Suddenly, an Audience for Arafat

TUNIS, TUNISIA —  A one-time world pariah has become a would-be peacemaker. Yasser Arafat now works at “a great historical opportunity”--the first such opportunity in 40 years, he says--to settle the future fate of Palestinians through negotiations. The chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, during three days of in-depth conversations in Tunis and Algiers at the end of January, talked about the United States being in a position to play a “decisive role” in this process.

Arafat claimed that new diplomatic momentum has developed since November in Palestinian peace efforts--involving the United States, Sweden, the European Community and Arab countries. That momentum must not be lost, he emphasized, because the alternative would be tragedy for Jews and Arabs alike.

Arafat is playing what he calls “the American card.” He began by accepting Washington’s demand that the PLO recognize Israel’s right to a secure existence and renounce terrorism before any U.S.-PLO discussions; he did it at a news conference following his speech before the U.N. General Assembly in Geneva on Dec. 14. Arafat’s basic objective, in return, is establishment of an independent Palestinian state on Arab territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 War. In his approach to the United States, he claims having volunteered to help investigate the terrorist bomb aboard Pan Am 103 and having interceded to free the U.S. hostages in Lebanon.

A small, bouncy 59-year-old, Arafat usually appeared relaxed during formal tape-recorded interviews and less formal meals, but a sense of eye-darting impatience also came through. In our first discussion at a seaside mansion near Carthago--once the home of the French resident general, now the residence of the PLO ambassador to Tunisia--Arafat explained at length how tough it had been for him to prevail on his PLO “brothers” that it was vital to “play the American card” even while Palestinians were fighting in Gaza and the West Bank.

The intifada-- the uprising in Israeli-occupied territories--could not and would not be halted, he said. He even speculated that he might lift his order that prohibits Palestinians from returning fire with fire in battles with the Israeli army. But to achieve more than increasingly deadly confrontations, the PLO cause had to break out of diplomatic isolation.

Momentum toward negotiation began building almost eight months ago, after imaginative and secret mediation from faraway Sweden by Foreign Minister Sten Sture Andersson and his top aides. The Swedes were the ones who convinced Arafat that the only plausible road to peaceful settlement with Israel was via the United States. The intifada was already costing hundreds of Arab lives, most of them young people.

As violence grew, the Reagan Administration also began looking for new routes toward Middle East peace. After the November U.S. elections, and with the approval of George Bush, Washington told Sweden that it would accept a PLO dialogue once Arafat met U.S. conditions.

Arafat believes that three key events occurred to create a propitious climate for settlement.

The first, he said, was “the Soviet-American detente on the international level”; it led the superpowers “to cool down all the hot spots and soothe all the regional problems.” It provided a background for addressing Middle East conflict. Washington and Moscow, Arafat suggested, may no longer use the Palestinian issue for their own purposes of confrontation.

The second “is the return of Egypt to Arab unity,” allowing Cairo to rejoin the Arab summit group and the Arab League after 10 years of absence (Egypt was expelled for signing the Camp David accords with Israel). Acting in concert for the first time, the Arabs may be a significant element in peace diplomacy. Although King Hussein of Jordan announced last July that the West Bank problem would no longer be a Jordanian responsibility, Arafat said the PLO was ready to establish a confederation between a new Palestinian state and Jordan if the monarch was willing.

The third is “the Palestinian level--the intifada. “ Arafat said the uprising began taking shape as early as 1986 although it did not fully emerge until December, 1987. It became possible, he went on, “when the barrier of fear was broken among our people.” Now the intifada “is similar to what the Indians had done in facing the British occupation.” He said 100% of the 1.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories support the intifada .

The crucial thing now, he argued, is to convince the United States to prevail on Israel to accept either direct negotiations with the PLO or to attend an international conference on return of the occupied lands. “France, China and Russia and even Britain support the conference,” he said, “so why doesn’t the U.S. agree, too?”

U.S.-PLO conversations began on Dec. 16, two days after the Arafat press conference. U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia Robert H. Pelletreau Jr. met with a PLO team headed by Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the PLO Executive Committee. Tunis is the site of the talks--several unannounced sessions were held during January--because this city has been Arafat’s PLO headquarters since his Beirut expulsion in 1982.

