THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY WILL CONTINUE TO MORN YOU-YASSER ARAFAT. Mohammed Yasser Arafat was a Palestinian leader. He was Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), President of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA),and leader of the Fatah political party and former paramilitary group, which he founded in 1959.Arafat spent much of his life committed to acts of liberation against Israel in the name of Palestinian self-determination. Originally opposed to Israels existence, he modified his position in 1988 when he accepted UN Security Council Resolution 242. Arafat and his movement operated from several Arab countries. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Fatah faced off with Jordan in a brief civil war. Forced out of Jordan and into Lebanon, Arafat and Fatah were major targets of Israels 1978 and 1982 invasions of that country. Later in his career, Arafat engaged in a series of negotiations with the government of Israel to end the decades-long conflict between it and the PLO. These included the Madrid Conference of 1991, the 1993 Oslo Accords and the 2000 Camp David Summit. His political rivals, including Islamists and several PLO leftists, often denounced him for being corrupt or too submissive in his concessions to the Israeli government. In 1994 Arafat received the Nobel Peace Prize, together with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, for the negotiations at Oslo. In late 2004, after effectively being confined within his Ramallah compound for over two years by the Israeli army, Arafat became ill, fell into a coma and died on 11 November 2004 at the age of 75. The cause of his illness and subsequent death became a matter of dispute.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 20:39:29 +0000
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