Yasser Arafat 1929- 2004

من طرف اميرة الخيال الإثنين أغسطس 27, 2007 10:24 am

10:07PM US Central Time/6:07AM Palestine Time Today, 11th of November, 2004, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of al-Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Organization and elected President of the Palestinian National Authority, died in Paris from complications stemming from a blood disorder at the age of 75.

Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini was born on 24 August 1929 in Cairo**, his father a textile merchant who was a Palestinian with some Egyptian ancestry, his mother from an old Palestinian family in Jerusalem. She died when Yasir, as he was called, was five years old, and he was sent to live with his maternal uncle in Jerusalem, the capital of the British Mandate of Palestine. He has revealed little about his childhood, but one of his earliest memories is of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house after midnight, beating members of the family and smashing furniture.
After four years in Jerusalem, his father brought him back to Cairo, where an older sister took care of him and his siblings. Arafat never mentions his father, who was not close to his children. Arafat did not attend his father's funeral in 1952.
In Cairo, before he was seventeen Arafat was smuggling arms to Palestine to be used against the British and the Jews. At nineteen, during the war between the Jews and the Arab states, Arafat left his studies at the University of Faud I (later Cairo University) to fight against the Jews in the Gaza area. The defeat of the Arabs and the establishment of the state of Israel left him in such despair that he applied for a visa to study at the University of Texas. Recovering his spirits and retaining his dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he returned to Faud University to major in engineering but spent most of his time as leader of the Palestinian students.
Arafat graduated from King Fuad Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering, in 1956. He served in the Egyptian army during the Suez Canal crisis, according to most accounts. He saw no action, but was assigned to a demolition squad near Suez city. Arafat's debut on the international scene came when as head of the General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), he was invited to an international students convention organized in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Thereafter, he moved to Kuwait. In 1957 he co-founded the first Fateh-cell in 1957 with Abu-Jihad (Khalil al Wazir), a friend from Gaza, and founded the Fateh party in January 1959, though it was not officially founded until January 1, 1965. Khalil al Wazir and his friend Khalid al Hassan are said to have made two key contributions to the success of Fatah. They were greatly influenced by the FLN and the experience of the Algerians. They argued Arafat out of his Nasserism, insisting that Palestinians had to rely on themselves, and they also pointed out the importance of winning over the population as opposed to engaging only in guerilla warfare.
It was also in 1964 that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was established, under the sponsorship of the Arab League, bringing together a number of groups all working to free Palestine for the Palestinians. The Arab states favored a more conciliatory policy than Fatah's, but after their defeat by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War, Fatah emerged from the underground as the most powerful and best organized of the groups making up the PLO, took over that organization in 1969 when Arafat became the chairman of the PLO executive committee. The PLO was no longer to be something of a puppet organization of the Arab states, wanting to keep the Palestinians quiet, but an independent nationalist organization, based in Jordan.
Arafat addressed the UN General Assembly in New York for the first time on November 13, 1974, wearing a barely disguised pistol and carrying an olive branch and dressed in a military uniform. This appearance raised world awareness of the Palestinian cause. Under Arafat's guidance, in 1974, the Palestine National Council adopted a policy of gradual liberation of Palestine, declaring that they would set up a Palestinian state on any part of Palestine that had been liberated.

His life was one of constant travel, moving from country to country to promote the Palestinian cause, always keeping his movements secret, as he did any details about his private life. Even his marriage to Suha Tawil, a Palestinian half his age, was kept secret for some fifteen months. She had already begun significant humanitarian activities at home, especially for disabled children, but the prominent part she took in the public events in Oslo was a surprise for many Arafat-watchers. Since then, their daughter, Zahwa, named after Arafat's mother, has been born.
The period after the expulsion from Lebanon was a low time for Arafat and the PLO. Then the intifada (shaking) protest movement strengthened Arafat by directing world attention to the difficult plight of the Palestinians. In 1988 came a change of policy. In a speech at a special United Nations session held in Geneva, Switzerland, Arafat declared that the PLO renounced terrorism and supported "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors"
After a setback when the PLO supported Iraq in the Persian Gulf War of 1991, the peace process began in earnest, leading to the Oslo Accords of 1993.
This agreement included provision for the Palestinian elections which took place in early 1996, and Arafat was elected President of the Palestine Authority. Like other Arab regimes in the area, however, Arafat's governing style tended to be more dictatorial than democratic. When the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu came to power in Israel in 1996, the peace process slowed down considerably. Much depends upon the nature of the new Israeli government, which will result from the elections to be held in 1999.
In September, 2000, Palestinians initiated a period of uprising (intifada) following Ariel Sharon's walk on the (haram al-sharif) compound. Though Arafat condemned acts of violence, documents seized by the IDF in Operation Defensive Wall in April 2002 indicate that Arafat personally approved salary disbursements for terrorists. Since April 2002, Arafat was been confined by Israeli forces to his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah, where Israelis claimed he was hiding several wanted terrorists. Israel sought to isolate Arafat and render him irrelevant. Israeli targeting of Arafat helped restore his popularity among Palestinians despite dissatisfaction with his dictatorial ways. He was increasingly regarded as the "father of his country" and European and American pressure did not allow Israel to harm Arafat personally. However, Europeans and Americans became disenchanted with Arafat because of his support of terror and reputed corruption, and sought to evade his practical leadership while maintaining him as nominal head of the Palestinian people.
In October 2004 Arafat fell seriously ill with an unidentified illness, and was hospitalized in Paris, leaving the Muqata for the first time since 2002. By October 28, there were rumors that he was dying. He suffered from nervous tremor, low platelet count and other ailments, variously attributed to poisoning.
Yasser Arafat died November 11, 2004 and was subsequently buried in the Muqata in Ramallah