the civil war that I got a true picture of how massive the destruction really was...
...Children sat on the floor...
...No civilian motor traffic was to be seen, but Bedouin shepherds with bright-colored cloth bundles containing their possessions trudged along the road, often trailing half a dozen children...
...the cockiness of a young man with a machine gun, however, is understandable...
...But wholehearted support for the commando cause was certainly evident, whether it be for Yasir Arafat's Al Fatah or Dr...
...At subsequent roadblocks there were more passport examinations, and occasionally some gentle pressure for contributions to the guerrilla cause...
...A visit to the camp revealed guerrilla jeeps parked proudly outside of a few of the houses, and slogans of Al Fatah, the largest of the Palestinian commando organizations, scrawled everywhere...
...Traveling at a clip of about 10 miles per hour, we passed into a deep valley then up a hillside...
...We were held up there for an hour while the escort officer checked out the guerrilla's strength and called in more armored cars to accompany our buses...
...The recoilless rifle, a weapon normally used for penetrating armor, easily pierced walls, leaving an opening the size of a melon...
...One member of the guerrilla patrol pointed to a refugee camp in a valley about two miles from town...
...To begin with, Al Fatah could disrupt Hussein's day-to-day recovery attempts with a single squeeze of the trigger...
...The submachine guns carried by both sides made little specks in the stone...
...Like the more than 100 other Western newsmen in the hotel, I was stuck...
...Finally, we reached the main highway, amply protected by Jordanian troops, and made it to the airport...
...Even counting the women and children, the camp surely did not hold 20,000 commandos...
...Donald R. Shanor is a foreign reporter for the Chicago Daily News...
...one disgruntled guerrilla could bring the present unsteady truce crashing down...
...At the very least, the commando leadership is in a position to exert constant pressure on Hussein...
...Each different type of weapon left its own neat pattern on the buildings...
...A nearby traffic circle was torn up by tank treads, and surrounding houses were badly gored or completely flattened by shells--despite the white flags made of torn sheets that flew from many of the windows, a vain plea from their occupants that they wanted no part of the war...
...This may have been a chilling preview of the course wars will take in the next decade, of the era of the little man who feels he has been wronged and has a gun...
...Soon Jordanian Army officers started to drift in, conducting impromptu briefings mixed with propaganda...
...He could not afford any more embarrassments like the foreign planes and their hostage passengers sitting in Dawson's Field, or the "liberated" area near the Syrian border...
...He donated a white shirt of his own and found a white piece of muslin in the depot, along with some red paint...
...What is worse, the decision to provoke the Army need not even be made by the guerrilla high command...
...But we were compensated by several factors...
...Several passengers raised suitcases to the windows as a sort of shield...
...One favorite line was that Israel was behind the guerrillas...
...But as we drove on it became clear that Jarash was in effect controlled by the fedayeen, who raced through town aiming their machine guns from the back of a bright yellow Chevrolet pickup truck and from several old jeeps covered with Arabic slogans...
...Nevertheless, I got to see plenty in those seven days, and I came to understand the circumstances that made armed conflict between King Hussein's Army and the fedayeen inevitable...
...Twenty thousand people in that camp," he said...
...Near the outskirts of the northern town of Jarash, a sign welcomes tourists in the name of the Jordanian government and calls attention to the famous Roman ruins...
...He explained that they want direct, immediate, armed struggle, and are unalterably opposed to Hussein because of his willingness to maintain the present cease-fire and his seeming readiness to make peace with Israel...
...Their stories were largely simple accounts of Al Fatah treachery--most of the enemy action in the hotel area was sniper fire--or of the toll of death and destruction...
Vol. 53 • October 1970 • No. 20
