Yasser Arafat is founder of Fatah and chairman of the Palestine Liberation of Organization and was in 1996 elected as President. In 1974 he came before the U.N. General Assembly in 1972 with an olive branch and a gun. The symbolic juxtaposition of peace and resistence defines Arafat's political life. He died in 2004 in a hospital in France.
On 15 November 1988, Yasser Arafat declared independence and the establishment of an independent State of Palestine. In 1993 he signed the Declaration of Principles at the White House and in 1994, after years of exile he returned back to Palestine, where he was elected as President of the Palestinian Authority. The Oslo Accords, which brought him back, were ultimately to undermine his status, as unabated Israeli colonisation of the occupied territories and punishing closures of towns soured what meagre benefits Palestinians experienced from the handover of population areas (but little other land) by Israel. Blamed for the failure of the 2000 Camp David talks Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and his wife Suha hold hands prior to Arafat's departure from his compound in the West Bank town of Ramallah in this file picture released by the Palestinian Authority Friday Oct. 29, 2004.and for the inevitable and predictable outbreak of the Second Intifada, Israel has invested much public relations efforts in demonising Arafat to divert attention from its bad faith negotiations during the Oslo process.

On 29 October 2004, the 75-year-old Arafat was flown from his compound in Ramallah to France to a military hospital in order to receive treatment for a grave illness. In a November 9th press conference in Paris, Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Sha'ath reported on Arafat's condition, saying he had been in a coma since November 3rd and had slipped deeper into the coma during the night. He quashed rumours of poisoning or cancer, saying that the terrible conditions during the three years of his office arrest in Ramallah had seriously affected his digestive system, preventing him from absorbing nutrition. On November 10th, media outlets began to report that Arafat's organs were progressively failing. On November 11, 2004 he died in a hospital in France. The Beyond Arafat section below tracks developments and reactions.

top