PLO’s Aging Warriors Use Politics, Position Papers to Fight Latest Battles

As a grim-faced Palestinian delegation closed the door on the latest round of peace talks in Washington, the plane their leaders boarded was not headed back to their homes in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Instead, it touched down Saturday in the sun-splashed hills of Tunisia. Here, the 28-year-old guerrilla organization that launched the Palestinians’ violent fight for a homeland is now, from a group of bougainvillea-covered villas guarded by stern young men with guns, directing by fax machine the delegates’ negotiations for peace with Israel.

Greeting them, in his characteristic kaffiyeh, green combat fatigues and a pistol on his hip, was the man the Israelis vowed would never be part of peace negotiations: Palestine Liberation Organization chairman Yasser Arafat, the self-proclaimed Palestinian “head of state” who has managed to make himself persona non grata in Washington, Damascus, Kuwait city and Riyadh--to say nothing of Jerusalem.

Most recently, Arafat joined an already substantial list of undesirables in Tehran, where Iranian President Hashemi Rafsanjani, irritated at Arafat’s move to make peace with Israel, vowed to support all of the PLO’s considerable number of opponents. “I told him you’re not the first man to try,” Arafat recalled recently. “We’re a nut that’s not easy to crack.”

A decade after they were chased out of Lebanon, two years after their disastrous backing for Iraq propelled them out of the Arab nest, 21 years after leaving the land they called Palestine, the aging warriors of the PLO are still at the front--a new front, to be sure.

The new war’s weapons are politics and position papers, and its stakes are not only a Palestinian homeland but, more immediately, as the passing of the Cold War leaves a generation of free-lance guerrilla fighters behind, the PLO’s ability to transform itself from a national liberation movement to a modern-day government-in-exile.

Arafat himself, battling rising opposition from leftist and Islamic radicals--generously financed by his enemies--who complain the peace process is going nowhere, is beginning to show the effects of a long campaign whose end, whether on the battlefield or at the peace table, still seems far from view.

Close associates and diplomats say he has begun to tire more easily since a plane in which he was riding crashed earlier this year, leaving him with lingering injuries. His new wife has argued against his characteristic all-night work sessions. He is focusing more on a resolution to the peace talks and less on micro-managing his guerrilla empire. He expresses constant frustration at a peace process that hasn’t moved substantially since it began more than a year ago at Madrid. He has become more reflective of late.

Maybe, he’s willing to consider, he will never be called on to raise the Palestinian flag over Jerusalem. “Maybe I will be like Churchill,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s a democracy. Churchill achieved a victory for the British people, and it came to nothing for him.”

But the old feisty Arafat spoke up. “But I will see that I have fulfilled the promises to all our martyrs, to all our children, to live freely on their free land as all other children all over the world. We are human beings.”

With seven rounds of peace talks completed and negotiations deadlocked over plans for an interim period of self-rule for Palestinians in the occupied territories, Arafat closeted himself Saturday night with delegation member Haider Abdul-Shafi and others to figure out where to go next: to pull out of the talks, to seek a postponement, to adopt some new strategy or to keep plugging when the talks are scheduled to resume in December.

“Until now, zero. Zero. Nothing has been achieved within the last year,” a frustrated Arafat said. “Who said the Israelis are faithful and fulfill their promises? I have many promises! What I was promised in the letter of guarantees is that these talks will conclude in one year. Maximum one year. Now, we are in the 13th month. Nothing. Where to go? What to do? We are not ready to be used as an umbrella. . . . We are not going to provide a cosmetic for the Israeli occupation.”

Arafat is under increasing pressure to produce results from the talks. Leftist Palestinians rallied recently in Damascus against the PLO’s move to the peace table, and PLO officials say Iran and non-governmental groups in Saudi Arabia have begun providing more than $30 million a year to finance the militant Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, whose slogans are posted all over Gaza’s refugee camps: “Palestine Is for Him Who Struggles, Not Him Who Haggles.”

Yet PLO officials know only too well that signing an agreement for a Palestinian government council in the occupied territories, unless it is backed by guarantees for eventual Palestinian statehood, could be signing the PLO’s own death warrant, rendering the Tunis-based leadership increasingly irrelevant as Palestinians in the territories take on the management of their own affairs.

