Battle at bedside pits Arafat's wife, aides

Questions of money and power arise around the stricken Palestinian.

As Yasser Arafat's aides arrived in France for an on-again, off-again visit to his sickbed, the question was: What's motivating Arafat's wife?

Is Suha Arafat, as she screamed in a phone call to Al-Jazeera TV, trying to stop his aides from usurping his power? Or is she, as some Palestinians said, just trying to maintain control of a fortune estimated to be worth hundred of millions or even billions?

Several Palestinian leaders rushed to Paris on Monday to check on Arafat, but hospital officials said visiting rights were restricted - setting the stage for a showdown between the delegation and Mrs. Arafat.

Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian prime minister; Mahmoud Abbas, a former prime minister and the current PLO deputy chairman; Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath; and Parliament Speaker Rauhi Fattouh landed in France late Monday on a private jet. They drove straight from the airport to a hotel a few miles from the hospital.

"Tomorrow they will see the French officials and visit President Arafat in his hospital," said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, one of Arafat's senior aides. They were also to meet French President Jacques Chirac.

Arafat, 75, was in intensive care Monday and his condition had not changed, a hospital spokesman said.

"He remains there and his condition is stable," spokesman Gen. Christian Estripeau told reporters at the Percy Military Training Hospital. However, "the medical situation of President Arafat compels us to restrict visitors," he added.

The New York Times, quoting unnamed Palestinian officials, reported that Arafat was in a coma but was not brain dead. Doctors at the hospital have told the Elysee Palace that the coma is technically reversible although it is unlikely, the newspaper reported, quoting an unnamed French official. But Arafat could linger for some time.

The Palestinians abruptly canceled and then rescheduled the trip after Mrs. Arafat accused them, in what she called "an appeal to the Palestinian people" from Arafat's bedside early Monday, of trying to bury her husband alive and take over his powers.

"You have to realize the size of the conspiracy," she told the Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera in a telephone call that she initiated. "I tell you that a number of contenders to the throne are coming to Paris and they are trying to bury Abu Ammar alive," she said, using Arafat's nom de guerre. "He is all right and he is going home."

Suha Arafat converted to Islam. And while some Palestinians in those early days admired her for her work with relief organizations and children, with others, she was unpopular from the start.

The New York Times, quoting unnamed French officials, reported that they had urged the Palestinian leaders to come to try to break Mrs. Arafat's hold over the situation. They also urged the Palestinians to reinstate the trip to Paris after they had canceled it in anger over Mrs. Arafat's remarks, Palestinian officials said.

Under French law, Mrs. Arafat, 41, has the right to control all information about her husband and all decisions about his treatment and perhaps his eventual death, French officials said, and they conceded that they had lost patience with her.

Many Palestinians detest her. Born a Christian, Mrs. Arafat lives a wealthy life. When violence escalated in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 2000, she was able to decamp to Paris, where she has lived and shopped ever since.

Several news services, quoting unnamed Palestinian officials, reported that she receives $100,000 a month from Palestinian coffers.

Suha Arafat is variously reported to have been born in Jerusalem or the West Bank city of Nablus. Her father was a banker, her mother a journalist, and she was raised in an affluent household in the West Bank, first in Nablus and then in Ramallah. She was educated at the Sorbonne in Paris.

In 1985, while she was working as a freelance journalist in Paris, she traveled to Amman, Jordan, and met Arafat. Suha's ambitious mother, the activist and journalist Raymonda Tawil, is said to have played a key role in introducing the pair.

Eventually, Arafat hired her to work for the PLO, which was then based in Tunisia, either on public relations, as an economic adviser, or as his secretary. In a secret ceremony in 1991, when she was 28 and he was 62, the couple married secretly in Tunis.

Suha Arafat converted to Islam. And while some Palestinians in those early days admired her for her work with relief organizations and children, with others, she was unpopular from the start.

She wore expensive clothes from Paris and refused to cover her head. She wended her way through Gaza's streets, where poverty is rampant, in her BMW. She flew to Paris in 1995 to give birth to the couple's daughter, Zahwa, because, she said, sanitary conditions in Gaza were "terrible."

Her motives now are unclear. This year, French prosecutors launched a money-laundering inquiry into transfers of $11.4-million into her accounts. She has refused to talk to reporters about Palestinian finances.

Arafat has never divulged his finances. But Jaweed al-Ghussein, a former PLO finance minister, told the Associated Press that it was worth $3-billion to $5-billion when he quit in 1996. No one will say how much it's worth now - some estimates say as little as a few million.

Forbes magazine ranked Arafat No. 6 on its 2003 list of the richest "kings, queens and despots," estimating he was worth at least $300-million. Shalom Harari, a former top Israeli intelligence official, said Arafat may have stashed away up to $700-million, part of it for an emergency such as a new exile, especially with Israel threatening to expel him.

However, Eran Lerman, an Arabic-speaking former Israeli intelligence officer who is the regional director of the American Jewish Committee, said, "It is crass and unfair to put her appeal down just to wanting money."

Mrs. Arafat seems to have aligned herself with hard-liners who apparently seek to take over the Palestinian leadership after her husband's death. On Al-Jazeera, she was appealing to the young militants of Palestine not to let the institutional inheritors of Arafat win, Lerman said.

"She seemed to be trying to preserve the model of political legitimacy in Palestinian affairs that is revolutionary and charismatic, and not institutional," he said.

- Information from the Associated Press, New York Times and Cox News Service was used in this report.

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