Arafat's departure
I refer to the letter by Nachum Kaplan from London in The Jakarta Post on Nov. 23. I fully agree with him and would like to add a few of my own observations.
There is no doubt that Yasser Arafat was unsuccessful as a leader. As a leader, he did not succeed in achieving his objectives of liberating Palestine and also did not succeed as a leader in keeping his people disciplined. He had to make compromises, like any politician, while signing agreements with Israel's Yitzak Rabin under the Clinton administration; but having signed the agreement, he could not abide by it because his own countrymen never obeyed him.
He was certainly "unique" in many ways. He must be the only one who, though a "head of state", was under something akin to house arrest in his own country, in his residence in Ramallah, and had to seek permission from Israel to travel to Paris for his final medical treatment.
If one scans the media coverage of his death, unanimity seems to prevail about how his passing would create new hopes for a Mideast peace. He must be one of the rare few whose death has evoked hope instead of grief.
His departure must surely have caused personal grief to his nearest and dearest, but by and large, media across the world have stopped just short of celebrating his departure and have expressed a hope that the new leadership following his exit could bring peace to the troubled region.
He is thus also unique in that he is contributing not by being present, working on something, but simply by being absent.
Basically, he gained fame -- or notoriety -- by his terroristic activities in the mid-seventies, when he claimed to have hijacked a few European aircraft successfully. I cannot forget the pictures of the three unfortunate aircraft lined up side by side in some desert in the Middle East, like sitting ducks, waiting to be blown up.
That such a terrorist should receive a Nobel "peace" prize shows how politicized the institute has become, particularly its peace prize. I have always felt that if Alfred Nobel had any inkling of how this prize would be handed out after his death, he would never have initiated it. I have no doubt that when it was conferred to Arafat and Rabin -- who apparently inspired the character of Ari in Leon Uris' Exodus -- Mr. Nobel turned in his grave.
The footage of Arafat throwing kisses instead of waving at the crowd at the Parisian airport for his last journey was pathetic, to say the least, and was surely an indication of a lack of mental equilibrium. What a way to go.
K.B. KALE, Jakarta