“The PLO has cottoned on to the fact that if you have an elected assembly in the occupied territories, you have a significant base for a challenge to the PLO leadership. It took a long time for them to realize that,” one European diplomat said.

The leadership in the territories has become more and more independent in the past year, complaining about the PLO’s distance from the real world of the territories at the same time as the rank and file’s adoration of Arafat makes the Tunis leadership indispensable.

The Jerusalem-based Palestinian paper Al Fajr earlier this year published a stunning critique of the PLO in which it complained about senior PLO officials living in luxurious villas while some of their private lives, it said, smelled like “an open sewer running through a refugee camp on a hot August day.”

Though the austere Arafat has generally been immune to such criticism, his marriage, after years of proclaiming himself “married to the revolution,” was unpopular in many Palestinian quarters and he has faced rising demands to loosen his grip on the organization and open it to more democratic institutions.

Arafat fought back against the increasing muscle of the occupied territories leadership recently when he refused to allow peace delegation spokeswoman Hanan Ashrawi to meet with French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas, apparently fearing she would steal the thunder from the PLO’s foreign minister, Farouk Kaddoumi, who was scheduled to meet Dumas a day later. Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij recently refused to meet with British officials in London unless the PLO’s ambassador was invited along. He wasn’t.

“He (Arafat) has lost his control, as we see it,” said an Israeli diplomat close to the peace process, pointing to continuing opposition to the peace talks from two key segments of the PLO--the Damascus-based Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

“With them in the resistance, I think it is more and more difficult for (Arafat) to make independent decisions,” the Israeli said. “Four years ago, he could lead the Palestinians to overcome any obstacle he finds. But now, after the accident in the airplane, the question of who will be his successor is raised at every single session. Arafat tries to get rid of it and postpone it, but it won’t go away.”

But Arabs and PLO officials say Arafat remains very much in control--if hamstrung on the one hand by demands to pull out of the peace process and, on the other, by peace talks that keep producing no results and a process that continues to officially exclude the PLO.

“Arafat is frustrated. He’s not in my opinion frustrated because he’s losing control, but rather because in spite of being so cooperative, people continue to refuse to recognize him. He feels he’s gone the extra mile and it’s time to get some official public recognition,” said an Arab diplomat close to the peace talks.

Privately, diplomats say, Arafat has been surprisingly ready to deal on the nuts and bolts of an interim Palestinian self-government, pressing through the delegation for the Israelis to nail down details of how and what a new Palestinian council would govern. He has insisted on legislative authority for the council, including a measure of sovereignty over land and resources. The Israelis have favored an administrative council with authority over the 1.7 million Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza.

Arafat now says he is hopeful, though not necessarily optimistic, that U.S. President-elect Bill Clinton will be disposed to break the deadlock.

“First of all, I hope that what President Clinton mentioned for Jerusalem (as the united capital of Israel) is only for election purpose. Because Jerusalem is the capital of the Palestinian state. No Palestinian, no Arabs, no Muslims, no Christians will accept this Israeli slogan that it is the capital of Greater Israel forever,” the Palestinian leader said.

As for Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Arafat said he has been unable to erase the memories of their first encounters--not over the peace table, but on the battlefields of Lebanon.

“I can’t forget his picture when he came as a volunteer because he was outside of the Cabinet, with (former Defense Minister Ariel) Sharon to participate in besieging me in Beirut,” he said. “Still, his mentality is as a general. I’m searching for (Charles) de Gaulle, there is no De Gaulle in Israel. At least a (Frederik W.) de Klerk, but it seems there is no De Klerk in Israel.”

Other PLO leaders share Arafat’s frustration, and many have begun to predict the demise of the peace talks.

“We are sure that without a clear position and a clear commitment of the U.S. to a just and comprehensive peace that will meet the minimum of our rights, the process will not continue. Meaning it will become increasingly pointless for the Palestinians to remain in the process, and if the Palestinians are out of the process, the process is finished,” said Jamil Hillal, deputy of a breakaway faction of the Democratic Front.