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Arafat dies at age 75

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Also by Associated Press correspondent:

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by Associated Press correspondent

Thursday, November 11, 2004

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — Yasser Arafat, who triumphantly forced his people’s plight into the world spotlight but failed to achieve his lifelong quest for Palestinian statehood, died Thursday at age 75.

The French military hospital where he had been treated for nearly a month said he died at 3:30 a.m. The Palestinian leader spent his final days there in a coma.

Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat and Tayeb Abdel Rahim, a top Arafat aide, confirmed that Arafat died in a conversation with reporters at Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said the administration was waiting to comment until it confirmed Arafat had died. The State Department had no immediate comment.

The Palestinian parliament speaker will be sworn in as Palestinian Authority president in the coming hours.

Palestinian officials have said they want to ensure a smooth transition. Under Palestinian law, Parliament Speaker Rauhi Fattouh, a virtual unknown, is to become caretaker president until elections are held in 60 days.

Arafat’s last days were as murky and dramatic as his life. Flown to France Oct. 29 after nearly three years of being penned in his West Bank headquarters by Israeli tanks, he initially improved but then sharply deteriorated as rumors swirled about his illness.

Top Palestinian officials flew in to check on their leader while Arafat’s 41-year-old wife, Suha, publicly accused them of trying to usurp his powers. Ordinary Palestinians prayed for his well-being but expressed deep frustration over his failure to improve their lives.

Arafat’s failure to groom a successor complicated his passing, raising the danger of factional conflict among Palestinians.

A visual constant in his checkered keffiyeh headdress, Arafat kept the Palestinians’ cause at the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict. But he fell short of creating a Palestinian state, and, along with other secular Arab leaders of his generation, he saw his influence weakened by the rise of radical Islam in recent years.

Revered by his own people, Arafat was reviled by others. He was accused of secretly fomenting attacks on Israelis while proclaiming brotherhood and claiming to have put terrorism aside. Many Israelis felt the paunchy 5-foot-2 Palestinian’s real goal remained the destruction of the Jewish state.

Arafat became one of the world’s most familiar faces after addressing the U.N. General Assembly in New York in 1974, when he entered the chamber wearing a holster and carrying a sprig.

“Today I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter’s gun,” he said. “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”

Two decades later, he shook hands at the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on a peace deal that formally recognized Israel’s right to exist while granting the Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The pact led to the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for Arafat, Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

But the accord quickly unraveled amid mutual suspicions and accusations of treaty violations, and a new round of violence that erupted in the fall of 2000 has killed some 4,000 people, three-quarters of them Palestinian.

The Israeli and U.S. governments said Arafat deserved much of the blame for the derailing of the peace process. Even many of his own people began whispering against Arafat, expressing disgruntlement over corruption, lawlessness and a bad economy in the Palestinian areas.

A resilient survivor of war with Israel, assassination attempts and even a plane crash, Arafat was born Rahman Abdel-Raouf Arafat Al-Qudwa Aug. 4, 1929, the fifth of seven children of a Palestinian merchant killed in the 1948 war over Israel’s creation. There is disagreement whether he was born in Gaza or in Cairo, Egypt.

Educated as an engineer in Egypt, Arafat served in the Egyptian army and then started a contracting firm in Kuwait. It was there that he founded the Fatah movement, which became the core of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

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Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 8:11am):

Good riddance to bloodthirsty garbage!

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 9:20am):

All I have to say is:

Sha na na na. Sha na na na. Hey hey hey. Goodbye.

Now maybe there is a real chance for peace without Arafat speaking about peace in English and crying for terrorism in Arabic.

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 12:14pm):

Nelson Mandela: Yasser Arafat was `one of the most outstanding freedom fighters of this generation`
Thuesday, Nove11, 2004

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 1:55pm):

"It's ironic that the man who personified the Palestinian movement was neither born in the region it claims, nor conforms to his own organization's definition of Palestinian identity."

http://www.honestreporting.com/articles/45884734/critiques/

Yassir_Arafat_1929-2004.asp

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 1:59pm):

http://www.latimes.com/la-oe-boot11nov11,0,3261290.column?coll=la-home-utilities

How Arafat Got Away With It
The Soviets, U.S., EU and other foreign enablers helped this thug stay in power.
Max Boot

November 11, 2004

It is considered bad form to speak ill of the dead, but I will make an exception for Yasser Arafat, the pathetic embodiment of all that went wrong in the Third World after the demise of the European empires.

