This week, the Arab World mourned the death of Mohammad Abbas (Abu al-Abbas), the veteran Palestinian commander who died in an American jail in Iraq. The sad death of Abbas is symbolic of the end of an era, where secular armed resistance was the only way to fight off the Israelis in Palestine. He represented the era of the fedayeen who emerged after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967, pledging to liberate Palestine on their own, without the help of the Arab leaderships. Abbas lived an abundant life and tried in vain to advance his cause during the 1970s and 1980s. Sadly, as Ghassan Charbil of the London-based al-Hayat wrote, "he reached his grave before reaching his homeland." The Arab press, however, too occupied with the temporary Iraqi constitution, the upcoming Arab summit in Tunis, and the US elections, gave little to no attention to a courageous man and brave fighter whose name was synonymous with that of the resistance for the better part of the past 30-years. As I was writing this article about him, Israeli war planes were hovering over my head in Beirut, provoking the Lebanese and reminding me that it was because of men like Abu al-Abbas that Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. It was also because of men like Abu al-Abbas that since 1948, it never had a day of peace and quiet in the Middle East.

Abu al-Abbas was born in a town near Haifa in 1948, six months after the creation of Israel. Along with his family, he fled to Syria and grew up in schools in Damascus. He studied Arabic literature at Damascus University, and graduated in 1984. He joined the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC) in 1973 and was close to its president, Ahmad Jibril. During the 1970s, he was spokesman for the PFLP. When Jibril supported the late Syrian President Hafez al-Asad in 1976 in fighting Yasser Arafat during the Lebanese Civil War, Abu al-Abbas objected and resigned from the PFLP. Along with the late Talaat Yaqub, he co-created the Palestinian Liberation Front (PLF) in Lebanon on April 24, 1977. When Yaqub died in November 1988, Abu al-Abbas became its secretary-general, a post he held until his premature death in March 2004. He also became a member of the executive and central committees of the PLO. The PLF was active in the late 1970s and 1980s, but most of its operations were poorly planned and poorly executed, often getting foiled by the Israelis. On September 16, 1978, the PLP tried and failed to attack an Israeli squad in Kiryat Shimona. On March 7, 1981, they also tried and failed to launch an attack against the Israeli Army in Haifa. Another failed attempt came when on April 16, 1981, they failed to take hostages from Haifa. When Arafat and his men left to Tunis in August 1982, Abu al-Abbas joined them, pledging to continue the resistance from abroad and into making every place on earth, a battlefield for the Palestinians. His most widely remembered attack, coined as "terrorist" by most of the Western world, was when on April 7, 1985, his men hijacked an Italian ship Achille Lauro sailing from Alexandria to Israel. Four armed men captured the cruiser, with 400 people on board, and threatened to kill them all if Israel did not release 50 men it had recently arrested from Force 17, the crack-troopers of Yasser Arafat. In the rampage, the hijackers killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly and handicapped American Jew, throwing him overboard with his wheelchair. A warrant for Abbas's arrest was filed in the USA, Italy, and Israel, and he was expelled from Tunis, causing great embarrassment to the late Tunisian President Habib Bourgeiba, and moved to Iraq, where ex-President Saddam Husayn gave him asylum. Reportedly, his troops were trained at Saddam's hometown in Tikrit at bases belonging to the now dissolved Republican Guard.

Abu al-Abbas and his men kept a low profile for the second-half of the 1980s, satisfying themselves with supporting the first intifada of Abu Jihad in 1987. On January 6, 1990, Mohammad Amin al-Jarrar, an ally of Abu al-Abbas, was arrested and convicted of trying to kill Israeli tourists in Egypt. On May 30, 1990, Abbas launched an attack of 17-gunmen on the coast of Tel Aviv, but their rubber-boats were intercepted by the Israelis on Nitzarim beach, and four were killed while 12 were arrested. On July 24, 2001, the PLF was accused of kidnapping and killing a teenage Israeli citizen, and on April 22, 2001, of planting an explosive at a bus stop in Haifa. Abu al-Abbas laid down his arms, however, when Arafat signed the Oslo Peace Accord in 1993. He gave an interview to CNN saying that the time of armed struggle was now over and that it was time to re-build Palestine with Arafat. To make peace with past, he apologized for the killing of Klinghoffer. He even gave an interview to The New York Times after the 9-11 attacks on Washington and New York, condemning terrorism and Osama Bin Laden. In 1996, he returned to Palestine to attend the Palestinian National Council (PNC), where he was welcomed and embraced by Arafat, and last visited the Occupied Territories in August 2000, one month before the intifada broke out. He was advised by Arafat not to return, fearing that Israeli would either kill him, as it did with many members of the resistance, or place him under house arrest, as the case with Arafat himself, who has been locked up at his office in Ramallah since December 2001.

