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Farewell To Arafat

By Donald Macintyre

13 November 2004
The Independent

By the time the two olive green Egyptian military helicopters wheeled in low over the city at the end of their melancholy flight from Cairo, the struggle to prevent the people from the streets taking over Yasser Arafat's burial had long been lost. With the Muqata compound by now already packed with tens of thousands of chanting, pointing, flag-waving mourners who had, absurdly, been expected to wait patiently outside the gates, the frightened pilots, who had already once considered aborting the landing, by some miracle managed to touch down amid fusillade after fusillade of skyward gunfire without injuring anyone.

It had been after noontime prayers that it became clear how wide of the mark had been predictions of apathy about the burial. Even before they surged recklessly towards the helicopters as the huge, menacing rotary blades continued to blow up the dust in their faces, the masses had assembled in and around the compound with some of the same expectancy about the return of the dead Arafat as they had when, so very much alive, he had come back to Gaza from Tunis in triumph in 1994.

They had poured out of Ramallah's mosques for their measured but determined march towards the Muqata. When they came within sight of it the pace of younger men quickened and they clambered onto whatever vantage point they could find. At one end of the 8ft-high concrete wall of the compound they scrambled up to the top and ripped down the barbed wire. They filled the rubble-strewn hillock at the other end; a few shinned up three floors on drainpipes to evade security guards trying to prevent them reaching the roofs of buildings expensively rented by television networks.

But the will of the majority of the 40,000 mourners to pay their last respects from inside the compound proved irresistible. Those at the front of the queue of several thousand increasingly angry men, many wearing black and white chequered keffiyahs, banged on the steel doors on the side of the compound demanding to be let in. Those behind them chanted: "We want to see Abu Ammar", and ­ in ominous reference to the continuing rumours about the reasons for his demise: "From Ramallah to Paris, who poisoned the President?"

Their fears that this might turn out to be an even paler version of the ultra-official obsequies that had been performed a few hours earlier in Cairo were heightened as they watched the comical admission of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Ekrima Sabri. So reluctant were the police to open the doors that the holy man, and Arafat appointee, in his flowing clerical robes was lifted bodily over the wall after standing on a uniformed guard's shoulders.

They shouted down a senior police officer who appealed for calm, quietening briefly only when Tayeb Abdul Rahim, the Palestinian Authority's head of protocol, looked over from the other side of the wall. "The world is watching you through the TV cameras," Mr Rahim told them. "I know everyone wants to see the President. But I tell you frankly that you will not get in before the helicopter lands in the Muqata." The police bowed to the inevitable, opening the doors at around 1.30pm. The helicopters arrived at around 2.25pm.

There was mayhem as they landed to a continued barrage of semi-automatic gunfire, some from masked militants in the crowd but most from uniformed security men honouring the one man who had been able to exercise unequivocal control over them, and to the familiar chants from the heaving, frenzied crowd of: "We sacrifice our blood and souls to you, Abu Ammar."

It was a good 10 minutes before the doors to the aircraft could be opened as the crowd surrounded it, many trying to touch the now sacred fuselage. The scared driver of the security forces' hatchback which was meant to convey the body for final prayers at the Muqata mosque 200 yards away reversed and advanced at frantic, hair-raising speed scattering mourners and security men to try to reach the helicopter.

The bald head of the Palestinian cabinet minister Saeb Erekat could be seen standing at the top of the gangway screaming at the crowd to allow space for the coffin to be brought out. When eventually the coffin was lifted from the aircraft, three brass handles on each side and still draped with the same Palestinian flag that had covered it at Villacoublay airfield 24 hours earlier, the vehicle had retreated. Instead, green-bereted troops somehow managed to force a path on foot through the crowd.

From above you could see the black, green, white and red flag bobbing up and down in the swaying crowd restrained by troops brandishing long wooden poles. At times it stopped and at one point even went into reverse. If there was a moment that young militants might have fulfilled Israeli fears and seized the body to march it to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's old city, where Arafat had always wanted to be buried, this was it. But it didn't happen. Somehow ­ with the by now bedraggled naval band separated from the procession by the crowd and still playing its scarcely audible funeral anthem ­ the sweating, frightened pall bearers reached the car.

And, eventually, it arrived at the battered, sandbagged complex where Arafat had lived, plotted and prayed for the last two and a half years. A few moments later the vehicle turned back amid scenes of more chaos. Security men stood on it alongside black-tunicked, AK47-toting militants, as it inched through the crowds towards the deep marble tomb that had been built for the dead president over the past two days.

So dense and so eager was the crowd to see the coffin laid out that uniformed police stood inside it to prevent over-zealous mourners from jumping in. The burial, with earth brought from the precincts of al-Aqsa, the site which is also sacred to Jews as the Temple Mount, and where Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister had steadfastly refused to see the body buried, was long delayed. Among the dignitaries at the tombside was Arafat's mother-in-law Raimonda Tawhil; but her daughter, Arafat's wife Suha, could not be seen. As an apparent mark of respect to her Christian beliefs, however, the Greek Orthodox cleric Attalah Hanna was also at the tomb.

As he performed the last rites at the grave, by now strewn with garlands, Yaqub Kiraish, an imam with close links to Arafat, and in the past imprisoned and exiled by the Israelis, issued an uncompromisingly defiant message in his encomium. "We vow to respect your will and to place the Palestinian flag on every house in Jerusalem, on its churches and on its mosques. We will continue the march. We will make our blood like water for Jerusalem."

It wasn't difficult to detect the sub-text; that any future successor would be limited to the concessions that Yasser Arafat had himself been prepared to offer at Oslo. In other words, that no Palestinian leader should compromise still further, either on the status of Jerusalem or on the borders between Israel and a new Palestinian state, in the negotiations that George Bush and Tony Blair pledged in Washington yesterday to try to restart.

 

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd


 

 

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