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