When iconic Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat died at the age of 75 on November
11, 2004, the causes of his sudden collapse and
death at a Paris hospital were registered as
"unknown". This was strange - to say the least -
for a man of his age.
Israeli papers
occasionally came out with reports that Arafat
died of AIDS, while Palestinians of different
strips and colors insisted that their former
president had been murdered. For years, the world
scoffed at them, claiming that Arabs in general
and Palestinians in particular love to spin wild
"conspiracy theories". Today, eight years later,
Arafat's case re-emerges strongly as
fresh evidence indicates
that he may indeed have been poisoned.
After a recent groundbreaking nine-month
investigation by the Doha-based al-Jazeera TV, it
was proven that high levels of the deadly
radioactive polonium 210 were found in Yasser
Arafat's effects. The poison avoids detection
unless specifically searched for at a laboratory,
explaining why nobody noticed it back in 2004. Two
years after Arafat's death, Russian dissident and
former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko was
murdered in London by Russian agents using this
same poison. It took him three weeks to die from
polonium. As in Arafat's case, his doctors at
first wrote off the death as an "accident".
After the al-Jazeera report, Arafat's
widow submitted her late husband's toothbrush,
underwear, and other belongings to a respected
Swiss laboratory for further investigation. She
authorized the exhumation of his remains for
further testing, which was promptly approved by
Arafat's long time friend and successor,
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. After
examining his body and bone marrow, tests will be
able to demonstrate whether the radioactive poison
was in his system. If that is the case, all
fingers are pointing at two potential culprits;
then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and
Mohammad Dahlan, the former chief of Preventive
Security in the Palestinian National Authority
(PNA).
Let us round up the usual suspects
in Arafat's death. One obviously is Sharon, who
often lamented publicly that he did not eliminate
Arafat when he had the chance to do so in Beirut
in 1982. In early 2004, he talked about Arafat
having "no insurance policy". The Israelis have
done it before, notably in 1997 when they almost
killed Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Amman, on
the orders of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
There is nothing that would have prevented them
from doing it yet again to Arafat, whom they
regarded as a prime terrorist and the single
source of all their misery since 1967.
Had
Sharon done it, however, he probably would not
have hid the task, which he would have regarded as
a great service to Israel. Sharon had already
grounded Arafat in his office compound in Ramallah
since December 2011, denying him access to
foreigners, sleep, and travel authorization.
Israeli drills were conducted at night right next
to his bedroom to deny him sleep during the night,
and guns were trained at the compound to shoot
him, if he dared venture outside his "jail".
Yet if Israel had nothing to hide, why
then did its prime minister sign off a law
extending classification of state archives? That
meant that all documents related to the war of
1948, for example, and its monumental aftermath
would remain under lock and key until 2018,
exactly 70-years after the loss of Palestine.
Records of Arafat's death, therefore, will
not be opened until 2074. Netanyahu's move came
only after the Shin Bet applied pressure to
prevent the opening of state archives. According
to State Archivist Yehoshua Freundlich, the
material will remain classified because "it has
implications over [Israel's] adherence to
international law". He added: "I've been convinced
that in the current situation these materials are
not fit for public viewing."
The Dahlan
connection When Hamas occupied the Gaza
Strip in 2007, its leaders claim that they found a
letter dating back to July 13, 2003, addressed by
Dahlan to then-Israeli defense minister Shaul
Mofaz. According to Hamas, he said: "The fear now
is that Yasser Arafat will merge the Legislative
Council to withdraw confidence [from the Abbas
cabinet]. To prevent him from doing that, I wish
to see cooperation from all parties and pressure
[on him." He adds, "Be certain that Mr Yasser
Arafat has been counting his final days. Let us
slaughter him our way - not yours."
Was
the Dahlan-Mofaz document authentic? The recent
revelations certainly add credit to it, indicating
that somebody, probably from his own entourage,
killed Arafat. Abbas was quick in authorizing an
autopsy of the former president's body last week,
specifically to ward off accusations that he too
might have been accomplice to Arafat's murder.
In June 2011, Dahlan was expelled from
Fatah because of repeated claims by President
Abbas that he had murdered Arafat. In September,
his house was raided by the Palestinian police and
his private armed guards were arrested. In August
2011, his former party accused him of murdering
Arafat by poison, long before the al-Jazeera
investigation was launched. According to an old
friend of Abbas, who spoke to Asia Times Online on
the condition of animosity; "Dahlan is more
dangerous than Israel!"
