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RAMALLAH, Feb 7: Advisers to Palestinian President Yasser Arafat declined to comment on Thursday on reports quoting Arafat as naming his possible successor.
Arafat said in interviews published in two Arab newspapers on Wednesday that if he “disappeared”, Palestinian parliament speaker Ahmed Qurei (Abu Ala) would replace him for a period of 60 days, until new elections were held, in accordance with Palestinian law.
Observers said it was the first time Arafat had mentioned a possible successor by name.
Deputy head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), Mahmud Abbas (Abu Mazen), would replace him as head of the PLO, he said in reply to questions by his interviewers from the United Arab Emirates daily al-Ittihad and the Egyptian weekly al-Musawar.
In the interviews, Arafat also accused Israel of consciously mentioning the Palestinian preventive security chiefs in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Jibril Rajoub and Mohammed Dahlan respectively, as his possible successors.
Israel did this because it wanted him to “get rid of them”, but both “are close to my heart”, he said.
The Israeli ‘Yediot Aharanot’ daily quoted Arab-Israeli legislator Hashem Mahmeed, who met with Arafat on Wednesday, as warning against premature speculation on the Palestinian leader’s possible succession.
“Don’t even begin to dream of successors. Anyone who tries to take Arafat’s place while he is still alive will not live for even one day,” the daily quoted Mahmeed.
INVITATION: The European Parliament tried to break Yasser Arafat’s isolation on Thursday by asking him to address it.
It also slammed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for saying he regretted not having killed the Palestinian leader in 1982, when it had him under siege in Beirut.
Arafat has been effectively confined to his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah by a ring of Israeli tanks since December.
EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana told the Parliament on Tuesday that Arafat remained the legitimate interlocutor for peace talks despite Israel’s dismissal of him as “irrelevant”.
The Parliament voted 430 to 15, with 22 abstentions, to invite Arafat and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, noting they both shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize.
At the same time, the EU legislature said in a resolution it was “shocked by the interview given by Prime Minister Sharon to the Israeli newspaper Maariv in which he openly regrets ‘not having killed Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in Lebanon 20 years ago’.” The interview was published last week.
Sharon was in Washington on Thursday to ask the United States to sever ties with Arafat.
The Parliament resolution called on both sides to end violence, including what it called terrorist attacks on Israeli citizens and “extra-judicial executions” by the Israeli security forces, and to take steps to reopen peace negotiations.
Violence continued unabated on Thursday, with Israeli warplanes attacking a Palestinian Authority headquarters in retaliation for the killing by at least one Palestinian gunman of three Israelis at a West Bank settlement on Wednesday.
The EU Israeli-Palestinian violence will dominate an informal conference of EU foreign ministers on Friday and Saturday, the first big meeting under Madrid’s six-month presidency of the 15-nation bloc.
“The Spanish presidency is very much determined to present some kind of EU initiative to break the impasse,” one diplomat said.
US CAN’T LINK ARAFAT: The US still cannot prove that Yasser Arafat personally ordered or knew about a shipment of Iranian arms seized by Israel, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Wednesday.
Powell told the House of Representatives International Relations committee that the Palestinian Authority must take responsibility for the shipment found aboard a ship intercepted in the Red Sea last month.
But he added: “I cannot tie it directly to Chairman Arafat on the basis of the information that is available to me,” Powell said.
“It’s certainly a case where he should have known, and may well have known, I just can’t prove that he did know, or had direct control over the operation,” said Powell.
“But it’s close enough that the Authority has to take responsibility for it.”
Last month, US Vice President Dick Cheney said US officials had seen direct evidence that linked Arafat to the arms shipment, but Powell’s remarks Wednesday appeared to fall short of that statement.
Both Iran and the PA have denied any knowledge of the operation and Arafat has set up a commission of inquiry into the affair.—dpa/Reuters
