P.L.O. plays its last card

Press, 29 December 1988, Page 16

P.L.O. plays its last card

The

“Observer”

profiles the head

of the P.L.0., Yasser Arafat

EXACTLY FIVE years ago this month, Yasser Arafat was engaged in some fratricidal strife in a shrinking enclave he and his men were trying to hold around the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli. As the Syrian-backed Palestinian rebels under Abu Mousa closed in, things could not have looked worse either for himself or the Palestinian cause. For the second time in 15 months the chairman of the P.L.O. was about to lead his tattered battalions into a shipborne evacuation of Lebanon. On the first occasion defeat had been turned into a huge propaganda victory. The devastating fire-power the Israelis had inflicted on West Beirut had brought world condemnation and confirmed the Palestinians as underdogs. In the end, the P.L.O.’s infantry had swaggered out of the rubble into the waiting evacuation fleet under the protection of an international force and a mostly admiring world’s press. Tripoli was different — the awful sight of a stateless people indulging in the ultimate wickedness of civil war. A few days before Mr Arafat departed on a Greek ship — appropriately named, it seemed then, Odysseus — an “Observer” reporter attended his last Tripoli press conference.

It was held in a sand-bagged apartment block while his men tried to dispose of a colony of rats which had taken up residence in the piles of festering rubbish outside, for the chairman is a fastidious man.

Would he take up the Italians’ offer of a helicopter ride out of Tripoli over the Israeli patrol boats to one of their frigates waiting offshore? He would leave, he said, when he thought the situation was right. HOw could he go when his volunteers were facing death daily? Would that be the honourable thing to do? What would we think of him?

The eyes, watery, seemed to plead, “Give me a break,” but this may have been because the room was full of cigarette smoke. (Arafat does not smoke.) In the week of his greatest triumph it seems only proper to point out that the most enduring quality of Rahman Abdel Raoud Arafat al-Qudwa al-Husseini, also known as Abu Ammar which means “the builder,” and alIkhtyar, which means “the old man,” is his grit. He never gave up, he never surrendered. He is the Pales-

tinians’ Churchill. On the West Bank and in Gaza the children of the intifada play deadly games taunting the Israelis with his portrait. Yet had Robert Bruce experienced this leader’s list of setbacks, one feels the fugitive Scot might well have trod on that spider and crept further into his cave. Arafat has known defeat all his adult life. He first tasted it at the age of 19 in 1948 when the new State of Israel won its first war and the first of the Palestinian refugees came to Gaza. How active a part he played in that war is unclear. -Butrin by then a recent graduate of "tlie"' faculty of engineering at Cairo™ University,. he . was. a lieutenant commanding an Egyptian demolition platoon when the Israelis stormed into the Gaza Strip in collusion with the Anglo-French adventure at Suez. Three years later, while he was working as an engineer in Kuwait, Mr Arafat founded alFatah. At the time it was one of many offshoots in the region of Nasser’s vibrant Pan-Arabia and a very minor one at that. Gradually, the new powers in the Third World began to show an interest. In December 1962, Mr Arafat visited Algiers and obtained the blessing of President Ben Bella who took him along on a visit to China. Then came the ignominious Arab defeat of June 1967, which led to the occupation of the Jordanian territory west of the River Jordan, the West Bank, and again the Gaza Strip which the Israelis had withdrawn from after the 1956 campaign. Mr Arafat’s guerrillas, the fedayeen, set themselves up in bases in Jordan and began to make such a nuisance of themselves that the Israelis started to launch retaliatory raids on Jordan itself. At the same time the P.L.O.- began to embrace the revolutionary theatre of the hijack. In February 1969, Mr Arafat was elected the P.L.O.’s chairman, a position he has held ever since. By September 1970 King Hussein had decided that the Palestinians were out of control and unleashed his Arab Legion on their refugee camps which had become armed citadels. Outnumbered and outgunned, it was a foregone conclusion.

Desperate fedayeen swam the Jordan and gave themselves up to Israeli patrols. This was Black September. The P.L.O. rebased in Lebanon and rapidly turned their areas into a State within a State. The south of the country became known as "Fatahland.” The resulting shift in Lebanon’s demographic balance played its part in detonating the civil war which would ultimately see the P.L.O. headquarters being exiled to Tunis. It was here, in September 1985, that the Israelis made their last confirmed attempt to assassi- ■ nate Mr Arafat with a pinpoint bombing raid that killed 60 z.i,P ? L.O. men. The chairman, increasingly conscious of his weight, was out jogging at the time. In Geneva, two weeks ago, there was a brief moment of panic on the part of the Swiss police when Mr Arafat’s car was caught up in a traffic jam. Journalists who witnessed the scene were struck by the fear visible in Abu Ammar’s face. Certainly, he has a right to be frightened. There have been numerous attempts on his life, mostly from enemies within the Arab camp. As a result, he leads a peripatetic life, rarely sleeping in the same bed two nights running. In spite of this lucifugous existence his followers put his survival down to something else. They call it baraka, a kind of sixth sense. Mr Arafat was born in Gaza in December 1929, the fifth of seven children. His father was a wealthy merchant with business interests in Cairo as well as Gaza. His mother was a prominent member of the al-Husseini clan and was connected with the Mufti of Jerusalem, a thorn in the side of the British Mandate.

As a member of a bourgeois family with some connections, however tenuous, with the old aristocracy of Ottoman Palestine, Mr Arafat was brought up in a houseful of servants in what was then part of British occupied Eygpt.

He was an unprepossessing teenager, short in stature, with blubbery lips, slightly hyperthyroid eyes and bad acne. But he was already demonstrating that power of oratory Arabs so admire.

While a pupil at Gaza’s Zeitoun secondary school, where a teacher gave him the nick-name Yasser, he became leader of the Gaza section of an anti-Zionist organisation called al-Futuwwa. He still speaks Egyptian Arabic, as it happens the language of the region’s film stars.

The Yasser Arafat the world knows today began to emerge in the early 19605, when the headway he was making with Third World leaders persuaded him to adopt a style more befitting a representative of the struggling masses.

The Keffiyeh head-dress of the Palestinian peasant, the very symbol of his revolution, now covers an entirely bald pate. His pioneering of the fashion for nail-scissor stubble is said to owe much to the fact that a shave brings on a rash.

He has never married and when asked about it normally says that he is “betrothed to the revolution.” This has led to prurient speculation about his private life, some of it probably whipped up by the Israeli secret service.

In fact, he is said to have had a relationship with an Egyptian woman for many years now. The lady in question is thought to be a friend of one of his sisters.

Until recently this sibling lived a quiet life in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis. Then, earlier this year, some men broke into her apartment, bound and gagged her, and went through her address book. They were presumed to be Israeli agents.

To an extent Mr Arafat has always represented the moderate, he would prefer to say “realistic,” wing of the P.L.O. If one charts his progress from when he first made the cover of “Time” magazine in 1968 to his “Gun and the olive branch" speech at the U.N. in 1974, it is possible to see how his emphasis on minimalist policies has increased.

But until now he has invariably drawn the line at recognising Israel, explaining that it was the P.L.O.’s last card. The intifada has undoubtedly changed all that. Israel has never been so isolated. At last, he feels strong enough to play it.