Princess Basma

By Lisa Beyer/Aqaba

Among the advice a newly certified scuba diver may hear is this: don't dive the Red Sea first, unless you want to be disappointed with every other site. For diversity of coral life per square foot, no other place matches it. Preserving that supremacy, at least in the tiny chink of the sea that belongs to her native Jordan, is the goal of Princess Basma Bint Ali, a cousin of King Hussein's. Princess Basma, 28, is president of the Jordan Royal Ecological Diving Society, which works to protect the delicate undersea world in the Gulf of Aqaba off Jordan's 16 miles of southern coast.

She came to her passion through aversion. "I used to be petrified of the sea," she confides. A major in the Jordanian army, Basma had just completed her parachuting course in 1993 when her commanding officer teased her, "Ha, ha, but you'll never learn to dive." Rising to the challenge, she became the first Jordanian woman to qualify as a navy diver. And she licked her fear. "I was afraid because I didn't know what was below the surface of the water. Now I know," she says.

It wasn't just clown fish and brilliant anemones she discovered down there. Basma was alarmed to find Aqaba's reefs full of litter. She and some friends founded JREDS in 1993 as a diving club, but it became an environmental outfit, and Basma sharpened her interest by taking marine science during a semester at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.

Through signs, pamphlets and exhibits, Basma's group teaches the Jordanian public how to use the sea without damaging it. Boaters are told not to drop anchors that can break the reef, and divers are discouraged from snatching souvenir corals or feeding the fish. JREDS also organizes cleanup dives and recruits schoolchildren to sweep trash off the beaches.

Even a princess can't do some things. JREDS lost a fight against construction of an Aqaba oil refinery, and though the society helped win a law against traps that ensnare precious coral fish as well as edible species, many fishermen still use the devices. Zipping by a culprit as she rides on a royal pleasure boat, Basma gives a shrug that is part resignation, part stiffened resolve. But mostly stiffened resolve.

--By Lisa Beyer/Aqaba