Untitled Document

back to top

The truth is that Yasser Arafat died years ago

By Robert Fisk

Nov. 6 — Yet again, Yasser Arafat is dying. We thought he’d been killed back in 1982 when the Israeli air force flew around Beirut attacking apartment blocks and homes they thought he was visiting. Their bombs tore to pieces hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians but Arafat was never there. Then we thought he’d died in a plane crash in the Libyan desert — but it was the pilot who died and the bodyguard who shielded him in his airline seat. Then we thought he’d bought it on the road to Baghdad when he suffered a blood clot. But Jordanian doctors brought him back to the world of the living. Now, again, we’re preparing for the old man’s death. Yet like the Pope, he seems to go on and on and on.

He is a wearying man, not just in his repeated death but in life as well, a man who married the Revolution — as his wife was to discover — rather than develop a coherent strategy for a people under occupation. And in the end, he became like so many other Arab leaders — and as the Israelis intended him to be — a little dictator, handing out dollars and euros to his aging but loyal cronies, falsely promising democracy, clinging to power in his shambles of an office in Ramallah. Had he done what he was supposed to do — had he governed “Palestine” (the quotation marks are daily more important) with ruthlessness and crushed all opposition and accepted all Israel’s demands — he would be able now to visit Jerusalem, even Washington.

I recall how, just after the famous handshake on the White House lawn, I told an Israeli friend in Jerusalem that it was only fair that he would now have to live with Arafat next door. After all, I said, I’d had to suffer his near-occupation of West Beirut for seven years. Those were the days when he promised to return all the refugees of pre-1948 Palestine to their homes, when he deliberately sacrificed thousands of Palestinian lives in the Tel el-Zaatar camp to earn the world’s sympathy, when he tolerated aircraft hijacking and talked about “democracy among the guns” and eventually left his people in Beirut to Israel’s murderous henchmen in the Phalange.

The Arafat mug was never going to find its way on to university walls like Guevara or even Castro. There was — and still is — a kind of seediness about it and maybe that’s what the Israelis saw too, a man who could be relied on to police his people in their little Bantustans, another proxy to run the show when occupation became too tiresome. “Can Arafat control his own people?” That’s what the Israelis asked and the world obligingly asked the same question without realizing the truth: that this was precisely why Arafat had been allowed back to the Occupied Territories — to “control” his people. The only time he did stand up to his Israeli-American masters – when he refused to accept 64 percent of the 22 percent of Palestine that was left to him — he returned in triumph to Gaza and allowed the Israelis to claim he was offered 95 percent but chose war.

When he started negotiating with the Israelis, he had not even seen a Jewish settlement but he put his trust in the Americans — always a dangerous thing to do in the Middle East — and when Israel began to renege on the withdrawals, there was no one to help him. Israel broke withdrawal agreements five times.

Then came intifada two and the Palestinian suicide bombings and Sept. 11, and it was only a matter of time — about six hours, to be exact — before Israel said Arafat was linked to Osama bin Laden and that Ariel Sharon, too, was fighting world terror in his battle with the “terrorist” Arafat. In a country where the word “terrorist” is even more promiscuously used than it is in the United States, it was applied to Arafat by every Israeli official and every right-wing journalist outside Israel.

Sitting like an old and dying owl in his Ramallah headquarters, it must have struck Arafat that he had one unique distinction. Some “terrorists” — Khomeini, for example — die of old age. Some — Gaddafi comes to mind — become statesmen courtesy of mendacious folk like Tony Blair. Others — Abu Nidal is an obvious candidate — get murdered, often by their own side. But Arafat is perhaps the only man who started off as a “super-terrorist,” was turned overnight by the Oslo agreement into a “super-statesman” and then went back to being a “super-terrorist” again. No wonder he often seems to be losing attention, making factual errors, falling ill.

Like all dictators, he made sure that there was no succession. It might have been Abu Jihad, but he was murdered by the Israelis in Tunis. It might have been one of the militant leaders whom the Israelis have been executing by air attack over the past two years. It could still be, just, the imprisoned Marwan Barghouti. And, if the Israelis decide that he should be the leader — be sure the Palestinians won’t get any choice in the matter — then the prison doors may open for Barghouti.

Yes, Arafat might die. The funeral would be the usual excruciating rhetoric bath. But the truth, I fear, is that Arafat died years ago.

Source: The Independent (UK)

Editor's note: Yasser Arafat was reported dead on Nov. 10

back to top

Fallujah and the reality of war

By Rahul Mahajan

Nov. 6 — The assault on Fallujah has started. It is being sold as liberation of the people of Fallujah; it is being sold as a necessary step to implementing “democracy” in Iraq. These are lies.

I was in Fallujah during the siege in April, and I want to paint for you a word picture of what such an assault means.