Arafat said his immediate contribution to the peace process is a “major effort” to obtain release of American hostages as soon as possible. He called the taking of hostages a violation of “humanitarian principles” and indicated that he had a general idea who was holding the Americans although he refused to elaborate.

During a dinner meeting, Arafat opened his files on the Pan Am 103 sabotage investigation. There were pages in Arabic script, including a sketch of the Boeing 747 after the crash, its cockpit detached from the rest of the fuselage. He had ordered his intelligence experts to launch their own investigation--in response to a U.S. request--and had received the first clues. The bomb, he said, was inside a Samsonite suitcase and had been traced back to Frankfurt. Arafat, an engineer by training, had no doubt that the jet was blown up by radicals determined to derail the Palestinian “peace process” and, specifically, the new PLO-U.S. dialogues.

Arafat refused to place blame but other PLO leaders said they strongly suspect the Iranian-directed Hezbollah guerrilla movement in Lebanon. They talked about hard-line factions in Iran that oppose all dialogue with the West.

Arafat’s support within the PLO is holding, he said, partly because of the great international response to his negotiation offers--the best world perception the Palestinians have ever enjoyed. But he knows there is still sullen resentment among PLO hard-liners even as they pay public lip service to the “new diplomacy.” The survivor of 40 years of Palestinian struggles, Arafat has no illusions; his critics wait for him to slip--and he is ready for them.

He is also ready for Israeli resistance. “Now we have an international consensus for peace,” Arafat went on. “The European Community has accepted it. The socialist countries have accepted it. The Arab countries have accepted it. The African countries have accepted it. The Islamic countries have accepted it. The nonaligned countries have accepted it. But while we had this historical initiative to achieve peace, I am sorry to say that there was a completely negative response from the Israelis. Not only that, they are attacking the dialogue, which began between the PLO and the American Administration and the new President, Mr. Bush. And they’re trying their best to stop it through different channels and pressures.”

Bitterly, Arafat complained that from Israel, “the response to our initiative was escalation--escalation against our people, against our masses, against our children, against our women. This is state terrorism.” Then he looked at his U.S. visitor and said: “But in spite of that, we are continuing in our peace line because it is a strategic policy. It is not a tactical one.”

The PLO leadership is in close contact with intifada leadership, called the Unified National Command of the Uprising. The PLO and UNCU, Arafat said, speak with the same voice: “Now the Israelis know they are facing the masses, that our kids in refugee camps everywhere complement the struggle of our youths who are throwing stones in the occupied territories.”

Arafat said the uprising began because “our new generations began to discover that this Israeli enemy is not the huge invincible enemy their propaganda claimed,” adding that Israel’s failure to control Lebanon after the 1982 invasion convinced Palestinians that they had a chance to fight back some day.

While diplomacy develops, intifada goes on. Arafat talked about four stages, the last having been a “partial strike.” The fifth stage would be a “complete strike,” now in preparation. And the final stage will be “national disobedience,” designed to paralyze the entire country.

Arafat was not hiding his impatience about the pace of the new U.S. talks. Yes, he said, he was willing and ready to participate personally in conversations with the United States, sounding like he was looking forward to an invitation from American envoys.

“The American Administration must now decide if it will support our strategic policy of peace,” he argued, instead of siding with Israel’s continued opposition to negotiations, either directly with the PLO or at an international conference.

Arafat clearly enjoyed revealing that the PLO has been talking to the United States for years. There had been prior, secret high-level contacts with ranking emissaries of successive U.S. Administrations, although neither side had an interest in making them public at the time.

As early as 1974, according to Arafat, two top PLO officials met with Vernon A. Walters, then-deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in Morocco. At that time Gerald R. Ford occupied the White House and Henry A. Kissinger was secretary of state. But the time was not ripe for action; Arafat decided that Ford and Kissinger were principally interested in trying to fathom PLO thinking.

Then, during the Reagan Administration, Arafat said, he met repeatedly in 1981 and 1982 with presidential emissary John Edwin Mroz, president of the New York-based Institute for East-West Security Studies, a respected think tank. Mroz now says that he indeed had hundreds of hours of discussion in Beirut: “Arafat understood precisely what had to be done--he didn’t need to be convinced.” But again, the timing was wrong. No further contacts occurred.

