Yasser Arafat and Tawakel Karman: The Struggle for Peace - Research Paper Example

Yasser Arafat and Tawakel Karman: The Struggle for Peace Introduction The twenty-first century has witnessed major conflicts all around the world, especially in the Islamic world. And in these conflict-ridden regions emerge great leaders, like Yasser Arafat and Tawakel Karman, who received the internationally acclaimed award—the Nobel Peace Prize. Looking at the life and works of these leaders shed light on the reasons why they were chosen to receive the prestigious award. Arafat and Karman were both activists who spent much of their time, resources, and effort to promote the interests of their country and their people. This essay discusses and analyzes the achievements of Yasser Arafat and Tawakel Karman. The discussion also includes an analysis of their lives, challenges, goals, and values. And most importantly, this essay makes a comparison between these two great leaders. Yasser Arafat: The Audacious Liberator Mohammed Abdel-Raouf Arafat was born in Cairo on August 24, 1929 (Rubin & Rubin 14). In Cairo, the teenage Arafat was illegally transporting weapons to Palestine which was at the time in opposition to the Jews and the British. During the conflict between the Arab countries and the Jews, Arafat dropped out of school to participate in the war against the Jews in the Gaza territory. The Arab defeat and the formation of the state of Israel severely frustrated him. Regaining his commitment and motivation and preserving his vision of an autonomous Palestinian society, he came back to the university to study engineering but devoted much of his effort, resources, and time as head of the Palestinian students (Rubin & Rubin 16-18). In 1956, he successfully acquired his degree, worked for a short time in Egypt and afterward relocated to Kuwait. He was hired in the public works agency and profitably managed his own contracting business (Rubin 38). He used all his free time in political movements. In 1958 he and colleagues formed Al-Fatah, a secret complex of underground chambers, which in 1959 started to distribute a publication supporting armed struggle against Israel. Arafat decided to abandon Kuwait in 1964 to become a permanent activist, mobilizing Fatah incursions against Israel (Rubin & Rubin 49). That same year the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was formed, which was supported by the Arab League, uniting several organizations all struggling to liberate Palestine for the Palestinian people. The Arab countries preferred a more peaceful strategy, but after their failure in the Six-Day War against Israel in 1967, Fatah surfaced as the most mobilized and most influential of the organizations within PLO (Rubin 93). In 1969, it acquired the group when Arafat became PLO Executive committee’s chairman. The PLO was eventually removed from its role as a dummy of the Arab countries. Arafat expanded the PLO into a state with its own armed forces. But the PLO was eventually driven out from Jordan when King Hussein became troubled its guerilla raids on Israel and other hostile activities (Rubin 108). Arafat tried to form a similar group in Lebanon, but was expelled by an Israeli military attack. Yet, he continued the organization by transferring its center of operations to Tunis (Rubin 108). He spent much of his time travelling to advance the Palestinian objective, always maintaining the secrecy of his campaigns. The years after the eviction from Lebanon were a depressing moment for the PLO and Arafat. Afterward, the intifada campaign motivated Arafat by raising the awareness of the world about the struggle of the Palestinian people. In 1988 a policy reform occurred. In an address at a UN conference in Geneva, Switzerland, he proclaimed that the PLO abandoned terrorist activities and advocated “the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East conflict, to live in peace and security, including the state of Palestine, Israel and other neighbors” (Rubin 110). The possibilities of a peace treaty with Israel now became an encouraging reality. After a delay when the PLO backed up Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the peace process began intensely, resulting in the 1993 Oslo Accords. This treaty involved conditions for the Palestinian elections which occurred in 1996, and Arafat became the head of the Palestine Authority (Rubin 110-111). Nevertheless, similar to other Arab administrations, the administrative approach of Arafat has a tendency to be more authoritarian than democratic. In 1996, when the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in Israel, the peace process was hampered (Rubin & Rubin 83). Yasser Arafat has been a major personality in the conflict between Israel and Palestine for more than three decades. In the 1950s, he contributed to the formation of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement, a covert organization that became involved in numerous terrorist activities. In 1968, Arafat became the head of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) (Rubin & Rubin 101). He talked with Israeli leaders Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 to establish the Oslo Peace Accords, and in 1994 the three of them were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their endeavors. However peace and unity itself has been slippery, and even though Arafat keeps on delivering speeches in public against terrorism, the hostility and bloodshed in the Middle East persists hopelessly (Rubin 82). On September 9, 1993, the PLO and the State of Israel reached an agreement to recognize each other after almost five decades of disagreement. Several days afterward, both sides approved the Declaration of Principles (DOP) which would form the basis of a wide-ranging peace process. The DOP was ratified by PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, PLO Executive Council Member Mahmoud Abbas, and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (Rubin 96). It was a time that most people thought would never arrive, and an event that was honored passionately. As the 21st century began, Yasser Arafat had been a political leader, a national ruler, head of his own organization, and a revolutionary. Nevertheless, in