PLO Drops Terrorist Abbas From Panel

Abul Abbas, the Palestinian terrorist leader wanted in the United States and Italy for masterminding the hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro, is being dropped from the top leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization because he has become “too much of an embarrassment and a political liability to the organization,” senior PLO officials said Wednesday.

“Abbas is out,” a source close to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat said. “He is losing his seat on the Executive Committee because of what he did,” the source added, referring to the 1985 hijacking by members of Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front, a small guerrilla faction within the PLO, and the murder of an elderly, handicapped American passenger.

Abbas, in Algiers to attend the first gathering in three years of the Palestine National Council, the PLO’s so-called parliament in exile, confirmed to reporters that he will not be on the new Executive Committee. He asserted, however, that he is stepping down from the PLO’s top leadership body voluntarily and maintained that there are “no differences” between him and Arafat.

But other senior PLO sources said Abbas is being removed from the Executive Committee because his role in the Achille Lauro affair has rendered his presence among the top leadership “incompatible with the image we are trying to project.”

Another senior source close to Arafat put it more bluntly. “Abul Abbas is not welcome here,” he said. “He has become too much of an embarrassment and a political liability to the organization.”

The Achille Lauro hijacking, as Palestinian officials conceded at the time, was widely regarded as a diplomatic disaster for Arafat because it came just when the PLO chairman was trying to cultivate a moderate image to win Western support for PLO participation, in association with Jordan, in peace talks with Israel. It also severely strained the PLO’s relations with Egypt and Jordan and led to Arafat’s proclamation of the Cairo Declaration, which renounced all “acts of armed struggle” outside Israel and the occupied territories.

On Oct. 7, 1985, four Palestine Liberation Front terrorists hijacked the cruise ship off the Egyptian coast. They held the vessel, along with more than 500 passengers and crew members, for 51 hours before surrendering to Egyptian authorities. They also shot and killed Leon Klinghoffer, 69, a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, and pushed his body overboard.

The terrorists’ leader, Abul Abbas, was dispatched to the scene by Arafat to persuade them to surrender peacefully. There were reports that Arafat, in order to ensure that Egypt did not try the hijackers, promised President Hosni Mubarak that the PLO would punish them. Mubarak ordered that they be secretly deported to Tunisia, where the PLO has its headquarters.

However, the United States learned that an Egyptian airliner was to spirit them out of Egypt and intercepted the plane over the Mediterranean, an incident that strained U.S.-Egyptian relations.

The jetliner was forced to land in Sicily, where authorities subsequently released Abbas, who then faded into PLO-imposed obscurity but otherwise was not punished. Italy eventually brought the hijackers and a number of accused associates to trial, sentencing most of them to prison terms.

Abbas’ reappearance at the Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers captured immediate media attention, to the annoyance of other senior PLO officials participating in the conference.

“We have noticed which way the cameras are pointing in the conference hall,” PLO spokesman Ahmed Abdul-Rahman said, referring to the media interest in Abbas. “But really, this issue is not so important to the PLO.”

Other officials said that Abbas, who is staying at a luxury seaside villa near the heavily guarded conference site, will continue to serve as general secretary of the Palestine Liberation Front but will remain “under control” and out of the limelight in the future.

“He is unimportant. Don’t waste your time on him,” snapped one obviously irritated PLO official when asked about Abbas.

The Palestine National Council session, held here in the Algerian capital for the last three days, was called to ratify a new unity accord ending a four-year-old schism between pro-Arafat moderates and radical PLO factions based in Damascus, Syria.

Syria, which has long sought to wrest effective control of the PLO from Arafat, supported a revolt within Arafat’s Fatah guerrilla group in 1983. Other left-wing factions sided with Syria the following year after Arafat moved to improve his ties with Jordan.

However, Arafat’s growing isolation, after a falling-out with Jordan’s King Hussein, and the radical groups’ deep disenchantment with the heavy-handed Syrian attempts to control them led to pressures for a reconciliation.

Both sides have cited the Syrian-inspired siege of Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon as the major factor behind the reconciliation. But heavy pressure exerted on the left-wing groups by the Soviet Union and intensive mediation efforts by Algeria also played pivotal roles in the reconciliation, Palestinian sources said.

Boycott by Syria Allies

However, it was noted that a number of small PLO factions remain loyal to Syria and have boycotted the gathering here. And less than halfway through this conference, there were already signs of discord over the direction the PLO will take in its relations with Jordan and Egypt.

To bring most of the radicals back into the PLO fold, Arafat was obliged to formally abrogate the agreement he signed in 1985 with King Hussein on a joint peace strategy aimed at initiating talks with Israel for the establishment of a confederated Jordanian-Palestinian state on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

However, another of the radicals’ demands, that Arafat break relations with Egypt, is already threatening to loosen the new bond of unity being hailed by speaker after speaker at the open council session.

The radicals, led by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, maintain that Arafat agreed to sever relations with Egypt as a condition for their decision to attend the council gathering here.

But the deliberately vague way in which this was phrased gave Arafat considerable discretion in interpreting the agreement, and PFLP sources say they already fear that the politically acrobatic PLO chairman has found a way around it.

One of the seven factions signing the unity agreement, the radical Palestine Popular Struggle Front led by Samir Ghoshe, has already walked out of the Palestine National Council, leaving only six groups to participate in the “national reconciliation”--Arafat’s Fatah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Abbas’ Palestine Liberation Front, the Arab Liberation Front and the tiny Palestine Communist Party.

Palestinian sources expressed confidence, however, that these factions will hold together. They noted that the largest and most important of the dissident groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, have already distanced themselves too much from Syria to back out of the unity accord now.