Heading off a Disaster

By William E. Smith

Arafat and his enemies agree to a withdrawal

Yasser Arafat, the Houdini of Middle East politics, appeared ready to perform yet another remarkable feat. Last year the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization managed to escape from Beirut with more than 6,000 of his commandos after the Israelis had captured a third of Lebanon and surrounded all of his positions. This year Arafat and his loyalists had held on for three weeks in the vicinity of the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli as a vastly larger force of P.L.O. rebels, strongly backed by Syria, tried to drive the Arafat faction into the sea. The chairman's cause seemed hopeless, as his followers lost control of one refugee camp, then another, and were cornered within a small section in the heart of Tripoli. But then, as Arab and various nonaligned diplomats rallied to his cause, Arafat seemed to be on the verge of escaping once again, to fight another day. Or was he?

Arafat's strategy was based on stubbornness. He held on in Tripoli as long as he could, convinced that one or another group of foreign governments would eventually come to his aid. Sure enough, at week's end the Foreign Ministers of Saudi Arabia and Syria announced, after several days of intense bargaining in the Syrian capital of Damascus, that they had devised an agreement acceptable to both Arafat and his enemies.

The announcement came only a day after the P.L.O. had completed negotiations with Israel that resulted in an enormous, if lopsided, exchange of prisoners of war: six Israeli soldiers, held since September 1982, in return for more than 4,500 Palestinians and Lebanese captured by the Israelis during the war in Lebanon. That exchange, in turn, strengthened the prestige of Arafat at a precarious moment, and may have hastened the negotiations leading to the agreement between Arafat and the rebels. Those negotiations had been closely supervised by Syria, even though Syrian President Hafez Assad was absent and rumored to be seriously ill. Official reports had stated that Assad underwent an appendectomy two weeks ago, but many diplomats believed that he was suffering from some sort of heart trouble.

In the meantime both Lebanese President Amin Gemayel and Israeli Prime

Minister Yitzhak Shamir prepared to fly to Washington this week for separate talks with President Reagan. Gemayel will be seeking U.S. assistance in overcoming some of Lebanon's internal problems. Reagan will be intensely interested in helping him with that aim. After all, one of the Administration's biggest foreign policy problems at the moment, as the U.S. heads toward a presidential election year, is the presence of the 1,800-man U.S. Marine force in Lebanon. As for Shamir, he and Reagan will probably discuss the Administration's thoughts about "strategic cooperation" between the U.S. and Israel. They may also talk about ways of putting the long-moribund Middle East peace process in motion again, perhaps with the help of Egypt and Jordan. Reagan will want to discuss with both Gemayel and Shamir the unsettling announcement last week by Lebanese Prime Minister Chafik al Wazzan that his government would "freeze" the agreement it had reached last

May to establish relations with Israel and would ask the three-member Israeli diplomatic mission to leave.

In a way, the success of the prisoner exchange improved the climate for the Shamir-Reagan talks, as well as for the agreement among the P.L.O. factions. By consenting to an exchange that was so staggeringly in the Palestinians' favor, the Shamir government seemed to be serving notice that it was trying to get rid of some of the unfinished business of the war in Lebanon. It was also worried about the safety of the six Israeli soldiers, knowing that they were being held in the Tripoli area as it came under bombardment and that one of them had reportedly suffered a nervous breakdown. Finally, after weeks of secret negotiations, Israel took the first step: it freed 1,100 Palestinians, most of whom had been held at the Ansar prison camp in southern Lebanon, and flew them to Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv, from which Air France jetliners carried them on to Algeria.

At the same time, Arafat's forces in Tripoli were putting the six Israelis aboard a fishing boat, which took them to a French vessel offshore. They were then transferred to an Israeli naval vessel, which sailed south to the Israeli port of Haifa. From there they were flown to Sde Dov airport, near Tel Aviv, where they received a tumultuous reception from relatives and well-wishers. Once the Israeli prisoners were known to be safe, the Israeli government ordered the release in Lebanon of the remaining 3,500 Arab prisoners. Israel also returned the P.L.O.'s archives, which had been seized during the fighting in Beirut last year.

Some Israelis were unhappy about the lopsided nature of the exchange, but Prime Minister Shamir defended it. Said he: "We paid a high price, but we were faced with the fact that at any moment the worst could happen." Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, breaking a three-month public silence, declared on Israeli radio that he was "happy on this day" over the prisoners' release.

An inevitable side effect of the exchange was that it bolstered Arafat's political reputation at a critical moment. His lieutenants were quick to point out that at a time when the chairman was successfully gaining the release of more than 4,500 Arab prisoners, his enemies within the P.L.O. were pressing on with a battle that had taken nearly 500 lives since the fighting in Tripoli started Nov. 3. In any event, the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia and Syria announced on Friday that both Arafat and the rebels had accepted a plan for a "permanent" cease-fire and an evacuation of all P.L.O. forces from the Tripoli area over a two-week period.

