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By Christopher Dickey
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Yasir Arafat amassed billions to buy loyalty. An aide shadowed him everywhere with a bag of cash--as much as $2 million, according to a Palestinian diplomat. Another, Mohammed Rashid, an Iraqi Kurd, ran a business empire for Arafat in the 1990s. In partnership with well-connected Israelis, it embraced a casino in Jericho and cigarettes in Gaza, as well as vast webs of hard-to-trace foreign bank accounts and investments estimated at anywhere from $300 million to upwards of $1 billion. But Arafat never trusted anyone completely with the money he saw as the key to his survival: no single aide, none of his political heirs, not even--and, some sources say, especially--his wife, Suha.
Thus the stage was set for the ugly scenes as Arafat wasted away in a French military hospital from a blood disease doctors were never able to diagnose. When his political successors announced they were coming to Paris to check on him, Suha phoned Al-Jazeera in the small hours of the morning. "I tell you they are trying to bury [Arafat] alive!" she screamed.
"She thought that these people are coming to squeeze her husband when he's on his deathbed," says Jaweed al-Ghussein, a former head of the Palestine National Fund. "The relationship is not good between them, and she thought they were coming to investigate her."
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The question at that point, however, was not whether Suha controlled the keys to the kingdom or, rather, the passbooks to the empire. Al-Ghussein says Suha "was not involved at all" in Arafat's elaborate financial schemes. The proximate cause of the hysteria was more obvious. Panic was mounting among both Arafat's political and personal heirs as the leader's condition grew inexplicably worse and Suha allowed less and less information to be released. Before her outburst, according to a source close to her, at least one of the aides to Mahmoud Abbas threatened to have her child taken from her.
The roots of such rancor go beyond money and stretch back to the early 1990s. Suha, a bride 34 years younger than Arafat, expected to be treated as First Lady--if not queen. She wanted perks and profits that the old guard found unseemly and inconvenient. Over the years she developed a rep as spoiled, corrupt, overweight, overweening and possibly estranged from Arafat himself. After the failure of peace talks in 2000 and the beginning of the ferocious new intifada, Suha decamped to Paris. There, she and Arafat's daughter Zahwa, now 9, were able to live in haute bourgeois comfort while "the old man" was holed up under siege in his fetid compound.
Palestinian sources close to both Arafat and his wife say he wanted it that way, possibly so Israeli pressure on Zahwa wouldn't distract him from his cause. Certainly his wife and child didn't want for money. Last year French authorities launched an investigation into $11 million transferred from Switzerland to Suha's French bank accounts.
And the rest of his phantom financial empire? A Palestinian source who follows the financial issue said he hoped Arafat's aides--and banks--would "do the right thing" and return the money to the Palestinian people. That's the only way they'll ever see it.
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