Fallujah is dry and hot; like Southern California, it has been made an agricultural area only by virtue of extensive irrigation. It has been known for years as a particularly devout city; people call it the City of a Thousand Mosques. In the mid-90s, when Saddam wanted his name to be added to the call to prayer, the imams of Fallujah refused.

US forces bombed the power plant at the beginning of the assault; for the next several weeks, Fallujah was a blacked-out town, with light provided by generators only in critical places like mosques and clinics. The town was placed under siege; the ban on bringing in food, medicine, and other basic items was broken only when Iraqis en masse challenged the roadblocks. The atmosphere was one of pervasive fear, from bombing and the threat of more bombing.

Noncombatants and families with sick people, the elderly, and children were leaving in droves. After initial instances in which people were prevented from leaving, US forces began allowing everyone to leave -– except for what they called “military age males,” men usually between 15 and 60. Keeping noncombatants from leaving a place under bombardment is a violation of the laws of war. Of course, if you assume that every military age male is an enemy, there can be no better sign that you are in the wrong country, and that, in fact, your war is on the people, not on their oppressors, not a war of liberation.

The main hospital in Fallujah is across the Euphrates from the bulk of the town. Right at the beginning, the US forces shut down the main bridge, cutting off the hospital from the town. Doctors who wanted to treat patients had to leave the hospital, with only the equipment they could carry, and set up in makeshift clinics all over the city; the one I stayed at had been a neighborhood clinic with one room that had four beds, and no operating theater; doctors refrigerated blood in a soft-drink vending machine. Another clinic, I’m told, had been an auto repair shop. This hospital closing (not the only such that I documented in Iraq) also violates the Geneva Convention.

In Fallujah, you were rarely free of the sound of artillery booming in the background, punctuated by the smaller, higher-pitched note of the mujaheddin’s hand-held mortars. After even a few minutes of it, you have to stop paying attention to it -– and yet, of course, you never quite stop. Even today, when I hear the roar of thunder, I’m often transported instantly to April 10 and the dusty streets of Fallujah.

In addition to the artillery and the warplanes dropping 500, 1000, and 2000-pound bombs, and the murderous AC-130 Specter gunships that can demolish a whole city block in less than a minute, the Marines had snipers crisscrossing the whole town. For weeks, Fallujah was a series of sometimes mutually inaccessible pockets, divided by the no-man’s-lands of sniper fire paths. Snipers fired indiscriminately, usually at whatever moved. Of 20 people I saw come into the clinic I observed in a few hours, only five were “military-age males.” I saw old women, old men, a child of 10 shot through the head; terminal, the doctors told me, although in Baghdad they might have been able to save him.

One thing that snipers were very discriminating about -– every single ambulance I saw had bullet holes in it. Two I inspected bore clear evidence of specific, deliberate sniping. Friends of mine who went out to gather in wounded people were shot at. When we first reported this fact, we came in for near-universal execration. Many just refused to believe it. Some asked me how I knew that it wasn’t the mujaheddin. Interesting question. Had, say, Brownsville, Texas, been encircled by the Vietnamese and bombarded (which, of course, Mr. Bush courageously protected us from during the Vietnam war era) and Brownsville ambulances been shot up, the question of whether the residents were shooting at their own ambulances, I somehow guess, would not have come up. Later, our reports were confirmed by the Iraqi Ministry of Health and even by the US military.

The best estimates are that roughly 900-1000 people were killed directly, blown up, burnt, or shot. Of them, my guess, based on news reports and personal observation, is that 2/3 to 3/4 were noncombatants.

But the damage goes far beyond that. You can read whenever you like about the bombing of so-called Zarqawi safe houses in residential areas in Fallujah, but the reports don’t tell you what that means. You read about precision strikes, and it’s true that America’s GPS-guided bombs are very accurate – when they’re not malfunctioning, the 80 or 85 percent of the time that they work, their targeting radius is 10 yards, i.e., they hit within 10 yards of the target. Even the smallest of them, however, the 500-pound bomb, has a blast radius of 400 yards; every single bomb shakes the whole neighborhood, breaking windows and smashing crockery. A town under bombardment is a town in constant fear.

You read the reports about X killed and Y wounded. And you should remember those numbers; those numbers are important. But equally important is to remember that those numbers lie – in a war zone, everyone is wounded.

The first assault on Fallujah was a military failure. This time, the resistance is stronger, better-armed, and better-organized; to “win,” the US military will have to pull out all the stops. Even within horror and terror, there are degrees, and we -– and the people of Fallujah -– ain’t seen nothin’ yet. George W. Bush has just claimed a new mandate -– the world has been delivered into his hands.

There will be international condemnation, as there was the first time; but our government won’t listen to it; aside from the resistance, all the people of Fallujah will be able to depend on to try to mitigate the horror will be us, the antiwar movement. We have a responsibility, that we didn’t meet in April and we didn’t meet in August when Najaf was similarly attacked; will we meet it this time?

Source: counterpunch