15 - 21 February 2001
Issue No.521
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 15 - 21 February 2001 Issue No.521 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Anxiety over Sharon signs
To soothe widespread panic and placate European investors who, they fear, might transfer their billions to other countries in the region, Jordan's King Abdullah and his Prime Minister have issued successive statements to the effect that the right-wing Ariel Sharon's election victory in Israel will not affect Amman. But the reality is that Jordan finds itself on a high wire over the election result. Seeking to calm Jordan's fears, a close aide to Sharon, Mejalli Wahbeh, visited Amman last week for the third time in two months for talks with top Jordanian officials. According to informed sources, the kingdom's leaders have been dreading the scenario of a Sharon re-emergence as a hard-liner whose policies will wipe away the last semblance of a credible peace emerging from negotiations between Israel and Palestine.
On the official level, King Abdullah II and Prime Minister Ali Abu Ragheb have repeated the line that Jordan is dealing with a state with which it signed a peace treaty in 1994, and not with a prime minister. As such, it will be business as usual between two countries in a state of peace.
But that is only a brave front. Deep within, they fear that Sharon could dust off his "Jordan-is-Palestine" theory and undermine the kingdom's security. The right-wing Likud leader has long refused to recognise the right of Palestinians to have their own independent state, arguing that the forced removal of at least two million Palestinian refugees to Jordan after Israel's creation in 1948 turned the Hashemite Kingdom into Palestine.
Although Sharon had announced in his election campaign that he recognised the peace treaty signed with Jordan, his recent statements have only stoked Jordanian fears. He was quoted as saying late last month that the "risk existed" of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat toppling the Hashemite regime in Jordan and establishing a state in that country. Without a buffer zone, he said, the borders of such a state would stretch from the border with Iraq to the east up to Petah Tikvah and Kfar Saba, the Israeli towns to the northeast of Tel Aviv.
The general impression among Jordanians, officials and public alike, was expressed by MP Khalil Attiyeh in terms rarely heard in parliament: "Sharon believes he can do anything he wants and that he is the master of this region, and the Arabs should succumb to his every wish and desire."
While officials assert in public that Sharon's anti-Jordan statements were aimed at winning the votes of hard-liners, they agree in private that his moves should be closely watched.
"Sharon as prime minister of Israel has totally rewritten the rules of the game in the Middle East, but we will keep an open eye on his future policies and respond accordingly," a senior official said.
To add insult to injury, Sharon has said publicly that Jordanian leaders have conveyed to him privately their fears that, in the case of an independent Palestinian state being established, the Palestinians might threaten the kingdom, since it would control the border between the two countries. Palestinians make up more than 50 per cent of Jordan's population, and some estimate the figure to be as high as 70 per cent. Following the Black September clashes in 1970 between the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) led by Arafat and the Jordanian army, acting on orders from late King Hussein, Palestinian-Jordanian relations have been a sensitive issue.
Sharon, in an interview he accorded before winning elections, claimed that Jordanian officials told him they preferred Israel to remain posted along the entirety of the Jordan Valley, that is the border with the West Bank, to keep Palestinians from the kingdom's frontiers.
Abul-Ragheb has dismissed such comments as "rubbish," and has said that they were "intended to sow dissent between the Palestinians and Jordan."
Rubbish or otherwise, such "revelations" will only serve to make the Jordanians extra cautious in frank discussion of issues of concern with Sharon, and thus bring about a further chill to bilateral dealings.
The Jordanian press has been vociferous in rejecting Sharon as a peacemaker, and has been demanding that he publicly declare his respect for the kingdom's sovereignty and the 1994 peace treaty. "We want Sharon to declare that Jordan is Jordan and that he respects the peace treaty signed between the two countries," wrote Fahd El-Fanek in the Arabic daily Al-Rai the day after Sharon was declared the election winner.
Adding to Jordanian fears is the fact that it was Sharon, while serving as infrastructure minister under former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who rejected Israeli moves to give additional water to Jordan as stipulated in the 1994 peace treaty.
The question facing Jordanians today is simple: will Sharon treat the Palestine problem as directly linked to the status of Jordan as he envisions it, as the alternative homeland for the Palestinians? If he does, then they fear another massive influx of refugees across the River Jordan, something that could seriously undermine the security, demographic balance, and stability of the kingdom as it exists today.
"When Jordan signed the peace treaty with Israel in 1994, it also sort of hitched itself to the Israeli bandwagon," an Arab analyst said. "Today it finds that the hands that hold the reins of the wagon have changed, and the course of the rickety journey is uncertain. It can only hope that the trip will end before the damage to the wheels is too serious to be repaired."
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page