Profile: Yasser Arafat

[DVTimes]

For decades Yasser Arafat has been the leader and figurehead of the Palestinian people's struggle for statehood.

He has carried on his shoulders the burden of that struggle. But his refusal to share power or delegate responsibility has taken a toll on his health and often damaged his popular support.

His latest health problems began around 20 October with stomach pains, and one of his ministers has described him as "very, very sick". He has been flown to Paris for treatment.

The illness has raised serious questions about the succession to his rule - his power is so personal that other Palestinian leaders have tended to be in his shadow.

When the Oslo peace process failed to live up to expectations, more and more Palestinians lost patience with his mercurial and dictatorial style of leadership.

However, in an ironic twist of fate, Mr Arafat has won back a lot of Palestinian support thanks to Israel's attempts to sideline him.

Until he left for France on 29 October, Mr Arafat had been confined by Israeli forces to his battered headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah since December 2001. The siege came to be regarded as a potent symbol of the draconian measures exacted by the Israeli Government.

Personal war

From his earliest days, Mr Arafat has indulged in the weaving of myths about his life, insisting, for example, that he was born in Jerusalem even though his birth, in 1929, is clearly recorded in Egypt.

As a young man he was, according to one biographer, "a natural publicist" and a workaholic. At the same time, he developed an obsessive desire to be leader of the pack and to get his way.

As early as 1959, as Palestinian exiles in Kuwait were forming Fatah, later to be the biggest group within the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), Mr Arafat was only paying lip service to the idea of collective leadership.

Two years later his contemporaries noticed how he "exercised total control over the Fatah war chest and how he bribed people to join him".

But he also did more than anyone else to put the Palestinians' cause on the world agenda.

Arab regimes were clearly not prepared to act to help the Palestinians so, led by Mr Arafat, the PLO took up arms themselves, hijacking airliners and committing other acts of violence.

As a military leader, Mr Arafat often led the way into action against the Israelis. When backs were against the wall, when he took on Israel at Karameh in 1968, or Jordan in September 1970 or under siege in Beirut in 1982, Mr Arafat never lacked personal courage.

His armed campaign against Israel launched from neighbouring countries, first Jordan and then Lebanon, led to his expulsion from these countries and eventual "exile" to distant Tunisia.

The presence and activities of Palestinian fighters in Lebanon was one of the causes of the Lebanese civil war there and the Israeli invasion.

Negotiations

His goal has always been independence for the Palestinians, with himself as president.

In 1987, with the outbreak of the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza, Mr Arafat risked being sidelined, but was able to harness the a home-grown uprising that was little to do with him.

In 1990, the Palestinian leader supported Saddam Hussein in the Kuwait crisis, which killed off his support in the Gulf States and marginalised the Palestinian cause was never so marginalised.

From a position of relative weakness, Mr Arafat started making peace with Israel and renounced armed struggle.

On 13 September 1993, Arafat and Israel's Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, appeared on the White House lawn after secret talks facilitated by Norwegian diplomats.

Though great progress was made in the negotiations leading to the foundation of the Palestinian Authority and the handover to Palestinian control of parts of the occupied territories, the negotiation process collapsed at talks in the US in September 2000.

Mr Arafat is blamed by the US and Israel for rejecting a generous offer. Mr Arafat insists that basic Palestinian demands were not met and it was not a deal that he could have sold to his people.

Israel blames the uprising that followed the failure of talks on Mr Arafat. He failed to reign in Palestinian militants, and, the argument goes, his backing for the armed intifada was a tactical attempt to gain concessions through violence.

Israeli and US refusal to deal with him and insistence that he hands over power to a prime minister, do not appear to have worked.

Palestinian prime ministers have come and gone, and Mr Arafat, until his recent severe illness, was still very much in charge from his battered headquarters in Ramallah.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/3102112.stm

[DVTimes]

Who could follow Arafat?

Yasser Arafat has been careful during his long career not to anoint a successor.

Like many other Arab leaders, he has been wary of rivals - and even his closest lieutenants have often been kept on a short leash.

The death of senior Palestinian official Faisal Husseini in June 2001 strengthened the impression that the old guard of Palestinian leaders are gradually fading from the scene.

And since Mr Arafat is now a frail figure in his mid 70s, speculation about who will one day take his place is inevitable.

The contenders

Possible contenders fall into two main categories. There are the older men who have worked with Mr Arafat for a long time and younger figures who have come to the fore more recently.

Those in the first category worked with the PLO - the umbrella body of the Palestinian movement - during its long years in exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia.

They are people Mr Arafat trusts, but Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tend to regard them as outsiders. They are sometimes dubbed the "Tunisians" and some of them are tainted by accusations of corruption.

In the second category are "insiders", younger men who remained in the Israeli-occupied territories when the PLO was in exile.

They have stronger roots than the "Tunisians", and they acquired their first taste of local leadership during the first intifada, or uprising against Israeli rule, which broke out in the late 1980s.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/mid...st/1362216.stm