PARIS/JEDDAH, 5 November 2004 — Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was fighting for his life last night amid conflicting reports that he may have passed away or was “clinically dead.”
Throughout the night, Arafat’s aides said he was in a critical condition but gave contradictory details. Some said he was in a coma, others said he had been floating in and out of consciousness.
A French general reading a brief communiqué said Arafat was not dead but had been transferred to “a unit appropriate to his condition”. He said Arafat’s wife, Suha, had asked for “discretion” in providing information about his health.
He added that Arafat’s condition had become “more complicated” and that the patient had been transferred to “a unit appropriate to his condition.”
Arafat’s spokesman Ramzi Al-Khouri also confirmed that the Palestinian leader was in a “grave condition” but could not be legally or medically pronounced dead.
A French medical source said the Palestinian leader was breathing only thanks to artificial life support systems. The source said Arafat had slipped into an irreversible coma and could only be kept alive in his vegetative state through ventilation machines.
Earlier in the day, France’s President Jacques Chirac called on Arafat for what had been tipped as a 30-minutes visit. But Chirac left after about seven minutes. There was no official statement
The picture that emerged was that Arafat, though he may still be alive, was incapacitated and likely to remain out of the political scene for a long time. And that prompted a flurry of activity in Ramallah as Palestinian leaders tried to find a formula to pick a successor. Palestinian security chiefs were called to an emergency meeting at Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah as concern mounted in the West Bank over the health of the man who embodies the Palestinian struggle for statehood.
A senior official in Ramallah said Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei took over some of Arafat security and financial powers. The emergency meeting also discussed measures to call for elections to be held 60 days after Arafat’s passing.
Mahmoud Abbas, the former prime minister, was scheduled to chair an emergency meeting of Fatah, Arafat’s political party in Ramallah, later.
A source at the State Department in Washington said France had informed the US that the Palestinian leader was in critical condition. But, when asked whether Arafat had died, President George W Bush, taking questions in his first post-election press conference, said he did not know. “ If he is dead, may God bless his soul,” Bush said.
The first news about Arafat’s “death” came from Israeli sources. This prompted Palestinian leaders to accuse Israel of organizing a disinformation campaign to harass the Palestinian Authority at a critical moment.
“The Israelis want to provoke a power struggle,” Abbas Zaki, a member of Fatah, said in a telephone interview. “But we are determined to remain united at this critical moment.”
Zaki said he did not know whether Arafat had been deliberately poisoned and, if yes, by whom. But he added that Arafat had been subjected to at least two attempts at assassination through poisoning in the past four years.
The attitude of Arafat’s French doctors added to the confusion. They refused to publish medical bulletins, a routine practice in French hospitals. But they allowed leaks to the media that inspired speculation.
Dr. Ashraf Al-Kordi, Arafat’s personal physician for more than 20 years, said he was surprised by the French attitude. “ I have told the French doctors that their attitude is causing concern in many Arab and other capitals,” Kordi said in a telephone interview from Amman.
He said he had talked to someone who had visited Arafat in his hospital room at 8 p.m. yesterday and could confirm that the Palestinian leader, though unconscious, was still alive.
Kordi said he did not know the causes of Arafat’s latest illness but suspected a blood condition that may or may not have been caused by poisoning. What was surprising, Kordi added, was that the French doctors, after three days of sophisticated tests at a military hospital near Paris, had not been able to diagnose the disease.
A statement by Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker at a summit of European leaders in Belgium that Arafat had died added to the confusion. Later, however, he retracted the statement. “It was a misunderstanding,” government spokesman Lucien Michels said.
