Yasser Araftat: Behind the myth

He is one of the world's most controversial - and recognisable - political figures. Now that the career he choreographed so carefully may be about to end, Phil Reeves goes in search of the real Yasser Arafat

Yasser Arafat is a man whose political obituary has been written many, many times. And now the pens are out again, raised after George Bush made clear the United States will only support a Palestinian state if there is a new and different leadership.

The great survivor and arch-manipulator is in hot water yet again. Could a four-decade career of leading the Palestinian cause – as head of Fatah, the PLO and latterly the Palestinian Authority – be finally drawing to a close? Or will this be like his other famously close shaves – from attempted assassinations, civil wars and exile – yet another episode from which he will manage a Houdini-style escape?

Arafat has been skating on thin ice for a long time, but it became much thinner after the atrocities of 11 September brought about a change in the world's geopolitical mood, especially in the United States. Disastrously, the Islamic-nationalist suicide bombers kept on attacking Israeli civilians, causing mayhem and murder in the hope of ending Israel's 35-year-old occupation of Palestinian land.

But trouble had been brewing for a long time. For months before the outbreak of the new intifada, Palestinians had been increasingly critical of Arafat's failure to achieve results in peace-making with Israel and of the dire state of Palestinian government.

Ever since he assumed power as the chairman of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, Arafat's rule had been one of total chaos. His ministries were abysmally inefficient, mired by nepotism, over-manning and general cronyism. He has many political qualities, not the least of which are the guile and charisma needed to become and remain one of the planet's best-known leaders and retain power in a feral, armed and unstable environment. But running government is not among his skills.

Money has been squandered on an operatic scale in the pockets of land that are autonomously ruled by the Palestinian Authority under the 1993 Oslo agreements – the main towns of the West Bank, on 20 per cent of the territory, and 60 per cent of Gaza. Meanwhile, Arafat's security apparatus became a network of private armies, vying with each other for primacy.

Democracy was always only a word to be bandied in front of the cameras. Those who opposed his decision to embark on the road to statehood were arrested by his CIA-trained police. And those who dared to suggest his government was autocratic and venal were threatened, and even jailed.

The idea promoted now by President Bush, and cheered on by Israel – that the half-formed Palestinian regime can be unravelled and reformed – is wildly optimistic. So is the notion that reform will make any difference to the root cause of the conflict, which has little to do with mis-spent funds and ineptitude. At bottom, the intifada is born of an extremist nationalism that has fused with Islamic fundamentalism, which has become steadily more violent in the face of a ruthless Israeli military occupation. Those currents will remain, even if the Palestinian Authority is succeeded by a model of good governance. There is little evidence that if the West recasts Arafat's security forces, a job in which the CIA will surely play a major role, they will be any more willing to rein in nationalist militants with whom most Palestinians sympathise.

Crucial to Arafat's survival has been his ability to control the PA chequebook personally, dispensing funds and – until the Israelis locked up the Palestinian population after the start of their uprising – lucrative business contracts with Israel as a means of reinforcing his own powerbase. Israel and the US tacitly endorsed this, believing it helped shore up a compliant Palestinian leadership. Now, with the collapse of Oslo and the renewed explosion of violence, both are leading the chorus of allegations of corruption and demands for reform.

The corruption sprang up almost the moment Arafat returned in 1994 from exile in Tunis to the Gaza Strip to take control of the newly created Palestinian Authority. The White House ardently hoped that he would pilot his people along the path set out in the Oslo accords towards statehood. Within months of arriving, however, his senior PLO colleagues were busy building themselves luxury villas on the strip's sand dunes, a blow to the feelings of the hundreds of thousands of refugees who had lived there in squalor and poverty during the occupation.

Yet Arafat himself, although he uses corruption as a tool to bind people closer to him, has shown little sign of interest in personal wealth since his days in Kuwait as a young man, the founder of the Fatah organisation, when he had a fondness for fast cars and fine clothes. He is personally frugal, neither smoking nor drinking. Those Israelis, including Ariel Sharon, who have heartily wished him dead over the years can take little comfort from his modest lifestyle which, though at times a trifle odd (he pours tea over his cornflakes and spoons Yemeni honey into his tea), are decidedly healthy. The only dash of exotica emerged in 1990, when, out of the blue, he married a tall, green-eyed blonde Christian 30 years his junior; Suha Tawil, who had worked as his assistant. But she removed herself to the quieter climes of Paris many months ago.