In July 2009,
senior Fatah member Farouk al-Kaddoumi accused
Dahlan publicly of having murdered Arafat.
Speaking to Al Jazeera from Jordan, Kaddoumi
revealed the contents of a secret document -
presumably shown to him personally by Arafat -
regarding a meeting between Sharon, Abbas, Dahlan,
US undersecretary of state William Burns and a
number of Central Intelligence Agency officials.
The meeting was aimed at eliminating Arafat and
Hamas leaders Abdul Aziz Rantisi (who was
eventually assassinated by Israel in April 2004).
Kaddoumi said he advised Arafat to flee
Ramallah, seeing that the death threat was
serious, but the aging Arafat curtly refused.
Arafat after all was a firm believer in fate,
especially after he miraculously survived an air
plane crash in Libya, when all others onboard were
killed. Responding to the accusations, which
spread quickly throughout the Palestinian areas,
Abbas said, "Kaddoumi claims to be in possession
of five-year-old documents that prove [his
allegations], so why did he not reveal them
immediately?"
Abbas, who shared a close
relationship with both Kaddoumi and Arafat since
the 1960s, claimed that the accusations were
"lies" intended to show him in poor light.
Kaddoumi also called for an international tribunal
to investigate Arafat's death, similar to the one
created to probe the 2005 assassination of former
Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri.
Poisoning Arafat was probably not a
difficult task. Those who knew him are full of
stories about how lax his security was; how he
used to eat off the hands of strangers, and kiss
or embrace anybody who spoke favorably of the
Palestinian cause. During the siege of Beirut in
1982, he would famously sleep near Israeli
checkpoints, believing that Sharon would never
search for him so close to where his enemies were
camping.
Readers might ask why Arafat's
case is so important today, when thousands of
Arabs are dying each day in the Syrian Revolt -
for example - and while others were killed at the
hands of the Libyan regime in February 2011?
Yasser Arafat is the only Arab leader who
probably would have calmly survived the Arab
Spring. In the age of Arab despots and military
dictators, he was the only democratically elected
president in the Arab world (with the exception of
course of Lebanon), which explains why all his
contemporaries hated him and wished to see an end
to the PLO chairman.
While they fed off
the riches of their countries, and milked the
Palestinian cause dry, Arafat was a selfless
figure; devoting his life in hell to a cause he
firmly believed in. He never thought of
bequeathing power to any chosen successor, and
never did he clamp down on his critics, or shoot a
single Palestinian citizen when serving as
president after the Oslo Accords of 1993.
No statues of Arafat decorated the
landscape in Gaza or the West Bank during his
tenure in the 1990s. Unlike Arab leaders who had
huge armies to rely on in times of war, a secret
police in times of peace, and a massive state-run
media machine, Arafat had nothing. He had no real
army, no dungeons in which to incarcerate his
opponents, and in the age of mass media and
satellite TV, he was a walking, talking disaster.
While his Arab contemporaries wore Western
suits and were always ironed, neat, and
clean-shaved, looking like leaders of European
countries, Arafat had the looks of a resistance
leader. Scruffy, always in khaki military uniform,
and always with a revolver buckled on his side, he
was the perfect mirror of his people's image,
representing revolution and resistance.
In
Jordan, he used to lunch with his troops in their
barracks, sleep in their camps, and spend quality
time with them. In Beirut, he joined them in their
weddings, funerals, and daily life. Even as head
of state in Ramallah and Gaza, he did not change
colors with the Palestinians. He would show up at
hospitals to visit the wounded, and in one
televised encounter, bent over to kiss the foot of
an injured Palestinian boy. His critics argued
that these were theatrical stunts, no different
from him donating blood to the victims of the 9/11
attacks in New York.
True, they may be
stunts, but they had a magical spell on his
people. Was he corrupted? Arafat was a corruptor
par excellence - he knew what it took to lure
people into his political orbit, and what it cost
to secure their eternal silence. The same of
course cannot be said of his wife, who lived a
lavish lifestyle in Tunisia and France, while her
countrymen suffered because of occupation, war,
and poverty.
Precisely because of the Arab
Spring, Yasser Arafat ought to be remembered and
given justice. In the neighborhood of dictators,
he was the only real democrat, and that is why
everybody wanted him dead.
Sami
Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst. He is
the author of Steel & Silk: Men and Women
Who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press
2005).
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