CAIRO - World dignitaries from nearly 60 countries took part in the military funeral procession for Yasser Arafat at 11 A.M. Friday.
Streaming from a condolences tent in Egypt's capital, they walked to a military airbase and dispersed a short time later. Arafat's wooden coffin, draped in the Palestinian flag, was loaded onto a horse-drawn gun carriage for the short procession.
Afterwards, it was loaded onto a plane and flown to El Arish, from where it will be flown to the West Bank for a 4 P.M. burial in a tomb being hastily built at his Muqata headquarters in Ramallah.
Among the dignitaries present was Syrian President Bashar Assad, who spoke to three Arab MKs present at the funeral and told them he values the role of the Arab sector of Israeli society and expressed sorrow for the death of Arafat.
Earlier in the morning, Arafat's coffin was carried into an Egyptian military mosque, where brief prayers were held in front of presidents and kings gathered for military rites.
"He has served his people all his life, until he faced his God, with courage and honesty. Let us pray for his soul," Egypt's top cleric, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, told the gathered dignitaries.
Arafat's body arrived in Cairo on Thursday evening, following a French military send-off near Paris attended by a weeping Suha Arafat, the Palestinian leader's widow.
Yasser Arafat died around 3:30 Thursday morning (French time) at Percy hospital in Paris, after days in critical condition in an intensive care unit.
Palestinian officials, including Mahmoud Abbas, who has taken over leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and newly chosen Fatah leader Farouk Kaddoumi greeted dignitaries from around the world in the condolences tent.
After a traditional funeral prayer lasting only a couple of minutes, eight dark-suited pallbearers carried the casket out of the mosque and handed it to an Egyptian honor guard. They placed it inside a silver hearse and drove away from the mosque.
Unusually for the funeral of an Arab leader, ordinary people were not able to take part in the procession, apparently for fear that too many would come out to show their respect.
Unlike Arab states, many Western countries decided not to send their top leaders. The heads of state who attended the funeral include those of Algeria, Egypt, Indonesia, Jordan, Lebanon, South Africa, Syria and Yemen.
Numerous foreign ministers, including Jack Straw of Britain, Michel Barnier of France and Joschka Fischer of Germany, attended, as did EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.
Assistant Secretary of State William Burns represented the United States.
Security was heavy throughout Cairo on Friday, with the possibility of demonstrations at mosques and in public squares. Streets in the area, many of them closed off, were lined with hundreds of policemen. Soldiers on rooftops surveyed the area with binoculars.
The U.S. Embassy in Cairo warned Americans to avoid areas where spontaneous protests might occur, including the downtown Tahrir Square, a traditional site of demonstrations.
French honor guard holds ceremony
In Paris, a uniformed French honor guard carried Arafat's coffin, draped with the Palestinian flag, during a ceremony at a French military base.
Marching slowly to the strains of a funeral march, the honor guard carried the coffin past Palestinian and French officials. A military band then played the Palestinian and French anthems, before the coffin was loaded onto a plane for the flight to Cairo.
"Mr. Yasser Arafat, president of the Palestinian Authority, has died at the Percy Military Training Hospital in Clamart on November 11, 2004, at 3:30," spokesman General Christian Estripeau told reporters in a brief statement.
"Arafat's funeral should be as great as his heroism and the sacrifices he made for the Palestinian cause," said Mohammed Sobeih, the Palestinian representative to the Arab League. He said the League would host a three-day memorial for Arafat following the funeral ceremony.
The Jordanian government and monarchy expressed its sorrow at the death of Arafat and declared three days of national mourning.
The burial in Ramallah, which Israel agreed to Wednesday, poses enormous logistical obstacles, and will require huge expenditures of manpower to assure the safety of the dignitaries expected to attend, Israel Radio quoted military officials as saying.
Sharon: Arafat's death is 'historic turning point'
In his first official reaction to the death of Arafat before dawn Thursday in a Paris hospital, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed hope that the Palestinians would work toward "stopping terrorism," which he said was a precondition for dialogue and reaching a peace deal.
The prime minister said that Arafat's death could serve as a "historic turning point in the Middle East" and that Israel would continue in efforts to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians.
"The recent events could be a historic turning point for the Middle East. Israel is a country that seeks peace and will continue its efforts to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians without delay," said Sharon, without mentioning Arafat by name.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Thursday that Arafat's passing heralded "a new era."
"Our region, after Arafat, has turned into a different region, and in my view, will be a better region," he told Army Radio. "Arafat for years led the ideology that it is possible to achieve by the force of arms and the path of terror what might have been achieved by negotiation.
"This path of forty years of involvement in terrorism has yielded only victims, blood and destruction."
A spokesman for the settler movement, Yehoshua Mor-Yosef, said "the West Bank and Gaza Strip [Yesha] Settlers Council hopes that the removal of Arafat will put an end to the mistaken concept that the uprooting of Jewish settlements will bring peace and security," he said, referring to the disengagement plan.
Lapid: I hated Arafat for deaths of Israelis
Blaming Arafat for global terrorism and the failure to achieve peace, Justice Minister Yosef Lapid expressed hope Thursday that a new Palestinian leadership would put down militant groups and negotiate with Israel.

"I hated him for the deaths of Israelis... I hated him for not allowing the peace process... to move forward," Lapid told Israel Radio.

"It is one of the tragedies of the world that he didn't understand that the terror that began here would spread to the entire world," he added.
Opposition leader Labor MK Shimon Peres said, "There is no doubt that with the death of Yasser Arafat an era has ended... for good or bad."

"The biggest mistake of Arafat was when he turned to terror. His greatest achievements were when he tried to build peace," said Peres of his fellow 1994 Nobel laureate.
Israeli Arabs to hold symbolic funeral
The Israeli Arab Follow-Up Committee has declared that three days of mourning would be observed by the community.
The committee decided to hold a symbolic funeral in Nazareth and called on Israeli Arabs to tone down Id Al-Fitr celebrations Sunday and refrain from public events due to the official period of mourning.

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