Although Arafat was not then ready to recognize Israel, he was willing to court the United States. His personal intervention with the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini helped lead to the 1979 release of women hostages held in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. He also achieved, he said, return of the bodies of U.S. servicemen killed during the failed hostage-rescue operation in Iran.

Arafat appears to have some optimism about his current efforts in behalf of U.S. hostages, as political situations evolve in Lebanon, Iran and Syria. Those countries’ relationships--among the most complex, delicate and explosive in the Middle East--are crucial; Arafat knows the actors and implies that foreign hostages are pawns in regional power disputes.

He said that his diplomacy had already won freedom for several Western European hostages in Lebanon; he might be able to do the same for the Americans. He went out of his way to emphasize recent Iranian support for the PLO peace initiative. He expressed hope that hard-line Syria might also become cooperative. Each country has powerful influence over rival Lebanese factions. The PLO’s effective intelligence network keeps Arafat in touch; so does his own constant jet-hopping among Arab capitals.

Arafat is suddenly welcome almost everywhere. The chairman is expansive, even buoyant, about his meteoric rise to the role of honored world celebrity.

After an executive committee meeting in Algiers on Nov. 15, when the PLO declared the independence of a Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza, Arafat leaped into the diplomatic arena.

He appealed for diplomatic recognition by foreign countries, he began preparing contacts with Western leaders and he accepted the Swedish proposal for a meeting in Stockholm with a small group of prominent American Jews.

Arafat had come to understand the importance of presenting his case to American public opinion in general, and American Jews in particular.

Elsewhere, usually using a green executive jet belonging to the government of Iraq, Arafat enjoyed a 24-hour visit in Madrid where he was received by King Juan Carlos I. He has conferred with the foreign ministers of Spain, France and Greece, the three nations designated by the European Community to negotiate with both Israel and the PLO for a Palestinian settlement. He continues talking to the Swedes who are the discreet middlemen for Middle East negotiation.

Even in motion, Arafat takes good care of himself. Although he often stays up all night in meetings, he grabs daytime naps whenever he can--especially on the private jets. He eats lightly, never touching meat at night, preferring fruit and a porridge-like concoction of milk, honey and wheat. He neither drinks alcohol nor smokes. Always courteous, he shakes hands with pilots, waiters and bellboys; he serves food to guests, often peeling tangerines for them.

Arafat’s olive-green uniform is crisp and sharply pressed. He is completely bald and prefers not to be seen that way. He wears the Arab kaffiyeh that drops down on his neck and ties around the throat like a scarf, or a fur hat with the insignia of a phoenix, crossed swords and olive branches. A holstered revolver at the belt is part of the uniform; while flying, he carries a small submachine gun.

Arafat invited his U.S. visitor to accompany him to Algiers, this time in a jet sent by the Algerian president. That night, at dinner with two aides in his suite at the luxurious Algerian Official Residence, the chairman again rejoiced in what he called the “new sympathy” for the Palestinian peace process, remarking that “it seems that something had touched the conscience in all the areas of the world.”

Arafat could boast that after decades of silence, governments came to him, offering help and advice--sending emissaries to Tunis and inviting him to their capitals. He does not deny his delight: “You know, one is human, we are all human.”

Arafat, human leader, is still military leader. “From the beginning,” he said, “I gave strict orders not to use weapons in the intifada . In the beginning, I was worried and I became truly astonished.” His order had been obeyed “except for two incidents during 14 months.”

Now he said he is only considering rescinding the order because of the escalation of the Israeli “Iron Fist Policy” against the Palestinians.

Listening for long hours to the PLO chairman, I had the impression that another turning point was approaching, and that Arafat felt it, too. During a lunch in Algiers, Arafat told Abdel Hamid Mahri, the chairman of the ruling Algerian political party, “It is a shame that there is no Charles de Gaulle in Israel,” referring to De Gaulle’s 1961 decision to negotiate the end of the Algerian War of Independence against France.

From Tunis, Arafat deals the American card, decries Israeli intransigence and defends his move toward diplomacy within the PLO. “For your information,” he said, “it took me 600 hours--imagine 600 hours!--to convince everybody that this was the way to go.”