Arafat Is Under Siege by Radicals, Moderates Alike

PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, the Middle East’s most indestructible politician, has found himself under siege by radicals seeking to derail the peace process, moderates who say he has outlived his time and a world that is increasingly hostile to his dream for a country called Palestine.

The diminutive diplomat, whose trademarks are a checked head scarf, a bad shave and a loud mouth, has managed to shove the Palestine Liberation Organization toward a peace conference and bring together its disparate band of guerrilla fighters, businessmen and intellectuals, pulling them out of the chaos, economic crisis and dissent that were the legacies of the Persian Gulf War.

Yet, Arafat has had to face serious questions about his leadership of the fractious organization. And the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in-exile that he heads, has found itself in the curious position of debating whether to join a peace process to which it hasn’t been officially invited--a tense game of shadowboxing whose stakes are the future of the world’s 5.5 million Palestinians.

“I ask you not to elect me because we are facing a catastrophe,” an emotional Arafat told the 480-member Palestine National Council, which met last week for the first time in nearly three years to decide on a future course toward peace. “I say, may God help the leadership you will elect.”

Arafat has survived the loss of two Arab wars against Israel, the ejection of his trouble-making guerrillas from Jordan in the early 1970s and their disastrous rout in Lebanon a decade later, the bloody assassination of his top two lieutenants in Tunis and, finally, the loss of $100 million a year in Gulf aid and the disapproval of many of his former Arab and Western allies after his controversial support for Iraqi President Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.

Now, will Arafat survive the road to peace?

“We fell into a trap with the Gulf War, and we would like to escape it, and we find nothing to do,” Nabil Amar, the PLO’s representative in Moscow, said last week. “We are at the threshold of a dangerous stage. The battle for freedom and peace will be more complex than all the battles we’ve had before.”

Arafat has come under siege from some of the colleagues who founded with him the fledgling Fatah guerrilla movement in the 1960s, who say he shouldn’t have supported Saddam Hussein.

Meanwhile, revolution-minded radicals demand that he escalate the Palestinian uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Muslim fundamentalists demand a Palestine that stretches over Israel to the sea. Finally, young intellectuals demand peace--with honor--and a more democratic decision-making process in an organization that Arafat has historically run like a dictator.

How to hold together, at such a time, an assembly that includes under the same roof the likes of George Habash, aging founder of the Arab nationalist movement; Abul Abbas, mastermind of the Achille Lauro hijacking; well-known poet Mahmoud Darwish, and a whole cadre of wealthy Palestinian business leaders? How about a council whose general secretary is a farmer and whose Speaker is an 86-year-old Muslim sheik?

“Arafat has been able to use this conference as a means of impressing on people why unity is important and how he’s the only person who can deliver it for the moment,” said a Western diplomat who closely follows Palestinian politics.

The point was driven home one night last week when a dispute at the Palestine National Council between rival factions of the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the PLO’s many member organizations, erupted into a tumultuous screaming match that threatened to plunge the entire session into chaos.

The young toughs allied with radical leader Nayef Hawatmeh were paying no attention to the pleas and pounding of the PNC Speaker, Sheik Abdel Hamid Sayeh, as they attempted to shout down Executive Committee member Yasser Abed-Rabho’s calls for moving toward a peace conference. Then Arafat, surrounded by his bodyguards, glided to the dais and his voice began booming through the chamber, bouncing from wall to wall without the aid of a microphone, his head scarf swirling, his eyes furious.

“We listen to points of view, many points of view, and respect them because this is a democracy!” he shouted. “We are not ruled by the Democratic Front--we are ruled by democracy!”

As the auditorium broke into cheers, Arafat’s voice grew hushed, and he told of how the PNC’s opening session had been broadcast by radio into the Israeli-occupied territories. “Our people are dancing today in our homeland,” he said softly.

“Dear brothers, we are facing a catastrophe, and what weapons do I have? Do you want me to send bombs? I have no bombs. Do you want me to send missiles? I have no missiles. Do you want me to send chemical weapons? I have no chemical weapons. May God help us, the only missile I can give to my people, the only bomb I can give to my people, is your unity, your unity, your unity.”

Some delegates were wiping their eyes as Arafat returned to his seat.

“He is tired,” Mohammed Sobieh, secretary general of the PNC, said of Arafat. “He’s frustrated. He keeps threatening to resign, and we elect him by force. He must continue. He is devoted to the cause, he is a moderate and he has the credibility of the people inside (the occupied territories) and outside.”

Assad Abdul-Rahman, a Jordan-based intellectual and member of the PLO’s Central Council, drafted an open letter to Arafat in anticipation of the mercurial leader’s usual threats to resign, demanding that he stay--and address real calls for expanding the base of decision-making within the PLO so that young, educated Palestinians can have more of a say.

“If you say, ‘I have to resign because I’m an obstacle to the interests of the PLO because the Gulf countries and the U.S. don’t want to deal with me,’ Abdul-Rahman said he told Arafat, “then we say, ‘That’s why we want you in.’

“Maybe he’s not a philosopher king, but he’s a king, and most kings are not philosophers. . . . We hereby publicly say: ‘You are not an issue yourself. We all love you. But that is conditional this time.’ ”

In the weeks leading up to the PNC session, some of the PLO’s most prominent intellectuals resigned, either from the council or the Executive Committee, most citing either health or “personal” reasons. They included Columbia University Prof. Edward Said, Darwish the poet, academic Ibrahim abu Lughod and businessman Abdul Mohsen Qattan.

