Arafat - rebel with a lifelong cause

HE was an heroic freedom fighter, and a brutal terrorist. He was an international statesman, and the man who threw away an historic opportunity to achieve his goals. He was the best hope of peace, and he was its biggest obstacle. Even his place of birth was a matter of dispute.

But whatever else he was, there is no doubting that Yasser Arafat was a symbol for an entire people.

For almost 40 years, he tirelessly pursued the Palestinian cause, at times when even the rest of the Arab world had turned its back. In his khaki combat fatigues, with a pistol on his hip and his chequered keffiyeh on his head, on his shoulders were the dreams of one of the most persecuted and unloved peoples in the world.

The death of the man the Palestinians called Abu Ammar, in a Paris hospital early yesterday at the age of 75, signals a new era in the Middle East peace process. And it is only in whether it moves forward, or stalls as it has for the last three years, that the question of whether he hindered or advanced its cause will be settled.

He was born Muhammad Abdul Rahman Abdul Raouf Arafat al Qudwa al-Husseini, on August 24, 1929, in Cairo, although he was later to claim he was born in Jerusalem. According to some accounts, he was nicknamed Yasser shortly after his birth; others say he took the name at university, in honour of an Arab killed by the British in Palestine.

As a teenager, he flirted with the Muslim Brotherhood but the creation of Israel in 1948 converted him to the Palestinian armed struggle, and at 17, he was smuggling weapons to Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war.

He studied engineering and was commissioned into the Egyptian army, but some time after 1948 he founded Fatah, the Movement for the Liberation of Palestine, which was to provide his credentials as the father of any future Palestinian state.

HE forged a reputation as a formidable military commander as the head of Fatah's military wing, al-Asifa, which launched guerrilla attacks against Israel. In 1967, he won plaudits for fighting Israeli forces in the Jordan Valley, after all other Arab armies had been crushed and Fatah left as the only credible opposition, and the following year he defended the Jordanian town of Karameh against superior Israeli firepower.

In 1969, he became chairman of the recently-formed Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), a position he was to hold until his death and which helped him exercise total control over the Palestinian movement, bribing those whose loyalty could not be guaranteed in other ways.

Initially based in Jordan, the PLO was driven out in 1970 and made its home in Lebanon, quickly establishing control over the south of the country and using it to launch attacks on Israel.

In 1974, Arafat addressed the United Nations, telling them he came "bearing an olive branch and a freedom fighter's gun - do not let the olive branch fall from my hand". Although he has always denounced terrorism as a tactic, he has refused to discuss the methods used by various Palestinian groups, leaving his personal involvement open to conjecture.

Israel finally tired of the attacks across its northern border, and in 1982 its defence minister Ariel Sharon launched an invasion of Lebanon, forcing Arafat to flee to Tunisia and heralding a period of isolation. In 1991, he married Suha Tawil, a Christian Palestinian, with whom he had a daughter, Zahwa.

Although he was said to have amassed a personal fortune of £1bn, and his wife was to live in splendour in Paris, Arafat himself lived a frugal life, vast quantities of honey his only luxury.

It was the Palestinian uprising, or intifada, in 1987 which brought Arafat back to prominence. Although the intifada's origins had little to do with him, he managed to identify the stone-throwing unarmed challenge to the Israeli occupation with his leadership.

But he made a serious error in 1990 when he backed Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, alienating the rest of the Arab world and forcing him to negotiate with Israel from a position of weakness.

A combination of secret talks and open negotiations led to the Oslo Agreement, and on September 13, 1993, Arafat shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on the lawn of the White House. It meant Arafat could return to Gaza in triumph the following year, but the agreement contained critical flaws which were to derail the drive towards a Palestinian state in the years to come.

Although it allowed Palestinian self-rule in the Gaza Strip and part of the West Bank, issues of Jewish settlements on occupied land and the right of Palestinian exiles to return were left unresolved. It did not stop Arafat, Rabin and Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres from being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, but after Rabin's assassination in 1995, the promise of the Oslo Agreement went unfulfilled.

In 2000, Bill Clinton made a final attempt to secure peace, and at Camp David Arafat was offered a state composing almost all of the West Bank, east Jerusalem and all of Gaza, in return for giving up the right of return for refugees and part of the West Bank. Fearful of the reaction of extremist groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Arafat rejected the deal, turning his back on what came to be seen as an historic opportunity for peace. Instead, a new cycle of terror began, with Arafat seemingly unable to control the militants.

After a wave of suicide attacks, Israel, with Ariel Sharon now prime minister, lost patience, and in December 2001 Arafat was blockaded into his headquarters at Ramallah on the West Bank, where he was to remain until just a few weeks before his death, when he was flown to Paris.

But although the peace process had effectively come to an end, and there was widespread dismay among Palestinians at both corruption among their leadership and failure to free themselves from Israeli shackles, Arafat never lost his status as the channel through which all attempts at peace must pass.

While his dominance was never challenged, his refusal to countenance rivals means there is no clear successor who could command respect, opening the way for bitter infighting.

And unless the Palestinians lower their sights - and any future offer is likely to be worse than the one Arafat rejected in 2000 - they will be left with nothing, breeding further resistance and violence.

Without a unifying leader, the highly-organised and militant Hamas may be the main beneficiary of a power struggle, although its leaders have been angling to become part of the political mainstream. If a new moderate leadership were to emerge, it would put pressure on Israel to return to negotiations.

For the last four years, Israel and the US have regarded Arafat as the obstacle to peace, and his death may now force their hand, revealing whether he was the reason or just an excuse.

But although Arafat may have died with his dream unrealised, and with his people still suffering the Israeli yoke, he lifted the Palestinian cause from obscurity almost single-handedly. No longer can it be said, as former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir once remarked, that there is "no such thing as a Palestinian people".

Arafat's death represents an opportunity to achieve peace at last, or the demise of the best hope of establishing a viable Palestinian state; it means the faltering steps towards stability can be resumed, or it heralds a descent into chaos and turmoil; it enables the Middle East to finally shake off 4,000 years of bloody history, or it is the end of a dream. Just as his life was a mass of contradictions, so is his legacy.