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Karma Nabulsi was the representative of
the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the
United Nations, in Beirut, Tunis, and the
UK. Now a research fellow in politics at
Oxford University, this is her personal view
of Yasser Arafat and his career.
Yasser Arafat was
someone I knew and worked for, and learnt
many things from. I was very fortunate to
have had such a remarkable political
education, and a first hand experience of
watching him at work, always at work, for
our national cause.
But what I feel for his passing is shared by
all Palestinians; my memories of him are not
unique, although indeed he was.
For Palestinians
everywhere Arafat represented in so many
complex ways our history and our hope.
As a dispossessed
people whose society was destroyed in 1948,
he embodied in his own physical person all
of the extraordinary events over the last 40
years that every Palestinian has lived
through.
He was there through
the wars, the sieges, the tense negotiations
and small victories, all those moments in
our political and personal lives of
steadfastness and struggle.
All Palestinians
have Yasser Arafat inside him, and all have
memories that are national, political, and
personal all at once.
We all are part of
him, in essential ways of existence and
identity, as he remains inside us.
Wartime leader
Of other great
wartime leaders, the person who often comes
to mind as a comparison is General De
Gaulle.
Like Abu Ammar [Yasser
Arafat's nom de guerre], De Gaulle
represented his people after 1940 when their
state had disappeared through foreign
conquest, and his role and responsibility
was to represent the sovereign will of his
people.
Like De
Gaulle, he was a father figure in the sense
that even those who disagreed with him and
his policies recognised his authority.
But Yasser Arafat
was also vastly different from De Gaulle in
the conception and style of this authority
he possessed.
De Gaulle had a very
distant relationship with the public - he
kept himself removed from them, above them.
Arafat's conception
of authority and leadership on the other
hand was completely intimate. He saw himself
and kept himself constantly accessible, at
one with everyone.
He was constantly
surrounded by all kinds of people at all
hours of the day or night.
No one was afraid to
speak their minds to him, and this they
certainly did, and it made for a very lively
political life, and a useful one.
Popular touch
It was a great gift,
and one which explains the way ordinary
people understood him, accepted him, and
trusted him, and what they are feeling now.
When I
saw him speaking or just around in the
refugee camps in Lebanon, in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, even at the height of the
siege of Beirut in 1982, his connection with
the people he was surrounded by was
profound, and phenomenally important.
He seemed to know
everyone, their family, their stories - he
would remind them of when they last met, and
correct people who were trying to introduce
someone to him by saying he already knew who
they were, and go on to prove it, time after
time.
His personal
charisma was far different from the rather
stilted and opaque way he came across in the
media - he was, in person, immensely
charming, incredibly funny, and full of
lightness and a joy for life.
His capacity for
managing small details and his insistence on
managing them often threw his aides and
colleagues into despair. But this too was an
essential part of his approach to political
work: nothing was too small to know,
understand, be part of, to try and shape.
Consensus builder
His style of
politics was also reminiscent of De Gaulle
in the way he believed in creating a strong
party, but without being factional.
He did not believe
the party was the most important institution
- he would always work to gain a consensus
between the different parties and factions
in order to move forward towards political
positions in the international arena
vis-à-vis the peace process, and towards
internal political platforms where he could
gain the greatest coalition.
Although
this made for a very slow style of politics,
and irked those that wanted to move more
rapidly in certain directions, it was a
consensual method, and necessary in such a
fragmented society living in different Arab
countries, and vulnerable to external
pressures.
Indeed, this was
without doubt his greatest strength, rather
than a weakness.
It allowed him to
bring an entire people on board in trusting
him to make the necessary decisions when
they needed to be made - I think no other
Palestinian could have brought an entire
people through the concessions of Oslo
except for him, whilst still holding the
trust and faith of his own people in him and
in the way forward.
These last few years
of shameful treatment at the hands of the
Israelis - the imprisonment and humiliation
of a democratically elected leader - is not
something that the Palestinians will forget
in a hurry, nor will they forget the lack of
interest shown by the UK government to
assist the Palestinian leader while he was
forced to live in such terrible conditions
that surely led to his death.
We all are grateful
for the French president, and for the all
the people in the West that have stood by us
in this struggle for liberty.
We are also aware
that at this defining moment of our history
we are not alone. Yasser Arafat for many of
us represented that struggle for liberty.
But the hope, and the work, goes on. |
