The Other Jordanians

IN Amman last week, Jordan's King Hussein and Guerrilla Leader Yasser Arafat shook hands self-consciously. The gesture sealed a shaky agreement. In the wake of the ten-day civil war that claimed thousands of lives, Hussein won a pledge of loyalty from the Palestinian guerrillas. At the same time, he granted the fedayeen broad freedom to move and operate within his kingdom. Yet scarcely had Hussein and Arafat concluded the bargain when minor skirmishes between guerrillas and loyalists began breaking out.

Should the skirmishing develop into another round of full-scale fighting, Hussein is likely to find himself in deeper trouble than he has ever experienced.

For his support is steadily dwindling.

Hussein has always had trouble with the Palestinians. Most of them are latecomers, forcibly grafted on to the native population of Jordan in 1948. At the same time, the country was inundated by tens of thousands of other Palestinians who fled from Israel. Of Hussein's 2,200,000 subjects, two-thirds are now Palestinians, and the majority are at best lukewarm to him. But the country's remaining 700,000 or so people had always been considered loyal to the throne. It is within this group that the decline in allegiance is taking place.

Western newsmen have summed up Jordan's civil war as a confrontation between "fed" and "Bed"--that is, between the Palestinian fedayeen and the Bedouins, who make up the largest segment (250,000) of the other Jordanians. To a certain extent this is true, for the Bedouins remain the backbone of Hussein's 56,000-man army. Yet increasing numbers of "Beds" are joining the "feds." Arabs estimate that up to 15% of the guerrillas are non-Palestinians. No fewer than 2,500 members of the Beni Sakhr, Jordan's most powerful Bedouin tribe, have joined Arafat's Al-Fatah or other guerrilla groups. Other non-Bedouin Jordanians have also joined the fedayeen. One of them, Nayef Hawatmeh, even heads his own radical guerrilla group, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Houses of Hair. The Hashemite kings of Jordan set in motion the forces that have led to this shift in loyalties. Amman was a dusty musabilah, or market town, when King Abdullah, Hussein's grandfather, made it the capital of his new kingdom in 1921. Most of the country's Bedouins roamed Transjordan's eastern deserts, proud and hawklike men who scorned as inferiors the Arabs in cities. Allah made the Bedouin and the camel, they were wont to say, and then Allah made the town Arab out of the camel's droppings.

The Bedouins survived the 125DEG summer heat by hunkering down beside water holes; in winter, after provident rains had fallen, they drove their camel herds across 100-mile-wide tribal grazing grounds, venturing into town only to sell their animals. They observed stern codes for everything from vendettas to hospitality. Bigger tribes like the Beni Sakhr, when they suffered a bad winter, carried out a gazu or tribal raid, plundering weaker tribes of their camels, horses and food.

Abdullah won the loyalty of this fierce, independent people by protecting them from the even fiercer Wahhabi tribes of neighboring Saudi Arabia with his British-trained Arab Legion. But the legion, under Sir John Bagot Glubb ("Glubb Pasha"), also imposed an ever-increasing degree of internal order, forbidding the gazu and destroying the tribes' stockpiles of arms. Civilization, in the shape of the road and the automobile, ended the demand for camels and forced the nomads to fold up their goat-hair tents and drift into towns and villages. Today the Beni Sakhr prosper by dealing in real estate and farming 100,000 acres of land planted in grains.

Citification has enveloped others among the nomadic or peasant people who made up Jordan's original population. The Circassians, descended from Moslems who fled the Crimea and the Russians a century ago, along with the Shishans, Druzes, Turkomans and Bahais, represent 350,000 people who were once scattered in small, isolated villages. Now many of them are moving into cities like Amman, Salt and Irbid. So are many of Jordan's 100,000 Arab Christians.

Flung together in confining cities, the various Transjordanian ethnic groups are intermingling, and substituting political allegiance for tribal or ethnic ones. In a country where no formal political parties are allowed to function, the urban Jordanian turns increasingly to the fedayeen, mostly because of the guerrillas' commitment to defeating Israel but also because they are attracted by the emerging social cohesion of the Palestinians.

The pro-fedayeen, non-Palestinian Jordanians are not bent on overthrowing Hussein, but the King's attempts to repress the guerrillas have turned many of that group against him. Even neutral Jordanians were repelled by the brutality of Hussein's army. In Amman, Bedouin soldiers slew wounded guerrillas, some while they lay helpless on stretchers. Others looted stores and houses and raped women at gunpoint. Onlookers insist that these were not Jordanian at all, but the Bedouin mercenaries from Syria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia who constitute a third of Hussein's army. "These foreign legionnaires didn't look on this as a police action," says former Premier Suleiman Nabulsi, 60, a non-Palestinian supporter of the fedayeen. "They thought it was a great gazu, just like one desert tribe raiding another."

Hussein is aware of the lingering bitterness, and he is also alert to a quandary involving Israel. The King has frequently indicated that he would like to make peace with the Israelis. But the fedayeen have convinced his people that they must continue the war against Israel. This puts Hussein in a position that monarchs have rarely faced; the more he presses to end hostilities, the more hostile his own subjects become.

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