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History and Government
History: The Nabataeans were the first known inhabitants of the area that is now Jordan. The Romans absorbed it into their empire, as part of the province of Arabia, in AD 106. Shortly after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in AD 632, Arab armies entered the region and established the Umayyad dynasty. However, this became something of a provincial backwater after the conquest of Baghdad. During the 11th and 12th centuries, Jordan was the scene of some of the major conflicts between the Christian Crusaders and Islamic forces. Salah ad Din (known in the West as Saladin) and his successors ruled Jordan from his main seat of power in Egypt from the late 12th century until they were displaced by the Mamluks, a race of mostly Kurdish and Circassian origin.
The Mamluks repelled the Mongol invasion of the 14th century but were eventually overthrown by the Ottoman Turks in 1517. Jordan was governed along with modern-day Palestine and Syria as a single administrative entity (called a vilayet). Turkish rule lasted, in an increasingly anaemic form, until the beginning of the 20th century. After World War I, when the major Western powers began to dismember the old Ottoman Empire and distribute its territories among themselves, the area east of the Jordan River, known as Transjordania, fell to the British. Like neighbouring Palestine, Transjordania came under a League of Nations mandate under which the British maintained control. The mandate ceased in 1946, at which point Transjordania attained full independence under the present constitution.
The country came under the rule of King Abdullah ibn Hussein, a member of the Arabian Hashemite Dynasty who had held the position of Emir since the 1920s. When King Abdullah was assassinated in 1951, the crown passed to his son Hussein ibn Talal. King Hussein assumed the throne in 1952 and ruled the country until early 1999. Jordanian history and politics since independence have been dominated by the Palestinian issue and relations with Israel. When war broke out in 1948 between the newly declared state of Israel and the Palestinians, backed by the forces from neighbouring Arab countries, the Jordanian army occupied a 6000sq km area of Palestine bounded by the west bank of the River Jordan.
Until a major change in Jordanian policy in 1988, the West Bank comprised three of Jordan's eight provinces, while over half of the Jordanian population claimed Palestinian origin. Relations between King Hussein and the Palestinians were difficult from the very start: his father was murdered by a Palestinian extremist. Jordan lost the West Bank after the Six-Day War of 1967, and gained thousands of Palestinian refugees who fled across to Jordan. Many of them joined one of the myriad of guerrilla groups organised under the umbrella title of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. (The modern PLO is a coalition of seven main factions, the largest of which is Al-Fatah headed by the PLO's overall leader Yasser Arafat.)
Hussein ultimately came to feel that they constituted a major threat to his authority and, in September 1970, he deployed the Jordanian army to expel them. In 1973, Israel again defeated a combined Arab force, including a small Jordanian contingent, in the Yom Kippur war: Jordan lost no territory on this occasion. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Jordan pulled back from regional politics to concentrate more on domestic matters. After 1967, political power in Jordan had been concentrated fully in the hands of the King and his Council of Ministers. Political parties and almost all political activity were banned.
This prohibition has been substantially relaxed since the mid-1980s to the point where political parties can now campaign openly for election. The National Assembly has been and remains dominated by supporters of the King, although the latest parliamentary election in 1997 was marked by the large number of parties which boycotted the poll. The Government remains wary of Islamic fundamentalism: as elsewhere in the Arab world, Jordan has experienced a sharp growth in the phenomenon.
Throughout the 1980s, the Palestinian problem continued to exercise the Jordanians. In 1987 the Intifada (the uprising by Palestinians living in Israeli-occupied areas) led, in July the following year, to a surprise decision by Hussein to cede the residual Jordanian interest in the internal affairs of the occupied West Bank (notably financing public services such as education). The Gulf War of 1991 proved a political and economic disaster for Jordan. Heavily reliant on the Iraqi economy in a number of ways, Jordan suffered badly from the UN sanctions imposed upon Baghdad. The disintegration of the Iraqi sanctions regime will ultimately benefit Jordan, although there was some friction between the two governments caused by King Hussein's tolerant attitude towards Iraqi refugees in Jordan. In the summer of 2001, as a new 'smart'sanction regime was under discussion in the West -as a replacement for the failed existing regime, Jordan is deeply worried about being caught between its international obligations and Iraq's very real threat to cut trade with any country that assists in the new regime (which depends critically on local scrutiny of cargoes).
Back in 1991, King Hussein, who always retained firm control over the nation's foreign policy, concluded a peace agreement with the Israelis. This allowed for security and economic co-operation. Since then, similar mechanisms have been forged between Jordan and the Palestinian autonomous areas. But trade across Jordan's western border rises and falls in line with the prevailing security situation, and by mid-2001 had all but ceased as Intifada-2000 took hold across the West Bank.
At the end of 1998, attention was focused on King Hussein's future as he returned to the country after another lengthy and serious spell of medical treatment abroad. The King's brother, Crown Prince Hassan, had long been the heir apparent. But the King now made clear that one of his sons, Prince Abdullah, had been chosen to take over upon his death.
The change was made shortly before King Hussein finally succumbed to cancer in February 1999. During his first year in office, Abdullah adopted a more populist style than his father but there has been little change in the substance of policy. A new Prime Minister, Ali Abu al-Ragheb, took office during 2000 at the head of a government composed of independents and members of the main Islamic bloc.
Government: Jordan is a constitutional monarchy with a bicameral legislature. The House of Representatives has 80 members elected by universal adult suffrage for a four-year term. The second chamber, the House of Notables, has 40 members appointed by the King for an eight-year term. Executive power is held by the king, who governs with the assistance of a Council of Ministers. Until 1988, the Israeli-occupied West Bank was considered to comprise three of Jordan's eight administrative provinces.
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