Arafat Bows to Radicals, Hits Egypt : Cairo Delegates Walk Out of PLO Meeting in Algiers

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, trying to keep a newly forged accord on Palestinian unity from falling apart, bowed Saturday to demands by PLO radicals to criticize Egypt in a resolution adopted by the Palestine National Council.

Arafat’s concession, made to avert a threatened walkout by radical Palestinian factions returning to the PLO fold after a four-year split, cast an immediate pall over the future of relations between Egypt and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose delegation walked out of the conference earlier in the day, had threatened to break all ties with the PLO if the council, which serves as the PLO’s parliament-in-exile, criticized Egypt for making peace with Israel.

Mubarak had sought the deletion of a key phrase in the resolution affirming a hard-line stance toward Egypt taken at a previous Palestine National Council meeting in Algiers in 1983.

Warning From Mubarak

PLO officials said that Mubarak warned in a letter delivered to Arafat on Friday that failure to delete this phrase could “lead to a total breakdown in PLO-Egyptian relations.”

However, Palestinian radicals, who had made criticism of Egypt a condition for rejoining the PLO, were equally adamant about retaining the phrase and threatened to walk away from the unity accord if it was deleted.

Although Arafat, who was said by his aides to be keen on maintaining good relations with Egypt, succeeded in toning down the wording of the resolution, the key phrase was retained in the draft read aloud and passed by a wildly enthusiastic show of hands on the next-to-last day of the PNC’s weeklong meeting.

After the last resolution was passed, the crowded and tense conference hall erupted into a spontaneous uproar of chanting, singing and applause. Delegates joined hands and danced about their seats, chanting “Unity! Unity!” and “Yas-ser Ar-a-fat!”

Triumphant Gesture

Nayef Hawatmeh, leader of one of the radical groups, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was hoisted onto the shoulders of his supporters and carried triumphantly through the halls of the heavily guarded conference site on the outskirts of Algiers.

Early today, meanwhile, the Palestine National Council announced that it had reelected Arafat as head of the organization’s Executive Committee and that Abul Abbas is retaining his seat on the policy-making committee, the Associated Press reported.

Some Palestinian sources had predicted that Abbas, the convicted mastermind of the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking, would be fired from the committee because Arafat thought he gave the PLO a bad image. And Abbas, himself, had told reporters last Wednesday that he was stepping down.

The wording of the resolution in question on Egypt was the result of a hard-fought compromise that fell far short of what the radicals had originally demanded--the severing of PLO relations with Cairo.

The resolution began by noting in effusive terms “the great role” played in the past by Egypt in defending the Palestinian cause. It concluded by instructing the PLO leadership to base the PLO’s future relations with Egypt on the resolutions adopted at previous Arab summit conferences and Palestine National Council meetings, in particular “the 16th session of the PNC.”

It was this seemingly innocuous and passing reference to the 16th session of the PNC that caused all the controversy and appeared at several points in the day to threaten the conference with collapse on the eve of its conclusion.

11th-Hour Meeting

It was resolved, in favor of the radicals, only after an 11th-hour meeting between Arafat and George Habash, leader of the largest of the Syrian-based dissidents, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“We had already compromised on the text. We weren’t going to compromise anymore. We were going to walk out,” Popular Front spokesman Bassam Abu Sharif said.

The 16th session of the PNC, which also witnessed a clash between moderates and radicals, criticized Egypt for signing a peace treaty with Israel and urged it to back away from its Camp David commitments.

Arafat loyalists, who said that the chairman had sought to get the reference to the 16th PNC deleted, acknowledged that its inclusion might be seen as a slight to Egypt, which has strongly supported the PLO’s inclusion in future Middle East peace talks and has been working hard to mend a rift between Arafat and Jordan’s King Hussein.

Along with Jordan, Egypt has also been working intensively to lay the groundwork for an international peace conference, and the PLO resolution is likely to be seen as a rebuff to those efforts, the sources conceded.

Both Sides Took Risks

However, they added somewhat bitterly that Mubarak badly miscalculated the effect of his ultimatum, threatening to break all relations, on the conference. Both sides, radicals and moderates alike, had taken considerable risks and made a number of major concessions in order to reforge PLO unity at a time when thousands of Palestinians are threatened with death and starvation by Syrian-supported militiamen in the camps war in Lebanon.

“We desperately need our unity to defend our women and children in the camps. We cannot let them down over a few vague words that Egypt doesn’t like,” one PLO official said.

Rather than making it easier for Arafat to persuade the radicals to drop their insistence on retaining the reference to the 16th PNC, the last-minute Egyptian pressure resulted in a backlash among Palestinians who saw the Egyptian maneuver as an attempt to re-split the PLO in order to separate Arafat from the radicals, who can be expected to try to keep the PLO leader from making too many concessions in the future on the peace process.

“The Egyptians were blatantly trying to interfere in the internal affairs of the PLO, and we had to reject this,” a Democratic Front spokesman said.

Ironically, the Egyptian delegation, before it left, was said to be happy with the text of the PLO resolution on future peace talks.

To forestall the possibility of reviving the joint peace initiative with Jordan, the radicals initially sought to make the PLO’s attendance at an international conference dependent on its participation as an independent party. But the resolution passed by the PNC said only that the PLO should go to an international peace conference on a “equal basis” with the other parties--wording that left open the possibility of attending as part of a joint Arab delegation.

Radicals Give Ground

“The radicals gave in to a really rather moderate stand on the peace process, but unfortunately the controversy over Egypt seems to have eclipsed this,” a pro-Arafat source said.

The source added that it remains to be seen if Mubarak’s threat to sever relations with the PLO is “really serious or just a dramatic tactic that didn’t work.”

He said that Arafat, who has already said publicly that there will be no change in relations with Cairo as far as he is concerned, will seek to send a fence-mending mission to Egypt in the near future.

“We would like to maintain good relations with Egypt, but that’s up to Egypt now,” he added.

Mubarak hasn’t commented publicly yet, but an indication of Egypt’s ire was given in an editorial appearing Saturday in the semi-official Egyptian newspaper Akhbar el Yom.

Accusing PLO radicals who want to break ties with Egypt of “flagrant impudence,” the editorial cited Egyptian losses in four wars with Israel and said: “We have had enough suffering on account of the Palestinian cause. The losses . . . have turned us from a rich country helping others into a poor one mocked by our brothers.

“Enough wasted efforts and resources,” it added bitterly. “Enough deprivation of our masses for the sake of a people who insult us.”