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Yasser Arafat dies at 75 Wednesday, November 10, 2004 BY CAROL ROSENBERG KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS http://www.freep.com/news/latestnews/pm1313_20041110.htm JERUSALEM — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, a symbol of statehood to his people and of Satan to many Israelis, died early Thursday morning at a Paris military hospital at age 75. There was no immediate word on the cause of death. He'd been in ill health for several weeks and was undergoing treatment for an undisclosed blood disorder at the hospital when his condition suddenly worsened. A small man with perpetually unshaven cheeks, a checked Palestinian headdress, a khaki uniform and a pistol on his belt, Arafat was known to his people as Abu Ammar -- an Arabic term of respect and affection that roughly translates to Father of Us All. His life -- and death -- in many ways symbolized the modern Middle East. He fought the Israelis for the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, sometimes as a guerrilla and a terrorist leader, sometimes as a pragmatic peacemaker. He shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with two Israeli leaders, but Israel later saw the prize as soaked in blood after two violent Palestinian uprisings. He walked a tightrope as the de facto governor of a hobbled, Israeli-supervised self-rule regime called the Palestinian Authority, while trying to pursue a foreign and military strategy to enhance and expand its international legitimacy. His final years were spent in an ignominious internal Palestinian exile -- confined to a corner of his Ramallah, West Bank, compound after successive Israeli army assaults reduced his headquarters to rubble in retaliation for suicide bombings and other attacks on Israeli civilians. Historians will debate his legacy for decades. Arafat lived long enough to elevate the Palestinian cause to worldwide recognition and hear an American president, George W. Bush, declare the once unspeakable -- that the Palestinian people deserved an independent state called Palestine. But the latest wave of violence, and especially the involvement of the al Aqsa Martyr's Brigades, an offshoot of Arafat's Fatah political movement, revived the debate about whether Arafat had ever abandoned terrorism. President George W. Bush refused to shake his hand at the United Nations and tacitly signed on to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's campaign to isolate the Palestinian Authority as a sponsor of terror. Internally, Arafat never groomed a successor, instead playing his aides off against one another to maintain his own power. His popularity plummeted amid complaints from Palestinians that his regime was corrupt and inept at serving the people of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The rival Islamic militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad increasingly challenged his secular rule. So, at the end of his life, Arafat was once again seen in wide portions of the West as a terrorist and cast as an obstacle to co-existence between 4.4 million Arabs and 4.7 million Jews who live in the land today controlled by Israel. It was a humiliating end to a career that was as mercurial as the man himself was. His personality was a cross between godfather and grandfather, a gun-toting revolutionary whose followers sometimes feared him, sometimes revered him. When frustrated by political or military developments, he cursed and screamed at cowering deputies. But he could be magnanimous, too. He presided over a far-flung, secret fortune amassed from Persian Gulf sheiks and wealthy exiled Palestinians and showered cash and scholarships on refugee camp residents whose poverty symbolized the plight of his people. Personally, he was modest. He never gave up the revolutionary attire, including the carefully draped keffiyah headscarf that hid a bald pate. Beneath it, his shirt was often frayed, patched by himself during bouts of sleeplessness. He also had an aura of invincibility. Arafat said that Israeli spies repeatedly sought to assassinate him. He didn't lack mortal enemies and had an uncanny ability to evade death. He fled Jordan for Beirut when King Hussein cracked down on his Palestine Liberation Organization. In 1983, he sailed from Tripoli, Lebanon, as a radical Syrian-backed Palestinian militia moved in to destroy him after Israel invaded Lebanon and destroyed the state-within-a-state Arafat had created there. In 1985, he left a Tunis safe house minutes before Israeli warplanes bombed it. And in April 1992, his private jet crashed in the Sahara Desert, killing the three-man flight crew and a bodyguard. Arafat survived, although brain surgery several weeks later to remove blood clots left a noticeable quiver of his hands and lips that he never explained. In the end, his death came from natural causes that began as flu-like symptoms but worsened until he was unable to eat or walk. His doctors at his compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah decided he should fly to Paris when they were unable to diagnose his illness. His career as a Palestinian leader began in the 1960s, when he founded the small Fatah political movement while working as a roadway engineer in Kuwait. From there, he wrested the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization from its Egypt-backed establishment and led the group through an era of airplane hijackings and hostage-takings that brought recognition for the Palestinian cause, yet led much of the world to view him as a terrorist. By the 1970s, his forces were entrenched in the Hashemite kingdom of Jordan, abutting Israel's occupied West Bank. Their