biography
| name: |
Hussein (ibn Talal)
|
pronunciation:
[husayn]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1935–99)
|
| biography:
| King of Jordan (1952–99), born in Amman, Jordan, a member of the Hashemite dynasty. He studied at Alexandria, Harrow, and Sandhurst Military Academy. He steered a middle course in the face of the political upheavals inside and outside his country, favouring the Western powers, particularly Britain, while supporting Arab nationalism. In 1967 Jordan joined Egypt and Syria in their war against Israel. Thereafter, the PLO made increasingly frequent raids into Israel from Jordan, their power developing to such an extent that he ordered the Jordanian army to move against them, and after a short civil war (Black September, 1970), the PLO leadership fled abroad. His decision to cut links with the West Bank (1988) prompted the PLO to establish a government in exile. Alone among the Arab Middle-East States he was forced by domestic pressure to give verbal support to Iraq during the Gulf War (1990–1), and for a time lost Western aid for Jordan. In 1994 he signed an official peace with Israel. He was married four times; his second wife, Toni Gardiner, was an Englishwoman, by whom he had a son, Abdullah, in 1962, whom he named his heir in 1999. (Until that time his brother Hassan had been Crown Prince.) |
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