Reconciliation on the Nile

By William E. Smith.

On the run again, Arafat turns up in Cairo to embrace Mubarak

"It proves that Egypt is always right," declared an excited Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak as he stood at the steps of Cairo's Kubbeh Palace awaiting the arrival of a surprise visitor. His guest: Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat, who had shunned Egypt ever since Mubarak's predecessor, the late Anwar Sadat, took his search for peace to Jerusalem in 1977 and subsequently signed a peace treaty with Israel. Now, in one of those strange, unpredictable moments of diplomatic fluidity in the Middle East, alignments seemed to be shifting once more.

Scarcely 48 hours earlier, Arafat and about 4,000 of his loyalist forces had been evacuated from the northern Lebanese port city of Tripoli, where they had been besieged by Syrian-backed P.L.O. rebels and shelled by Israeli naval guns. The ever flexible Arafat quickly looked for new support--and appeared to find it in Cairo. As he arrived by helicopter from Ismailia on the Suez Canal, the P.L.O. chairman received a warm embrace from Mubarak. Later, after a conversation that lasted almost two hours, Mubarak hailed his guest as a "moderate leader of the Palestinian people." Arafat, for his part, expressed the hope that one day he and Mubarak would be able to pray together at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem.

The unexpectedly warm encounter--some Middle East experts called it a "historic meeting"--had significance for both men. For Arafat it was a gamble, but also something of a diplomatic coup, coming so quickly after the expulsion from Tripoli. A rapprochement with Cairo, which had been isolated in the Arab world since the Sadat peace initiative, could lead to stronger ties between Arafat's segment of the P.L.O. and the moderate governments of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It might even bring about a resumption of discussions between Arafat and Jordan's King Hussein to determine a common front in future negotiations with Israel based on President Reagan's 1982 peace initiative. That plan called for an eventual link between Jordan and the West Bank and Gaza, the territories Israel has occupied since 1967.

For Mubarak, the encounter with Arafat was a step toward an Egyptian reconciliation with much of the Arab world. Palestinian hard-liners called Arafat's move "treason," and Syria denounced him as "the new Sadat," but Arab moderates were delighted. As further indication that the Arabs' isolation of Egypt is ending, Jordan said that it would resume full-scale trading with Egypt for the first time in five years.

The U.S. responded favorably as well, characterizing the Mubarak-Arafat meeting as "an encouraging development." That angered the government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, which insisted that the encounter in Cairo was a breach of the spirit of Camp David. In a frosty, hour-long meeting with Undersecretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Richard Murphy, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, Israel's Ambassador to Washington, Meir Rosenne, protested that Camp David enjoined the Egyptians from encouraging terrorism and thus from dealing with the likes of Arafat. Eagleburger replied that the U.S. saw the rapprochement as an opportunity to use Egyptian influence toward getting Arafat and Hussein to cooperate in future peace negotiations.

In Lebanon, the bloodletting went on without pause. In an effort to strike at terrorist bases, Israeli planes twice raided positions held by Iranian-backed Shi'ite militiamen in eastern Lebanon. In Beirut, two more car bombs exploded. A pickup truck loaded with explosives blew up outside the French military command post in East Beirut, killing a French paratrooper and eight Lebanese civilians; a second blast shattered a West Beirut bar frequented by U.S. Marines assigned to guard the U.S. embassy. There were no U.S. casualties but one bystander was killed. A group calling itself Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility and warned that unless all "foreigners," particularly the U.S. and France, withdraw from Lebanon by Jan. 1, the terrorists will "make the earth shake beneath their feet."

For a while the Arafat evacuation from Tripoli also seemed in doubt. Five Greek ships had been chartered to take the P.L.O. forces out, under the protection of French naval vessels, including the aircraft carrier Clemenceau. The plan nearly collapsed when the Israelis made it clear, with their repeated gunboat bombardments of Tripoli, that they did not intend to let Arafat slip away unscathed--and maybe not at all. High-ranking sources in Jerusalem told TIME that the Israeli government had actually authorized special military and intelligence units to infiltrate Tripoli under the cover of the naval gunfire and assassinate the P.L.O. chairman. When it realized what the Israelis had in mind, according to these sources, the Reagan Administration intervened by insisting that the U.S. wanted the Palestinians removed from Tripoli without mishap. Only then did the Israelis stand down and allow the evacuation to proceed.

Soon after sunrise on the day of the evacuation, a small Lebanese boat circled the inner harbor, dropping sticks of dynamite to detonate any ordnance that the Israeli navy might have dropped in the basin during the previous day's firing. The Cypriot freighter My Charm, hit in that bombardment, was still ablaze. At 8:32 a.m., when the first Greek ship was sighted on the horizon, assembled Palestinian fighters broke into cheers and loosed volleys of small-arms fire into the air. They kept their personal weapons--pistols and rifles--as they filed onto the ships, but abandoned their heavy equipment. And they left behind at least 1,000 men, just as they had done during their forced withdrawal from Beirut 16 months earlier. "We are leaving Tripoli but we are not giving up the struggle," said Arafat. "No one has cut off our head, and we are not on our knees." Asked if he would resign as P.L.O. leader, as his enemies were demanding, Arafat replied, "I resign only when I am dead."

In Kuwait, meanwhile, the government arrested ten Muslim fundamentalists in connection with six terror bomb explosions that killed six people and damaged the American and French embassies two weeks ago. All were said to be members of Al Dawa, an underground Iraqi Shi'ite party closely linked to Iran. Israeli intelligence sources told TIME Correspondent David Halevy in Jerusalem that there was evidence that the order for the Kuwait bombings had come directly from the Iranian government. The explosives, said the sources, had been smuggled into Kuwait from Iraq in a secret compartment on an oil truck and were delivered to a Kuwaiti Shi'ite of Lebanese origin, who built and prepared the car bombs. The details, the Israelis said, were further proof of a growing Iranian-directed terror network whose activities are being felt as far to the west as NATO bases in Turkey. U.S. officials said they regarded the report as highly plausible.

Terrorism apart, some of last week's developments in the Middle East carried with them the faintest hint of a possible change for the better. A strengthened role in Arab affairs by a moderate Egypt would be a welcome sign; if Arafat can secure the support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia, he might enter into an agreement with Jordan, which in turn could help to get the long-stalled peace process moving again. In Washington last week, Egyptian Foreign Minister Kamal Hassan Ali emphasized that his country remains committed to the Camp David accords.

At the same time, Syrian President Hafez Assad told the French newsweekly Le Point, "Syria does not want to continue confrontation with the U.S. in Lebanon, but I have no choice. When the Americans bombard us we are obviously obliged to defend ourselves." Le Point's interviewers said that Assad, who has been ailing for six weeks, appeared to be regaining his strength after suffering what they speculated had been a heart attack. Unquestionably Damascus was discomfited by a U.S. approach to one of Syria's archenemies, neighboring Iraq. After talks with Mubarak in Cairo, U.S. Special Envoy Donald Rumsfeld flew to Baghdad for discussions with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. It was one of the few meetings of top Iraqi and American officials since diplomatic ties between the two countries were severed in 1967. It was also a step Mubarak had been advocating for some time as a way of showing U.S. sympathy for Iraq in its war with Iran. While Washington was quick to point out that it remained neutral in the gulf war, U.S. officials knew that the gesture to Baghdad would displease both Iran and Syria, two countries that have been giving the U.S. some problems of a different sort.

--By William E. Smith. Reported by Dean Brelis/Tripoli and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by Dean Brelis/Tripoli, William Stewart/Beirut