Yasser Arafat: Mr Palestine

2004-11-09 17:43

Ramallah, West Bank - Yasser Arafat, who lay in a French hospital on Thursday amidst conflicting reports over whether he had died, has been the standard-bearer of Palestinian nationalism for nearly half a century.

  

His status as the symbol of the Palestinian fight for their own homeland has never been challenged and his death would leave a huge gap difficult to fill.

His passing would also see time finally catch up with a man known as a great survivor, outliving nearly all his great rivals and cheating death when he walked away from the wreck of a 1992 plane crash in the Libyan desert.

Arafat was born Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat al-Qudwa al-Hussaini, on August 4, 1929. He has always claimed he was born in Jerusalem but biographers say he was actually born in Cairo.

A fighter

He fought in the 1948 war between Israel and its Arab neighbours that led to the foundation of the Jewish state.

Together with Khalil al-Wazir, Faruq Khaddumi, Salah Khalaf and Mahmud Abbas, he founded the Fatah movement in 1958 to fight against the Jewish state.

In February 1969, Arafat, who has the nom de guerre of Abu Ammar, was elected chairperson of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO).

Short, paunchy and usually sporting stubble, he rose to the leadership through the force of his fiery personality, his acute instinct for political survival and his total dedication to the cause.

After securing the PLO leadership, Arafat began an odyssey that was to see him wind up in Tunisia after being expelled from Jordan by King Hussein's troops in 1970 and from Lebanon by Israeli forces, led by his nemesis Ariel Sharon, in 1982.

With military options running out and the eruption of the Palestinian uprising or intifada in the West Bank and Gaza in 1987 he began to negotiate with Israel.

Arafat renounced terrorism in December 1988 and recognised Israel's right to exist, prompting the United States to end a 13-year ban on talks with the PLO.

A Palestinian delegation was included in the Jordanian team to the 1991 Madrid conference which launched a Russian- and US-backed attempt to find a comprehensive peace between Israel and its Arab neighbours.

As the Madrid talks dragged on, Israel and the representatives of the PLO began secret direct talks in Norway.

The resulting first Oslo agreement, signed in Washington in September 1993, ushered in Palestinian autonomy in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho.

Nobel peace prize winner

Arafat returned to the Palestinian territory in July 1994 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize along with Israeli premier Yitzhak Rabin and foreign minister Shimon Peres.

But the peace process was derailed when a Jewish extremist gunned down Rabin in November 1995.

Then US president Bill Clinton brought Arafat and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to his Camp David presidential retreat in July 2000.

But talks aimed at a final peace settlement collapsed, paving the way for the eruption of the second Palestinian uprising two months later.

Arafat was elected president of the Palestinian Authority in early 1996.

Under heavy international pressure, he reluctantly agreed to appoint his first prime minister, Mahmud Abbas, in April 2003. He lasted less than four months in the job after failing to persuade Arafat to loosen his control of the security services.

Abbas' successor, Ahmed Qorei, has endured an equally tempestuous relationship with Arafat.

In December 2001, the Israeli army encircled the iconic leader in his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah, known as the Muqataa, and troops destroyed his fleet of helicopters in Gaza.

- AFP