Arafat now: popular but weaker

Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat emerged Thursday from a five-month siege by Israeli forces in his West Bank headquarters here wreathed in smiles and uttering brave words about the future.

But the scenes of destruction he visited on his first day of freedom illustrated how much weaker he is today than when he last breathed fresh air. Arafat is emerging a hero in the Arab world for standing up to Israel. Denounced as a terrorist by Israel, he is a proven survivor in a part of the world where that is no easy feat. But his renewed popularity at home may not give him the strength he needs to assert himself against Israel.

In a chaotic cavalcade of security guards and journalists, Mr. Arafat toured Ramallah in a black Mercedes limousine to witness some of the damage done during the Israeli army's month-long invasion of the West Bank. Behind the physical ruins, however, lies a continued Israeli military presence in the West Bank that will severely limit his authority.

Stepping into bright morning sunlight amid a throng of uniformed bodyguards, the Palestinian leader waved his hand delightedly as he con- ducted an enthusiastic crowd gathered in the courtyard of his compound in their chant of "We will sacrifice our blood and souls for you."

Behind the well-wishers, piles of wrecked cars were heaped among rubble left by the Israeli tanks that had withdrawn from the area under cover of darkness in the early hours of Thursday morning. The courtyard was littered with the remains of the siege: coils of barbed wire lay strung around the area, and bullet casings were thick underfoot in some places.

Surveying damage done to a government building later in the morning, Arafat declared that "they destroyed our efforts to implement what I had signed with my partner Rabin," referring to the Oslo interim peace agreement he reached with former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993. "I shall rebuild it all," he promised.

His tour of this city showed him the scale of that task, which a UN official said would cost $300 million dollars "at a very conservative preliminary estimate that might be revised upwards."

At the Education Ministry, for example, where workers were repairing doors and ceilings broken down by Israeli soldiers, Arafat found that the hard drives had been stripped from some 40 computers in the building, and diskettes taken from drawers in every office.

For building department manager Nafez Younis, that meant that "all the details of our projects are missing, all the tender documents, all the contracts. When I entered this office three days ago, not a single document was in its place," but lay scattered around the floor instead.

In the teacher training department, it meant that all the training materials have disappeared, along with all the reports filed by supervisors for the last five years. In the examination section, all records of graduation exam results since 1967 have gone, and in the finance department lies a safe with its hinges blown off, and the equivalent of $7,000 in cash missing.

Palestinian officials say they have encountered similar scenes in several other ministries. Israeli army spokesmen say that the soldiers were seeking records to prove that the Palestinian Authority had been financing suicide bombers and groups that have attacked Israelis in the West Bank.

Palestinians say that the occupying troops also indulged in vandalism and theft, an allegation supported by the empty wallets scattered around the warden's office at the Ramallah prison, where prisoners' personal effects had been stored.

Bulldozers had been at work clearing roadblocks around the Palestinian Authority headquarters within minutes of the Israeli withdrawal. Yesterday morning, life was returning to a semblance of normality.

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