All too many rulers of "liberated" nations in the second half of the 20th century -- the likes of Mao Tse-tung (China), Sukarno (Indonesia), Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe), Moammar Kadafi (Libya) and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Egypt) -- proved to be devotees of the Louis XIV school of political philosophy: L'etat, c'est moi. Their rapaciousness knew no bounds. Neither did their cruelty.

Yet even as these rulers were torturing their own people, they were lionized in the salons of the West. European and American intellectuals, motivated by a combination of guilt for their countries' past conduct, vicarious zest for revolutionary adventure and condescension toward Africans and Asians who were thought incapable of conforming to Western standards, were willing to excuse any crime committed in the name of "national liberation."

Arafat benefited from this deference ever since taking over the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969. He and his cronies pocketed billions of dollars and kept their grip on power through the cruel application of violence against various enemies and "collaborators." In return, Arafat reaped worldwide adulation and a Nobel Peace Prize.

There has been no more successful terrorist in the modern age. Yet his biggest victims were not Israelis. It was his own people who suffered the most. If Arafat had displayed the wisdom of a Gandhi or Mandela, he would long ago have presided over the establishment of a fully independent Palestine comprising all of the Gaza Strip, part of Jerusalem and at least 95% of the West Bank. In fact, he seemed well on his way toward this goal when I met him in 1998 as part of a delegation of American scholars and journalists.

The place was his Ramallah compound, the time after midnight (Arafat was a night owl). He was wearing his trademark fatigues, and his hands and lips were shaking uncontrollably. Much of the session was conducted via translator, but Arafat broke into English when asked a question about Palestinian violations of the Oslo accords. It was the kind of query a democratic statesman would have batted away without a second thought.

Arafat, however, grew visibly agitated and stammered: "Be careful when you are speaking to me! Be careful, you are speaking to Arafat!" The threat of violence hung in the air as we left. Clearly Arafat had not quite mastered the art of being a politician or, rather, he was a politician in the mold of Mugabe or Mao.

His refusal to compromise, his unwillingness to give up the way of the gun consigned his people to economic and moral suicide. The current intifada, launched in September 2000 after Arafat turned down a generous peace offer from the Israelis at Camp David, has claimed three times as many Palestinian as Israeli victims. It has also led to a precipitous plunge in living standards in the West Bank and Gaza Strip -- not something Arafat's wife and daughter would notice from their cozy Paris residence.

As the uprising's failure became evident, many of his own people grew increasingly disenchanted with their corrupt and feckless leader, though they could not quite shake off a Stalinist cult of personality nurtured over many decades.

Though Arafat, of course, bore ultimate responsibility for his many sins, he could not have been so destructive without so many outside enablers, ranging from the Soviet Union, which supported him from the 1960s to the 1980s, to the European Union and the United States, which stepped into the sugar daddy role in the 1990s. And let us not forget his fan club among the Western intelligentsia, many of whom even now weep for his passing as if he were a great man instead of a criminal with a cause.

George W. Bush, alone among Western leaders, had the courage to stop dealing with the Palestinian thug-in-chief. On June 24, 2002, the president gave an important speech in which he called on the Palestinian people "to elect new leaders ... not compromised by terror" and to "build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty." Now that Arafat has gone to the great compound in the sky, there will be pressure on Bush to resume the pointless "peace process," but it will be premature to do so as long as the terrorist kleptocracy spawned by Arafat continues to exist.

Only if his successors show a genuine commitment to peace and pluralism should they be rewarded by the West. In the meantime, the U.S. and its allies need to work behind the scenes to identify and support genuine Palestinian democrats -- not a new generation of gunmen in the Arafat mold.

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 2:45pm):

The only good terrorist is a dead terrorist

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 2:48pm):

In response the Mandela quote: One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist. In other news, how long until Mandela becomes as irrelevant as Britney Spears and the NHL? My hope is any day now.

Anonymous (November 11, 2004 @ 10:32pm):

Your forgot to mention that he was a mass murderer who murdered thousands including many women and children, and some Americans. You also forgot to mention that he deserved to be hung by the neck until dead for his crimes.