Arafat is terrible at delegating, hugging power close to himself and his coterie of favoured aides. Within the PLO there are a number of articulate, young, highly intelligent and educated figures who have long advocated internal reforms and democratisation. They make far more effective advocates of the Palestinian cause than the ranting ministers and grisly security chiefs whom Arafat has allowed to appear on the airwaves. But, until recently, Arafat kept these younger figures in the shadows.

The results have been disastrous in terms of good governance. Yet Arafat's modus operandi is also part of the formula for his survival. Nearly 40 years of leadership have taught him to be mercurial, manipulative, unpredictable, irrational, suddenly generous, abruptly cruel. His inner circle is left to constantly second-guess his next move, never sure whether they are in or out of favour. "He draws his rivals and followers into his inner circle and distances them at the same time," wrote Danny Rubinstein, one of his biographers. "He simultaneously seduces and repels; he hands out promises as if they were going out of style and then breaks every one of them; he threatens and bribes; he wears the smile of the Cheshire cat and whines – all the while exerting the rigid self-control of a soccer player whose performance is extremely difficult to fathom. Sometimes, he acts like a silly clown; and then, the next moment, he is a raging dictator or a compassionate father."

Theories abound as to why he is as he is. Psychoanalysts will probably point to the death of his mother in 1933, when he was five. His father was a textile trader who spent much of his life attempting to pursue a lawsuit reclaiming land the family lost in Egypt 150 years earlier, revealing an obsessive nature that Arafat was to inherit. He was not close to Yasser, and sent him to live in Jerusalem for several years with an uncle. Arafat would later use this experience to claim he was Jerusalem-born, although it has since been established he was born in Cairo on 24 August 1929, under the name Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al Qudua al Husseini (his nickname Yasser means "easy"). The two were soon estranged.When his father died, Arafat did not attend the funeral.

As a teenager in the 1940s, Arafat became involved in the Palestinian cause, leading efforts to smuggle arms. After the 1948 war that accompanied the creation of Israel, he studied civil engineering at the University of Cairo. He headed the Palestinian Students League and, by the time he graduated, was committed to forming a group that would free Palestine from Israeli occupation, which became known as Fatah. At first, Fatah was ignored by larger Arab nations such as Egypt, Syria and Jordan, which had formed their own group – the Palestine Liberation Organisation. But it was in 1967, when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights and West Bank during the Arab-Israeli War, that the Arab nations turned to Arafat. In 1968, he became the leader of the PLO, beginning an odyssey that led 20 years later to a declaration before the United Nations that the PLO would recognise Israel. In 1993, before the eyes of the world, he met his lifelong enemies.

Secret peace talks in Norway led to the Oslo peace accords with the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, winning both men the 1994 Nobel Peace prize, and setting the occupied territories off on a path towards limited autonomy in the belief that they would soon gain statehood.

So what happens now? The Arab world has been confronted with the prospect of Arafat's departure before. He has come close on a number of occasions – in Beirut in 1982, when he decided to fight the invading Israelis, pitching his militia against the most powerful army in the Middle East. Four times, he narrowly escaped being blown apart by Israeli missiles. But perhaps the most telling occasion came on 29 April 1992. Arafat was flying to Tunisia in a light plane. It crashed over the Libyan desert, killing the pilot and two others. Arafat received a head injury, which some blame for the Parkinson's-like tremor that now plagues him. For 13 hours, no one in the outside world knew whether he was dead or alive. It provided a foretaste of how the world would react if he was to be exiled, or killed. According to Said K Aburish, another biographer, life came to a standstill in the occupied territories; debate raged over who would succeed him. The Arab world, much of which was still furious with Arafat for his support of Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf war, was genuinely uneasy. Egypt fretted that Islamic groups would come to the fore, destabilising its own regime. Jordan harboured similar misgivings. And much of the international community was nervous about the loss of "Mr Palestine", a man known to be deeply flawed, but at least a known quantity, who could be prevailed upon not to behave too atrociously. When the news emerged that Arafat had survived, there were scenes of ecstatic joy in the occupied territories, and a communal sigh of relief worldwide. Exactly the same misgivings now face the world.

What is the new leadership that Mr Bush is talking about? No one obviously presents themselves as a figure who could unit Christian intellectuals from Bethlehem, sophisticated secular Palestinians from Ramallah, or passionately religious Islamic radicals from Hebron or Gaza? The risk of chaos is real and very alarming.