‘Frontline’ Attempts to Show Real Face of Arafat

He wears a stubble beard, smiles a lot for cameras and is labled a terrorist by many Israelis and a hero by many Palestinians. Who is Yasser Arafat anyway?

Only a partial answer is available on a “Frontline” documentary titled “The Faces of Arafat” (airing tonight at 9 on Channels 28 and 15, and at 10 on Channel 50), but this narrow beam is better than no light at all.

Marie Colvin, an American journalist working for the London Sunday Times, traveled with Arafat for several weeks and interviewed his friends, family, enemies and others in preparing this profile of the 60-year-old chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) for PBS. A similar version will be aired on the BBC in England.

Arafat allows Colvin to get closer than most, but not close enough to get a real take on this man whom veteran Middle East reporter Tom Friedman notes here has helped bring Palestinians “back from that desert of obscurity to a land of prime time.”

Arafat’s personal habits and his routine--including a grueling schedule that requires him to use his private plane as an office 20,000 feet above ground--are fascinating, if only because his public veneer of mystery has so rarely been penetrated.

However, this program is essentially a straight childhood-to-adult biography, with Arafat emerging as a complex, ambiguous leader who is utterly committed, but whose greatest weakness, claims Palestinian scholar Edward Said, “is his radical, radical misunderstanding and ignorance of the United States. He has never understood what this country is about.”

Replayed here is Arafat’s historic statement of December, 1988 on behalf of the PLO: “We totally and absolutely renounce all forms of terrorism.” This was a catalyst for increasing pressure on Israel to include the PLO in the Middle East peace process as a way of resolving the Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Yet when Colvin presses Arafat on allegations of his own connection to terrorism and on his ability to control extremists within the PLO, he not only refuses to answer, he also walks out.

“Is this an investigation?” he first demands. “So it is clear what I am saying, you are speaking to the chairman of the PLO, the President of the state of Palestine (which doesn’t exist). Be careful with your investigation,” he warns.

Colvin persists. “Did you give orders to stop these acts (of terrorism)?”

Arafat resists. “What I have mentioned is clear and obvious.”

But of course it is not. Nor is Arafat himself, and apparently that’s the way he wants it to remain.