CAIRO, 13 November 2004 — Yasser Arafat’s funeral in Cairo was held in a solemn atmosphere amid tight security yesterday, as presidents, kings and princes paid their final respects to the Palestinian leader, while crowds from the city of the veteran leader’s birth were kept away.
The well-ordered and brief military ceremony was in stark contrast with the scenes of popular fervor awaiting the deceased leader around his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he was buried later in the afternoon.
The funeral, which was held inside a closed off military complex in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis where Arafat once lived as a young man, lasted less than two hours and was conducted according to Egyptian military protocol.
The area was completely sealed off by thousands of black-clad policemen standing shoulder-to-shoulder and roads were closed to traffic, preventing uninvited mourners from approaching the funeral.
The ceremony began at around 10:00 a.m. (0800 GMT) when the coffin, draped in a Palestinian flag, was taken out from the Al-Galaa compound’s morgue and carried by eight Egyptian pallbearers into the base’s small mosque.
Egypt’s top Muslim cleric, Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar Sayed Mohammed Tantawi, led two-minute prayers attended by a limited number of foreign leaders.
“Arafat has done his duty as a defender of the Palestinian cause, with courage and honesty,” Tantawi said, before calling “Allahu Akbar” (God is great) four times.
Foreign leaders gathered in a traditional Muslim funeral tent laid with ornate red carpets to extend their condolences to a Palestinian delegation headed by Mahmoud Abbas, who co-founded the Fatah party with Arafat and has replaced him at the helm of the Palestine Liberation Organization.
As the military procession was being formed, the largest gathering of foreign leaders in Cairo since former President Anwar Sadat’s funeral in 1981 lined up to pay their respects to the delegation, which also included close Arafat aide Yasser Abed Rabbo, Fatah chief Farouq Qaddumi and interim Palestinian leader Rauhi Fattuh.
Conforming with Muslim funeral tradition, the widowed Suha Arafat was not present for the first stages of the ceremony and stayed with Egyptian first lady Suzanne Mubarak in a lounge next to the mosque.
The procession, preceded by Egyptian Republican Guards on horseback and soldiers carrying flowers, was headed by Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
By his side were Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, Tunisian President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Syrian President Bashar Assad was also an unannounced participant in the funeral procession that followed the coffin being carried on a horse-drawn cannon carriage.
When the procession reached the adjacent Al-Maza military airport, eight Egyptian officers carried the coffin into a Hercules C-130 cargo plane. When the military band started playing the Palestinian national anthem, Suha and the nine-year-old daughter Zahwa she had with the deceased leader both broke down.
