Heading for a Showdown

By William E. Smith

Syria expels Arafat as the fight within the P.L.O. grows bloodier

The two-month-old rebellion within the Palestine Liberation Organization reached the crisis stage last week, with the future of Chairman Yasser Arafat in serious jeopardy. All week long, P.L.O. rebels, who consider Arafat's policies too moderate, attacked P.L.O. military positions in and around the Bekaa Valley of eastern Lebanon. In a spectacular ambush, aimed at killing or capturing Arafat himself, the rebels stormed a convoy of twelve P.L.O. vehicles in the western Syrian town of Homs. Arafat, who was safely in Damascus, declared that a dozen of his men had been killed or wounded in the attack. Hours later, the long-smoldering feud between Arafat and Syrian President Hafez Assad broke into the open as the Syrian government brusquely expelled Arafat, advising him that in the future he would be unwelcome in either Syria or the Bekaa Valley. He left immediately for Tunis to hold emergency meetings with his top lieutenants. By week's end he was in Czechoslovakia, presumably in search of support from the Soviet bloc.

The split within Fatah, the P.L.O. mainstream group that has always been Arafat's power base, is largely a reaction to last year's forced evacuation from Beirut. It is also the result of a wide range of complaints by some of the rank and file that the P.L.O.'s leadership has been corrupt and ineffective. But these grievances would probably not have sparked an active rebellion without the interference of Libya and, more important, Syria. The P.L.O. has always relied heavily on Syria for military and political support, although relations between Arafat and Assad have been cool for a long time.

The strains were exacerbated earlier this year when Arafat talked at length with Jordan's King Hussein about the possibility that Hussein would, in association with the Palestinians, enter into negotiations with Israel and the U.S. on President Reagan's proposal for a confederal relationship between Jordan and the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Assad bitterly opposed the U.S. initiative. His objections: it did not envision a significant negotiating role for the Syrians, nor did it address itself to the problem of the Golan Heights, which Israel seized from Syria in the 1967 war and annexed in 1981.

The rebel offensive began with a series of attacks on P.L.O. positions in Lebanon, particularly those near the Beirut-Damascus highway. From Tripoli, on the northern Lebanese coast, Arafat issued a statement explicitly accusing the Syrians of helping the rebels. Syria promptly dismissed Arafat's charges as "lies" and instead blamed the P.L.O.'s troubles on "those who have failed to resolve their internal problems because of their big mistakes and shortsightedness." According to Arafat's chief military deputy, Abu Jihad, an emergency meeting in Damascus of Fatah's 73-member Revolutionary Council failed to resolve the crisis. Though the rebel leaders insisted that they were not trying to topple Arafat, they demanded several reforms, including an end to Arafat's "singular rule." They also proposed that an emergency committee be formed to take over Fatah's leadership until a general congress could be held. The council turned down these demands but promised to set up a special court to examine cases involving neglect of duty. In a rhetorical concession to the rebels, the council announced its opposition to the Lebanese-Israeli withdrawal agreement and declared that the Arab plan for a Middle East peace settlement, as formulated at last year's Fez summit, should be rejected in favor of a "military option." That was not good enough for either the P.L.O. rebels or the Syrians, who merely stepped up their attacks on Arafat's leadership.

If Arafat survives the current challenge, his powers may be sharply curtailed. Says a U.S. analyst in Washington: "Arafat used to behave like an Arab potentate, always getting his own way. No more." To retain his position, he will have to make concessions to the rebels and particularly to the Syrians, whose aim is to re-establish themselves as a diplomatic force in the Middle East and who may not be willing to countenance Arafat's continued leadership. Arafat's troubles were also welcomed by Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who described the quarreling within the P.L.O. as "good for Israel" and indeed a positive result of Israel's costly war in Lebanon. His reasoning presumably is that any step toward further radicalization of the P.L.O. would prevent the U.S. from giving tacit support to P.L.O. moderates and make more difficult the kind of negotiated settlement on the West Bank and Gaza that Israel opposes.

--By William E. Smith.

Reported by Johanna McGeary/Washington and William Stewart/Beirut

With reporting by Johanna McGeary, William Stewart This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.