Middle East a region to avoid next decade

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The 'plucky little king' (as Western commentators used to call Jordan's King Hussein back when heightism was still politically correct) looks a bit the worse for wear these days. Recently he arrived back in Amman hairless and haggard after a six-month absence in the United States for cancer treatment -- and walked right into a dispute about what happens after he dies.

Hussein is not dying yet -- the kind of cancer he had, non- Hodgkinson's lymphoma, is curable, and the doctors at the Mayo Clinic say he is now clear of it -- but he is looking a lot older than his 62 years. His close brush with death has made him re- think matters, and a palace spokesman said bluntly: "The King has in mind major changes relating to the succession."

What he probably has in mind is replacing the current crown prince, his brother Hassan, with his own son, the 19-year-old Prince Hamza. Crown Prince Hassan, inured to a life of waiting and uncertainty, is taking it quite philosophically: "(Britain's) Prince Charles once said we should form an association of crown princes. Or perhaps clown princes would be more appropriate." But 4.5 million ordinary Jordanian are quite close to panic.

You can see why they might be upset, because the last thing Jordan needs is a ruler in his early twenties. The 1994 peace treaty with Israel is unpopular, the economy has been depressed since the Gulf War, and the country is sandwiched between two bitter enemies, Israel and Iraq, whose contempt for Jordanian sovereignty is so deep that they have both sent hit teams to assassinate their domestic enemies in the streets of Amman.

But at least in Jordan there is a designated heir to the throne. If Hussein changes his mind, almost everybody else will also accept the new heir, whatever their private reservations.

Whereas in most of the Arab world, the rulers think it is far too dangerous to let anybody emerge as their successor. These are all dictatorships, and a 'crown prince' would be a natural focus for the plots and attempted coups that such regimes tend to produce.

They tell a joke about 'President' Yasser Arafat of the once and future state of Palestine: that when he orders a car, it must be able to accommodate two drivers. It's not that he wants to drive it himself; it's just that even this menial position in his retinue must be divided between several rivals in order to avoid giving any one follower too much power. (The Palestinian Authority has at least six rival security services).

Arafat's divide-and-rule tactics are quite normal in the Middle East -- and this is more than a bit worrisome, given that the average age of Arab rulers (excluding those of former French North Africa) is 65.7 years. Arafat himself will be 70 this year, as will Syria's President Hafiz al-Assad, and Saudi Arabia's King Fahd turns 78.

These are people who have been in power for twenty, thirty, even (in King Hussein's case) forty-five years, and they have defined the entire landscape of the Middle East as we know it. None of them except Hussein has ever allowed a clear line of political succession to emerge, and now he is muddying the waters too.

You don't have to be an actuary to realize that more than half of these familiar Arab rulers will be gone in five years' time -- quite possibly including Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who will also be hitting 70 by then. So what will it be like when they go?

You read very little speculation on this subject, partly because most of those best qualified to speculate don't want to jeopardize their contacts in the Arab world (and their cash-flow) by unwelcome public speculation -- but partly, too, because nobody knows.

Apart from Libya's "Brother Colonel" Qaddafi and Jordan's Hussein (who go back even further), the whole of the Arab world is ruled by men who came to power in the 1970s. In terms of the gulf between the mentality of the rulers and the ruled, it's as though the West were still being run by Richard Nixon, Konrad Adenauer, and Charles De Gaulle. Yet ideas about what is possible and what is desirable change in the Arab world just as fast as they change in the West (though generally in different directions).

In terms of where things go from here, the situation is doubly bad because there is no democratic way of deciding who follows these strong-men when they finally depart. All the rival "crown princes" inside the various regimes (Arafat has at least five, for example) will have to fight it out, with promises or with guns, to decide who gets the brass ring.

It will probably be even worse than that, in practice, because most of these regimes depend on a fairly narrow ethnic, tribal, or clan base: Assad's Alawites, Hussein's Bedouin, Saddam's Takritis.

In the succession struggle, the continued dominance of the ethnic group that held power under the old regime is bound to be challenged by those who were previously excluded from power -- which virtually guarantees that the transition will be turbulent.

And then the new regime, be it princely, military, or tribally-based, must prove its patriotic credentials by being more bloody-minded than normal about questions like borders, Israel, etc. It's going to be very exciting in the Middle East (in the worst sense of that word) over the next five to ten years, as the old guard dies and the new rulers consolidate their power.

It also means that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli right have succeeded in their aim of killing off the prospect of an Arab-Israeli settlement that exchanges land for peace. Even if Netanyahu loses the Israeli election on May 17 (which is far from certain), he has managed to waste enough time that the Oslo deal, never consummated, will be overwhelmed by the new Arab political dynamic that emerges as the old rulers die off.

In other words, if you're planning to move to Earth in the next couple of decades, steer clear of the Middle East.