RAMALLAH, West Bank, 6 November 2004 — Suha Arafat, the once estranged but loyal wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat who has incited anger for her extravagant lifestyle abroad, has rarely left her husband’s side since his transfer for medical treatment in Paris.
Thirty-four years younger than Arafat, the French-educated daughter of a wealthy Palestinian Christian couple first met the man who was to become her husband 20 years ago when she was a student at the Sorbonne.
Arafat hired her to do public relations for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when he was exiled in Tunis.
She later became his economic advisor before they married secretly in 1990, only revealing their union two years later.
Their only child, a daughter called Zahwa, was born in 1995 in a private hospital in Paris — but marital life quickly degenerated into de facto separation.
With her dyed-blonde hair, Suha’s penchant for expensive clothes and the high-life could not be more different from the veteran leader’s trademark military suit and austere obsession with politics.
Suha, a convert to Islam, once complained to an Egyptian newspaper that her husband never gave her any jewels and lived like a bachelor.
“When I complain of being neglected, he offers me souvenirs and symbols of the Palestinian revolution,” she said in a rare interview.
However she later denied that her marriage was on the rocks and called Yasser “the happiest of husbands” who sang “Frere Jacques” — the only French song he knows — to their daughter. Despite once saying she had “married a myth”, Suha never displayed anything less than fierce loyalty to Arafat’s dream of a Palestinian state.
For all her Western ways and education, she has said there would have been “no greater honor” than sacrificing any son of hers to the struggle and has backed suicide operations.
After leaving the Middle East in early 2001, to the fury of Palestinians who saw her as betraying their cause for luxury, Suha has since divided her time between Paris and Tunis, where the PLO was based.
Despite her estrangement, six months before rushing to Ramallah to oversee Arafat’s transfer to Paris for medical care, Suha said that she was prepared to return to the Palestinian territories “the minute I am asked to”.
During her husband’s agonizing decline in a French hospital, she has been one of the few people permanently at his bedside — the picture of a devoted wife watching her husband battling a possibly fatal illness.
It has been a stark comparison to the public blunders and lack of tact that caused headaches for the Palestinian leadership earlier in their marriage.
Hailing Hillary Clinton as the first lady she most admired, Suha embarrassed the former US president’s wife at a West Bank function by launching a tirade against Israel for upping cancer rates in the Palestinian areas. A senior Palestinian official was forced to apologize to Washington.
Last year, France opened a preliminary investigation into the transfer of large sums of money of undetermined origin to Paris bank accounts she owns.
Suha accused her husband’s archfoe, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of being behind the subsequent press reports.
