‘President’ post goes to Arafat

Press, 3 April 1989, Page 10

‘President’ post goes to Arafat

NZPA-Reuter Tunis Yasser Arafat was unanimously appointed president of the self-de-clared State of Palestine yesterday by the Central Council of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, P.L.O. officials said.

They said all groups in the P.L.0., including the radical Popular and Democratic Fronts for the Liberation of Palestine (P.F.L.P. and D.F.L.P.), approved the appoint; ment. The Central Council is a smaller version of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, the Palestine National Council (P.N.C.), which last November proclaimed the Palestinian State. It also gave the Central Council the power to vote on a provisional Government. The P.L.O.’s Executive Committee, the 15-mem-ber body that runs day-to-day affairs, nominated Mr Arafat for the presidency and Farouk Kaddoumi for the post of Foreign Minister.

One P.L.O. official said the Central Council had not yet acted on Mr Kaddoumi’s nomination but would continue its meeting later in the day. The council has about

80 members, 59 of them present in Tunis.

Members of Mr Arafat’s Fatah movement said he had been appointed president, without a full provisional Government, for protocol reasons. They said it had been difficult for him to name ambassadors or write to heads of State as an equal while only chairman of the P.L.O. Executive Committee, the post he has held since 1969. About 70 countries have officially recognised the Palestinian State, even though it controls no territory.

Several more countries have said they cannot recognise a Palestinian State until it has a Government and controls some of the territory it claims.

The Fatah officials said Mr Arafat’s appointment might help to win wider recognition for the State by giving it some of the institutions normally associated with Statehood. The P.L.O. still intends to set up a full Government but has not decided how to handle the appointment of Ministers from inside the Israelioccupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.