Word: amman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, they administered the region as a League of Nations mandate. The British put the territory east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordan, under the local rule of Hussein's grandfather Emir Abdullah. When Abdullah first pitched his tents in Amman in 1921, he took over an impoverished desert area more than four times the size of Massachusetts that was peopled mainly by nomadic Bedouin tribes...
...might be tempted to try again to seize control of the whole country in their quest for a state of their own. But some P.L.O. radicals concede that they are reluctant to overthrow the King because, as one put it, "the minute there is an anti-Hussein coup in Amman we know the Israelis will move into Jordan, and we certainly don't want that." The monarch once despised by the Palestinians is now regarded as a kind of Arab insurance policy against a new Israeli blitz...
Clearly, Jordanian participation in Palestinian autonomy negotiations would be a key to their success. The foreign ministry in Amman issued a mild statement that Reagan's initiative "contains a number of positive elements that deserve to be studied," but King Hussein said nothing. Hussein would like to regain authority over the West Bank, but he accepted a 1974 decision by an Arab summit in Rabat that only the P.L.O. could speak for the Palestinians; his country, which has a Palestinian majority, is more vulnerable to P.L.O. pressure than any other in the Arab world. Hussein dares not venture...
...itself was an act of creative diplomacy. Whether or not the President's plan would ever be initialed at a second Camp David summit, Reagan had reasserted U.S. leadership in a dynamic way, and come forward with proposals that were clearly stamped "made in Washington"-rather than Riyadh, Amman or Jerusalem. It was an initiative sorely needed...
...Henry Muller. Reported by David Aikman/ Amman...