Obituary: AWMWC in UK Mourns Pioneer Jordanian Anchor-Woman, Rabah Rousan

Pioneer Jordanian anchor-woman, Rabah Mahmoud Rousan has passed away Monday October 21, 2013 in Jordan following a heart attack while driving.  

Rabah was one of the earliest anchor-women to read the 10 o’clock English news bulletin ‘News At Ten’ on the second channel of the Jordanian state television. 

{jcomments on}Rousan was a graduate of The American University in Cairo, one of the founders of the former Meridian Plaza Hotel, ABC Bank, a Media consultant and spokeswoman for the International Industrial Satellite Channel in (2009), political and economy analyst writer, an Adviser for the Minister of Information, and a Media Consultant for the Jordanian radio and television establishments.

‘The last time I met Rousan was during the Arab Women Media Professionals Conference in Amman held 2004. She will be greatly missed and remembered as one of the Arab women pioneers in our field who has inspired many women’ said Iqbal Tamimi, Director of Arab Women Media Watch Centre in UK.

Rousan who lived in the USA while her father was an Ambassador of Jordan in the sixties, was one of the journalists who spoke openly of the horrors of USA indiscriminate attacks on civilians and its media censorship.

She expressed her dismay after watching the unedited videotapes of the victims pulled out of the Ameriyya shelter after the USA attack on the Iraqi civilians’ shelter. She spoke in her testimony about media ethics and that the images were sanitized by television stations before they were aired. The charred and severely burned bodies were evident in the unedited tapes. They showed scenes of incredible carnage. Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat had been so great that entire limbs were burned off. Among the corpses were those of at least six babies and ten children, most of them so severely burned that their gender could not be determined.

Rabah Rousan, said then: “All my life I will remember these things in vivid detail. I was educated in the States — I lived there seven years when my father was ambassador, in the sixties — and I was expecting the American people to say, `We made a mistake, we’re so sorry.’ But they didn’t.”.

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