Then, on April 15, 2003, Abu al-Abbas was arrested by the US troops in Baghdad, who had recently defeated Saddam Husayn. The US Army accused him of having been implicated in acts of past terror, and pledged to bring him to court amid high resentment in the Occupied Territories and the Arab World. He was not a member of the ex-Iraqi regime, his allies claimed, and was not implicated in anti-American activity during his entire career. The US turned a blind eye to his defense, and offered to extradite him to Italy so he could be tried for the 1985 hijacking, but Italy did not ask for him. The Italian government feared that detaining Abbas, or bringing him to court in Italy, would provoke terrorist attacks against Italian targets. Rather than face the consequences, Rome decided to let bygones be bygones and not bring Abbas to Italian justice. Instead he was left lagging in a jail in Baghdad while the USA decides what to do with him. It was officially declared by the Pentagon that he died due to heart problems on March 9, 2004 in Iraq and that an expert from the US Navy would conduct an autopsy. His wife, who resides in Beirut, claims that a US autopsy is unacceptable, because the Americans "are not to be trusted" since they are fully responsibility for her husband's death. It is impossible for him to commit suicide, she added, because someone with his courage simply does not surrender so easily. Perhaps the USA failed to give him his needed medications, she claims, or perhaps they gave him wrong medicine. Nazim Yusuf, the PLF representative in Lebanon, said: "America is fully responsible for his death." All indicators prove that he was in good health, however, until his death. He sent a letter to his wife, through the International Red Cross, on January 19, 2004, and members of the Red Cross met him on March 8, 2004 to inquire on his needs, 24-hours before he died. Reportedly, he was in very good health and laughed saying that jail does have its benefits since he has lost 30-kilos since his arrest in April 2003. Huda Shaker, director of the Palestinian Studies Center in Baghdad, said that the Mossad had supervised his interrogation and torture in Iraqi jails, something which if proven true, can greatly embarrass the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq.

Arafat mourned the 56-year old leader, describing him as a "martyr." His death raises a million questions and answers. Was the USA responsible? Did it want to rid itself of a controversial man it had arrested and had no clue what to do with. Releasing him would have embarrassed George W. Bush in his war on terror, since for years the USA has been listing Abu al-Abbas as a world-class terrorist. Keeping him in captivity would have also raised objections among Iraqis, Palestinians, and Arabs who see no reason for his detainment since he was not an Iraqi Baathist, and never fought the Americans. The USA realized that by arresting him, it had in fact violated the Oslo Peace Accord, which had been signed by Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin, and President Bill Clinton in 1993. The signature of the three men meant that no member of Arafat's PLO would be arrested or tried for actions he had committed against the PLO prior to September 13, 1993, the date of signing the Oslo Accord. If the USA wanted to arrest him for hijacking and killing an American citizen on board, it was legally barred from doing so. To find a way out of the mess it had gotten itself into, the USA simply decided to rid itself from Abu al-Abbas. This argument is strong in Palestinian circles in Lebanon, Syria, and the Occupied Territories. It is hard to believe, however, since Mohammad al-Abbas is not a priority on the US agenda these days, especially now that the elections are around the corner and the new constitution in Iraq is underway. Most probably, as the Pentagon said, he died out of natural causes. Maybe, the US Army will be held accountable for not administering the right drugs, more so out of negligence than being deliberate, but this will not show until the autopsy is conducted. His wife can bring the USA to court for arrest (not death) of her husband, which is a violation of the Oslo Accord, but then again, the Oslo Accord has been violated hundreds of times by Ariel Sharon, and the world is unable, or unwilling, to bring him to justice. The most she can do today is plead the Americans to permit his burial in Ramallah. What matters now is that Abu al-Abbas is dead, and Palestinian politics will not be the same without him. As a matter of fact, nor will be the resistance since Abbas was part of a golden era that created many great men. Their acts, viewed as terrorist in the 1970s and 1980s, were in fact desperate cries for help from the international community, to attract world attention to a just cause that was not (and still isn't) finding its due place in the world media. By hijacking a cruiser or plane, or by killing a civilian, the Palestinians were hoping to force the world into recognizing their plight, and do something about it, or face the consequences. And this technique worked at the time, forcing the world to recognize the Palestinian cause, and its leader Yasser Arafat. Since then, the vanguards of this resistance have all been killed, starting off with men like Abu Jihad, and Abu Hasan Salameh, and ending with Abu Iyad and Abu al-Abbas. The resistance will never be the same without them, and Abu al-Abbas will be missed in the Middle East.


Beirut
March 11, 2004.