presence led to a bloody confrontation in 1970 with his rival and sometime ally King Hussein, which Palestinians called Black September. Routed but not defeated, his forces regrouped in Lebanon, where Fatah became one of the world's most feared guerrilla groups, carrying out airplane hijackings and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games. The attacks, most of them carried out by shadowy groups such as Black September, led by one of Arafat's top lieutenants, and reminded the world that the Palestinian question was still unsolved. Arafat reached a milestone of world recognition in November 1974 by winning long-sought permission to address the United Nations. In his speech, Arafat declared that the PLO was at a crossroads between warfare and diplomacy. "I have come bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun," he told the U.N. General Assembly. "Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand." After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, with the secret blessing of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin -- the former defense minister whose troops never truly stopped the rock-throwing intifada -- then Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres launched covert talks with Arafat's representatives in Norway. They produced the Oslo Accords. Israel and Rabin made huge concessions, notably one that accepted Arafat as a partner in peace and granted a large measure of autonomy to Palestinians. In a moment of high drama, Arafat and Rabin shook hands under the smiling gaze of President Clinton on the South Lawn of the White House on Sept. 13, 1993. Arafat, Rabin and Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize a year later. Arafat returned in triumph to the Gaza Strip on July 1, 1994. The man who'd fled in late 1967 -- dressed in rags and posing as a beggar to elude Israeli soldiers -- was greeted by Gazans cheering his name. Five days later, he arrived in the ancient West Bank city of Jericho aboard a borrowed Egyptian helicopter with an Israeli air force escort. But euphoria turned to confusion when Arafat tried to convert his partial mandate into a nation-building campaign. International aid funds were slow to come, largely because Arafat refused to set up a system of clear accountability for the Palestinian Authority. Radical Arab opponents of any agreement with Israel struck time and again at Israeli soldiers and civilians, trying to destroy the chances for peace with bullets, bombs and knives. And Arafat's longtime habits of secrecy and one-man rule proved ill suited to administering an autonomous region. In November 1995, the agreement suffered its worst blow when a 25-year-old Jew opposed to the peace process murdered Rabin at a rally in Tel Aviv. For both political and security reasons, Arafat stayed away from Rabin's funeral. It was a setback from which Arafat never recovered. Born Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al Qudwa al Husseini, Arafat was the sixth of seven children of Abder Raouf Arafat, a lower-middle class merchant and distant cousin of Haj Amin Husseini, the former mufti of Jerusalem, the city's senior Arab leader when the British ruled Palestine after World War I. Arafat often said he was born in the Jerusalem, but biographers said his birthplace was probably Cairo, although possibly Gaza. The most reliable accounts indicate that his parents moved to Cairo in 1927, and their sixth son was born two years later. His mother died of kidney ailments when he was four, and Arafat and his younger brother lived for a time with his mother's family in Jerusalem. But he spent most of his childhood in Cairo, where his friends nicknamed him Yasser, which means easygoing. After the state of Israel was founded in 1948, he studied civil engineering in Cairo and served as a demolition squad leader in the Egyptian military during the1956 Arab-Israeli war. Next he moved to Kuwait, where he worked on roads and construction projects for the Ministry of Works. While in Kuwait, he and other young Palestinians secretly planned their revolution and formed the Movement for the National Liberation of Palestine, known as Fatah for its reverse acronym in Arabic, the guerrilla movement that would become the core of the PLO. The group made its military debut Jan. 3, 1965, in a botched attempt to blow up a canal in the Galilee that transferred precious water from north to south. For much of his time as PLO leader, Arafat led an austere life, rarely sleeping twice in the same bed and shunning the elegant trappings the organization's fortune could have provided. He told interviewers that his wasn't a lonely life and that he chose bachelorhood because he was "married to a woman called Palestine." That changed in November 1991 when Arafat secretly married an aide, Suha Tawil, 27. News of the marriage leaked about a year later, leading to some grumbling among his followers. Some Palestinians worried that Arafat was abandoning the struggle. Others criticized the marriage because Arafat, a Muslim, had wed a Christian who converted to Islam. In fact, the two spent little time together. Arafat continued his busy routine, staying up all hours of the night. The marriage did, however, produce a single heir: a daughter, Zahwa, who was born when the Palestinian leader was 63. =========+========= FEEDBACK? http://nativenewsonline.org/Guestbook/guestbook.cgi GIVE FOOD: THE HUNGERSITE http://www.thehungersite.com/ Reprinted under Fair Use http://nativenewsonline.org/fairuse.htm =========+========= Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit) Native News Online a Service of Barefoot Connection Yahoo! 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