Earlier in the week, the rebels had seemed to be moving in for the kill. Captain Ahmed Jabril, who was emerging as the rebels' front man, if not their actual leader, had told reporters, "Arafat and his retinue will be brought to justice. If he goes to Tunis, we will pursue him there. We have decided to win or die." It was just such a fight that the people of the Tripoli area were most fearing. The Baddawi refugee camp was already littered with the wreckage of buildings and cars. A young Palestinian woman, allowed to return to her apartment to see if her possessions were safe, found the place ransacked and looted. Raging at rebel guards, she cried, "Ten years of hard work are gone. Why? I'm not the Israelis. Why did they do it?" At the nearby Nahr al Barid camp, when local Palestinians buried an eleven-year-old boy who had been killed in the shelling, they sang P.L.O. songs in praise of Arafat. Later, despite the presence of rebel forces, 1,000 people moved through the streets in a pro-Arafat demonstration. But the rebel leaders were adamant that Arafat leave Tripoli. Insisted Spokesman Mahmoud Labadi: "We will not allow him to convert a military defeat into a political victory."

That, however, is exactly what Arafat is good at. Said a P.L.O. official who was once on Arafat's staff but now supports the rebels: "Arafat proved in Beirut last year that all you have to do is hold on long enough for world pressure to force a cease-fire that saves you. We should have seen that he was playing the same game again."

Throughout the week, pressure was mounting for a ceasefire, even from within the two refugee camps outside Tripoli that the rebels had captured from the Arafat loyalists. Said a P.L.O. official sympathetic to Arafat: "If they do kill him, he will be the martyr of the Arab world for 100 years." Even in Syria, the move against Arafat was not particularly popular. "No one is enthusiastic about what is happening in Tripoli," said a university professor. "Arafat is not the Israelis."

The Assad government is not overly responsive to public opinion. But the Syrians have come to realize that they have limited choices in dealing with Arafat: to martyr him or to allow him to escape from Tripoli, with his popular support intact but his military following greatly reduced. The Syrians' principal arms supplier, the Soviet Union, had indicated repeatedly that it was displeased with the conflict within the P.L.O.

After his arrival in Damascus last Tuesday, the Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, began a series of meetings with the P.L.O. factions. So did a group of diplomats from nonaligned countries led by India's Foreign Minister P.V. Narasihma Rao. By Friday it appeared that both sides had accepted an agreement, which included a withdrawal of all P.L.O. forces from Tripoli and a resolution of P.L.O. disagreements by democratic means. But as the week ended, both Arafat and the rebels talked as if the fighting in Tripoli might resume at any moment. The rebel forces moved T-54 tanks to new positions overlooking the city and spoke as if they would not be willing, after all, to leave Tripoli along with the Arafat forces. The chairman himself announced, "We expect another big attempt [on Tripoli]."

Even if the Saudi-arranged withdrawal plan proves to be a success, it is obvious that many issues remain to be settled. Syria's Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Farouk al Sharaa, told TIME Correspondent Roberto Suro, with a touch of asperity, "If Arafat insists on remaining stubborn and uncompromising, then perhaps he will not find any more mediators after this." As for the P.L.O.'s future, added Sharaa: "We would prefer to see a collective leadership, but it is not our job to advise the Palestinians on this." Arafat may emerge with his chairmanship intact, but he may still be obliged to make changes in the structure of the P.L.O. leadership. Two hard-line P.L.O. factions, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, refused to join the rebels but favor many of the reforms advocated by the anti-Arafat forces.

What does the Israeli government think about Arafat's current struggle? Despite their longstanding hatred of Arafat, the Israelis may believe that it would serve their interests to have him stay on as the head of a fractured and weakened P.L.O. Under such circumstances he would be in no position to talk again with King Hussein or do anything to encourage Hussein to enter into negotiations with Israel over the future of the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. If, on the other hand, Arafat were removed from the scene, the P.L.O. might lose its claim to being the sole legitimate representative ol the Palestinian people. That, in turn, might free Hussein and the West Bank municipal leaders to pursue the 1982 Reagan peace plan, which has called for a future link between the occupied territories and Jordan. Israel opposes such a solution to the Palestinian problem and is therefore against negotiations toward that end.

These and other matters will be discussed this week during Shamir's visit to Washington, his first since becoming Israeli Prime Minister two months ago. He and Reagan will undoubtedly concentrate on the problems of Lebanon: how to bolster the fragile Gemayel government, how to bring about a withdrawal of foreign forces, how to deal with the tough and strident Damascus government of the ailing Assad. They will talk about "strategic cooperation" between longtime allies and try to overcome some of the bitterness engendered by the Israeli war in Lebanon. But they will obviously not solve all the outstanding issues between two nations whose needs are sometimes at variance. For this reason, Israel's President Chaim Herzog, just back from a visit to the U.S. himself, warned his countrymen against having "exaggerated expectations" about Shamir's trip to Washington. And, as the Prime Minister and the President confer, the foes of Yasser Arafat may be learning once again the futility of having exaggerated expectations about the durable P.L.O. leader's demise. --By William E. Smith.

Reported by David Halevy/Tel Aviv and Barry Hillenbrand/Tripoli

With reporting by David Halevy, Barry Hillenbrand This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.