Arafat has long had stormy relations with fellow Arab leaders

[TheOtherOne]

Arafat has long had stormy relations with fellow Arab leaders
By DONNA BRYSON
 

14:28 ET

Associated Press Newswires

Copyright 2002. The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Yasser Arafat has history of stormy relations with his fellow Arab leaders - Lebanese who accused him of helping to cause their civil war, Gulf sheiks angered that he sided with Iraq against Kuwait, allies who felt they could not be sure of his allegiances.

That history could be coming back to haunt him, tempting Arab leaders to go along with U.S. President George W. Bush's plans to shunt him aside.

"I am almost certain that the change of leadership is the unannounced demand of many Arab leaders," Fouad al-Hashem, a Kuwaiti political analyst, said Tuesday, a day after Bush laid out his plans for moving toward an Israeli -Palestinian settlement.

Publicly, however, no Arab leader welcomed Bush's demand in his speech that the Palestinians choose a new leadership that is "not compromised by terror."

Though Bush did not mention Arafat by name, reaction from ordinary Arabs and Arab political observers was outrage that the U.S. president would attack the Palestinian leader. Arafat is "the only one who can keep the Palestinians together at this point," said Mohamed el-Sayed Said, Washington bureau chief for the Egyptian daily Al-Ahram, echoing the opinion of many.

Arab leaders were muted in their defense of Arafat. The Cabinet in Jordan, a moderate Arab state that has backed Arafat in recent years, didn't even mention the Palestinian leader in a statement Tuesday welcoming Bush's speech.

Another Arafat ally, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, also praised the speech and brushed aside the possibility that Bush was targeting the Palestinian leader. Most other Arab governments had no immediate official reaction to Bush's speech.

Egypt and Jordan have hinted in the past at impatience with what many see as Arafat's unwillingness to take decisive action against militant Palestinians or make needed compromises to achieve peace with Israel .

In an interview earlier this month with The New York Times, Mubarak said: "I am not saying that Arafat is the best man, no. But we have to use Arafat in this present situation," adding the Palestinian leader might be relegated to a "ceremonial role" in a year.

Jordan's King Abdullah II can't afford to anger his country's predominantly Palestinian population and publicly embraces Arafat as the Palestinians' elected leader. But in a The Wall Street Journal interview late last year, Abdullah said he had told Arafat that the challenge presented to the Islamic world by the Sept. 11 attacks was becoming of greater concern than the Israeli -Palestinian issue.

Abdullah said he told Arafat: "Understand that most of the Arabs are beginning to look at it that way. So, get your act together because the patience of dealing with the situation is running out in much of the leadership."

Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher on Tuesday said Bush's speech had "many positive aspects," but that he had also been "harsh on the Palestinian Authority." The Palestinians, Muasher said, must be left to reform their institutions free from "outside" pressure.

Arafat has for years relied on Egypt and Jordan, the only two Arab states at peace with Israel , for backing and mediation. In both countries, however, he has sometimes been regarded with distrust.

Mohamed M. Kamal, a political scientist at Cairo University, said for example that Egyptians were disenchanted with Arafat when he publicly linked them to sensitive proposals for the future of Jerusalem that they felt should be hammered out in secret.

"Not everyone in the Arab world agrees with Arafat's tactics, especially in Egypt, where sometimes it's felt he's embarrassing Egypt," Kamal said. "But I don't think they would go as far as saying he should go. The official Egyptian position is: `Give him a state and he will deliver. If he doesn't deliver ... then you can see what you can do."'

In Jordan, Arafat is remembered from the days in the early 1970s when the PLO unsuccessfully tried to topple Abdullah's father, King Hussein. During the Lebanese civil war, Arafat ran a state-within-a-state in Beirut, and his guerrillas staged cross-border raids into Israel that invited an incursion into Lebanon in 1978 and a full-scale invasion in 1982.

The late Syrian President Hafez Assad was angered by Arafat's decision to embark on separate peace talks with Israel , and the Palestinians leader has only recently begun to mend ties with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other wealthy Gulf states that were outraged when he sided with Iraq in the Gulf War.

[OldFriend]

Frankly, I don't care what kind of relationships ANYONE has with Arafat........IMO the man is a piece of excrement.

[chiefqc]

The only thing left for this walking dead man is to fall over.

[Sabertooth]

And then there are the types of relations Arafat has had with pretty East German boys back when he was a KGB operative.

[Dallas]

This is an understatement by AP...

I see no mention of Black September.

[Mixer]

Arafat is "the only one who can keep the Palestinians together at this point

Not if they keep blowing themselves up he can't. Sorry I couldn't resist.

[My2Cents]

pretty East German boys

You mean East German "female" gymnasts?

[Sabertooth]

You mean East German "female" gymnasts?

Prettier.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

My toe-jam it prettier.