Qattan, who had substantial business interests in Kuwait, said in a letter to PLO headquarters in Tunis that its support for Iraq during the Gulf War was “a serious strategic error.” He also criticized Arafat’s decision earlier this year to resist the Lebanese army’s move into southern Lebanon, a move that led to the shutdown of the PLO’s last remaining military bases in Lebanon.

Prof. Said reportedly has health problems, but he is also “fed up, like a lot of other people, about the lack of seriousness on the part of the PLO leadership vis-a-vis the peace process,” said an associate.

“There’s a real struggle of the younger generation within the PLO to be entrusted in bigger and more influential positions. I see the younger generation asking for a more active, more sophisticated approach than what the PLO is doing now,” said Marwan Kanafani, a PLO representative in Washington and Arafat’s adviser on U.S. affairs.

Arafat, some influential PLO members complain, has become dictatorial and reluctant to share decisions with the rest of the organization.

“Individualism, unless it is controlled, it is one of the worst products of Western civilization because it creates monsters in the end,” said one influential PLO official. “Arafat is honest, but he adores himself. He reads too much about Napoleon and De Gaulle.”

Yet, PLO leaders say Arafat remains because there is no real alternative within the organization, and because, like it or not, he has become a symbol of the Palestinian cause. “The people inside the West Bank and Gaza, they don’t know him, but they adore him,” said one Arafat critic. “They look at him as a saint. So, we have to take care of him.”

Given the rising unrest within the organization, is Arafat ready for power-sharing?

“A blunt answer: no,” Kanafani said. “It’s not going to be the way he wants or the way we want--it’s going to be somewhere in between.”

To help guarantee that the wishes of the Palestine National Council will be carried out when Arafat is left to negotiate the details of the proposed international peace conference on the Mideast, the PNC is increasing the number of seats on the Executive Committee from 15 to 18 and replacing some of the older members with new faces. Meetings of the Central Council, which acts as an intermediary between the PNC and the Executive Committee, will be increased to once every three months.

At the same time, Arafat’s defenders say he has sprung to leadership not by force but almost by default to guide an organization that has often been too fractious to find its own course.

“If Arafat has too much power, it is the fault of the others; they don’t take their power,” said Sobieh. “This man doesn’t take his power with a gun.”

For all its internal troubles, the PLO has moved swiftly to repair the diplomatic damage of the Gulf War.

After leaving Arafat sitting in his jet at the Cairo Airport for several hours a few months ago, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak met Arafat in September for the first time since the end of the war. Diplomats say the PLO has managed to restore active relations with most of the major players in the Arab world except for the Gulf countries and is on the way to improving relations with the United States as well.

The official dialogue with Washington was severed last year after PLO guerrilla leader Abul Abbas launched an abortive terrorist raid on a Tel Aviv beach, but PLO officials had complained that the relatively low-level dialogue wasn’t going anywhere, anyway.

Now, West Bank Palestinian leaders Faisal Husseini and Hanan Ashrawi are talking directly to U.S. Secretary of State James A. Baker III in an effective escalation of the dialogue, Western diplomats said.

Although Abul Abbas resigned from the PLO Executive Committee last week, there are no indications that an official resumption of official PLO-U.S. relations is imminent.

“I’m not going to say there was no setback from the Gulf War, but you have to remember that the PLO was not in an enviable position even before Aug. 2, 1990,” said Kanafani. “By that time, America had severed the dialogue with the PLO. The relationship between the PLO and some of the Arab countries was not smooth. The change in the international situation was not going in favor of the traditional analysis of the conflict.”

“On the American side,” he added, “Yasser Arafat will be back on the right track with the Americans once again when the PLO shows it remains the sole representative of the Palestinian people with no splits, no internal problems and no major rebellion against him.”

In the meantime, the PLO is still being placed in the difficult position of signing off on a peace conference in which it will not be permitted to directly participate. Indeed, with Baker’s declaration that the peace conference would go on with or without the Palestinians, the PLO is left with little to sell but non-interference, several diplomats said.

The PLO is gambling that nearly all residents of the West Bank and Gaza are likely to be either reluctant or afraid to participate if the PLO opposes the conference. That, they hope, may be enough to win some concessions from the other players--including a greater role for the PLO. “The reality is that we’re in a difficult situation but not in a desperate situation,” said one Arafat adviser.

“I really don’t think this conference is going to solve the Palestinian problem,” he added. “It’s not going to secure the Palestinian right of self-determination, it’s not going to stop the military occupation of Palestinian land. But it could give the Palestinians a chance for damage control, it could give them a better image on the Arab and international front--that we are not against peace.”

One of the strongest foes of Arafat’s policy on the war, Khaled Hassan, who has close ties to the Gulf countries, said the PLO is ready to move beyond the war.

“I was in a difficult track during the war. I was against what was adopted by Arafat,” he said. “But now, the Gulf War is history. We are dealing with the result of history. If we keep ourselves continuing in yesterday, we can do nothing.”

Arafat: Man in the Middle

Yasser Arafat: PLO chairman and a veteran survivor.

Nayef Hawatmeh: Radical leader of Democratic Front for Liberation of Palestine whose backers oppose peace conference.

Abul Abbas: Hijacking mastermind who quit PLO Executive Committee.

Yasser Abed-Rabho: Executive Committee member who supports peace conference.

George Habash: Leader of Marxist oriented Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

* Colleagues from guerrilla days say Arafat shouldn’t have supported Saddam Hussein.

* Radicals say Palestinian uprising should be escalated in occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

* Muslim fundamentalists demand a Palestine stretching over Israel to the sea.

* Young intellectuals demand peace with honor and more democratic decision-making.