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Tumult as Arafat's body arrives home for burial
Thousands of Palestinians surged into Yasser Arafat's battered West Bank
compound on Friday to pay tumultuous homage to their late president at the end
of his final journey home.
The chaotic scenes in Ramallah were in high contrast to a funeral service
earlier at a Cairo airbase, where the public was kept away and even some world
leaders were shut out by mistake by over-zealous Egyptian guards.
Crowds in Ramallah roared "Yasser, Yasser" as the aircraft touched down in a swirl of dust and security forces fired in the air to them back.
Soon before the helicopter landed, thousands of mourners surged past Palestinian security forces into the compound but were pushed back to its fringes before they could reach the gravesite. Some were reported injured.
Arafat, a former guerrilla who became a Third World liberation icon and won a Nobel Peace Prize only to sink into renewed conflict with Israel, died at age 75 in a French hospital on Thursday of an undetermined disease, his long quest for statehood unfulfilled.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, accompanied by Palestinian and Arab leaders including Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, led the mourners in Cairo.
Six black horses pulled the gun carriage in the procession, led by Egyptian soldiers in ceremonial uniforms.
Arafat's widow Suha, who had lived apart from him for the last few years of his life, watched the procession from a black car which drove alongside. Accompanied by their 9-year-old daughter Zahwa, Suha wept at the airbase.
Egyptian authorities kept the public away, apparently fearing emotions could run out of control. Several foreign dignitaries were shut out from most of the ceremony by guards who failed to recognize them, a senior western official said.
The United States sent a second-ranking State Department official, Assistant Secretary of State William Burns, to the Cairo ceremony in a slight attesting to its boycott of Arafat as an "obstacle to peace," an accusation he denied.
Israel, on high security alert, dispatched no one at all. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," Justice Minister Yosef Lapid said.
TWILIGHT ZONE
Palestinians named a collective leadership comprised mainly of veteran moderates in Arafat's circle, reviving world hopes of a return to peacemaking that Israel had ruled out as long as the man it called "a master terrorist" was in charge.
But his interim successors will be challenged by a popular younger militant generation fed up with old guard corruption and a mood of futility in dealings with Israel, raising concern of a power vacuum that could trump any diplomacy in the near term. Israeli forces surrounding Ramallah had effectively confined Arafat to the Muqata, battered by Israeli raids after suicide bombings in the Jewish state, for 2-1/2 years until he fell seriously ill two weeks ago and was airlifted to Paris. He was to be buried later on Friday at a white marble gravesite hastily built in a tree-shaded corner of the compound, in a concrete coffin that could be moved later to nearby Jerusalem. Israel ruled out an Arafat grave in Arab East Jerusalem, calculating this would strengthen Palestinians' claim to a capital in the part of the city that Israel captured in the 1967 war and annexed in a move not recognized internationally. Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, brought sand from the site of its al-Aqsa mosque -- Islam's third holiest site -- to place on Arafat's body before the burial. The Palestinian Authority declared a 40-day mourning period. Arafat's death brought tens of thousands of Palestinians into the street in towns and refugee camps across the West Bank and Gaza on Thursday. Many wailed in grief and bore portraits of their patriarch, one of the world's most recognizable leaders. Palestinian officials urged Israel to revive stalled talks. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said it could be a "turning point" for peace if Arafat's successors ended violence. But Sharon, signaling scant hope they would swing the Palestinian street behind peacemaking, also said he would pursue a unilateral plan to quit Gaza and keep much of the West Bank, stripping Palestinians of land they want for a viable state. Arafat returned from exile in 1994 after interim peace deals that gave Palestinians limited self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza. He shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Israel's Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, and prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, later assassinated by a Jewish ultranationalist. But a final peace summit aimed at hatching a Palestinian state failed in 2000, pitching the region back into bloodshed. |
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