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Arafat:
The man and the mission The saga of this unlikely hero, perhaps embodied like no other the adage that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. And that the fine line that separates the two is blurred at the best of times. He was the inveterate guerrilla who went on to become a Peace Prize winner. He was the man who once told the UN General Assembly that he had come bearing an olive branch in one hand and a freedom fighter's gun in the other and exhorted them not to let the olive branch fall from his hand. Loved and adored by his people as the leader who could achieve their dream of an independent Palestinian homeland, he was reviled by the Israelis as the stumbling block to peace. There was no dispute, however, of his implacable resolve all through his 40-year struggle. "I have to cajole, embrace, to stab in the back and to extort but in the end I am only doing it for my people," Arafat once told a former New York Times correspondent. For many, however, Yasser Arafat will also be remembered as the man who gave leadership to terrorism not only in the Arab world, but also to terrorist movements throughout the world. The origins of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka could be traced to the training camps Arafat and his fellow fighters established under the flag of the PLO in the 1970s after the six-day war of 1967 showed that the Arab armies of Syria, Egypt and Jordan could not match the Israeli Defence Forces in conventional warfare. ( Please see Political commentary on this page for LTTE leader V. Prabhakaran's comments ). Uma Maheswaran, a founder of the LTTE (and later leader of PLOTE) in a statement to the Tamil Nadu Police in 1982 admitted that he had been in correspondence with the PLO in Beirut. "I have also gone in person to Beirut and discussed with the PLO leaders about the prospects of training our men there. But, they replied that they would have to take a decision on this only through their Central Committee. Then, I visited the following sections of the PLO and got trained by them for a month - 1. Political 2.Underground 3.Sabotage 4.Publication 5.Communications 6.Intelligence . Then, I came to know about their struggle for liberation in detail," he said. As the LTTE evolved, they turned closer home, to India, for their training and funding, going on to master the art of the suicide bomber (said to have been inspired by the Charles Bronson film of the '70s 'Telefon' and another film 'Caged Fury') and ironically, the deadly method they spawned caught on in turn, in occupied Palestine. And yet, Sri Lanka always backed his cause for the liberation of Palestine despite its early role in training Tamil militants. He was welcomed in Sri Lanka as a head of state, and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse, president for 25 years of the Sri Lankan Committee for Solidarity with Palestine represented the nation at the funeral in Cairo. The Palestinian struggle has been recognized by the world at large as a just cause for freedom and liberation of land from Israeli invaders, settlers and colonialists. It is a struggle of all Palestinians - Muslims and Christians. It is a collective struggle of a nation for nationhood -- an independence struggle like the ones the world saw in the 1940s, 50s and 70s in Asia, Africa and Central America and like the ones the Non-aligned Movement backed and justified. This is in contrast to the supposed liberation struggle of the LTTE, which has hijacked the collective voice of the Tamil people. As Tamil detractors themselves say, today, one of the grievances of the Sri Lanka Tamils is to liberate themselves from the clutches of the LTTE. Arafat symbolized the Palestinian struggle. At his funeral were Arab leaders who stabbed him in the back, as was Khaled Mishaal, leader of the Islamic militant group Hamas, a group, which, though ideologically opposed to Arafat, is willing to accept its leadership. Such unity in diversity is not tolerated by the LTTE. Now that Arafat is gone, the West is looking at the Palestinian crisis with new-found optimism as if Arafat was the only hindrance to peace - forget Jerusalem, forget the right of return of the Palestinian Diaspora. The Palestinian crisis is one of the root causes of global terrorism. The sooner the crisis is resolved, the better it is for the world, which is at war with itself as a consequence. |
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