spite of all these duties and prospects, he had failed to carry his people toward complete independence, peace, or success. He was good at preserving his personal status and sustaining internal solidarity. The loyalty of Arafat was to the Palestinian interest and not to the people themselves. Such objectives as improving quality of life and creating a unified, peaceful society, alongside numerous other attributes of political expediency are unimportant to him. Therefore, Arafat held back the solution to the conflict, creating needless catastrophe and pointless suffering. He felt safe in this chaos, unmindful of the outcomes of his own choices and actions. However, whether or not Arafat was conscious of it, he did display a strong, unfailing political ideology rooted in a trusted and proven philosophy (Rubin & Rubin 218): “when you are losing is precisely the best time to act as if you were the victor; flexibility encourages pressure on yourself, but if you stand firm, conditions will eventually change in your favor; convince adversaries you are ready to make a deal and that one more concession by them will solve everything; denying responsibility for an action or claiming moderation, no matter how obviously untrue, will make some believe you while others suspend judgment; the man who causes crises is the one others must appease to end them; and few will notice if you say contradictory things to different audiences.” The importance of a leader is not merely proven by the scale of his accomplishments, but also by the scale of the struggles and hindrances he had to surmount. In this regard, Arafat has no rival. Arafat’s leadership has been tested by very difficult challenges. When his leadership became widely known, his people were nearing void. Palestine had been erased from humanity’s consciousness. The world thought that a Palestinian identity is nonexistent. When Arafat formed the Palestinian Liberation Movement-- Fatah, he aspired to liberate Palestine in order to give the Palestinian people an opportunity to voice out and represent their interests. It was a perilous move. Fatah was lacking an autonomous foundation. It had to operate within the Arab states, usually under cruel harassments. For instance, at some point the entire leadership of the campaign, including Arafat was imprisoned by the Syrian tyrant of the time, after challenging his directives (Rubin 214). This period was a decisive influence on the distinctive attitude of Arafat. Arafat had to manipulate his way through the Arab rulers, use deceits, avoid traps and dodge hindrances. He became a top-notch manipulator. Through these steps he was able to rescue the liberation campaign from numerous threats in the time of its failing, until it could transform into a powerful entity. The Egyptian head, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser, who was the champion of the whole Arab kingdom during that time, became troubled about the expanding autonomous Palestinian entity. To end its progress, he formed the PLO and assigned Ahmed Shukeiri, a Palestinian political aggressor, as its head (Rubin 178). However, after the embarrassing riot of the Arab armed forces in 1967 and the exhilarating triumph of the Fatah combatants against the Israeli military in the Karameh war, Fatah seized the PLO and Arafat ascended as the head of the whole Palestinian movement (Rubin 178). In the 1960s, Arafat began his next campaign—the fight against Israel. This campaign successfully raised the Palestinian cause at the global arena. It should be argued openly: without the violent activities, the word would have ignored the Palestinian cause. Consequently, the PLO was acknowledged as the “sole representative of the Palestinian people” (Rubin 179), and three decades ago Arafat was asked to deliver his memorable address to the UN General Assembly: “In one hand I carry a gun, in the other an olive branch…” (Rubin 179) Arafat believes that the armed conflict was only a method. Not a philosophy, not an objective in itself. He knew that this process would enliven the Palestinians and draw the attention of the world. Arafat made a decision that the PLO should forge an agreement with Israel and be satisfied with a Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. He began to take steps to realize this objective. Contemporary history insists that it should be definitely mentioned that it was Arafat who visualized the Oslo Accords during the time Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin was trapped in the unpromising ‘Jordanian Option’, the assumption that one may take for granted the Palestinians and return the West Bank to Jordan (Rubin & Rubin 59-61). The misfortune of Arafat was that every time he was nearing a diplomatic, nonviolent solution, the Israeli state pulled out from it. Arafat’s conditions were definite and stayed the same from 1974 onward (Rubin 182): abandonment of all the Israeli camps in the Palestinian area; reinstatement of the pre-1967 boundary with the likelihood of restricted and fair territorial transactions; the independence of Palestine over East Jerusalem; and a Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. For the Palestinian people, these conditions are already the bare minimum. Tawakel Karman: The Female Liberator Yemen is an especially difficult and interesting case. Ali Abdullah, its president, was getting older and confronting a transition after his more than three decades reign. Opposition to his government surfaced in 2011. A key leader of several of these oppositions was Tawakel Karman, a Yemeni militant who would eventually receive the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts (Nelson 128). Karman’s contribution and her political association made the democratic protests in Yemen look like the consequence of the other Arab oppositions, characterized by the participation of Islamic democrats, including Karman. Karman is widely known as the ‘mother of the revolution’ in Yemen (Anarwala 51). A daring, outspoken member of the press had fought for freedom of expression in traditional Yemen even prior to the oppositions that devastated the nation in 2011. She said (Nelson 128): When I heard the news that I had got the Nobel Peace Prize, I was in my tent in the Taghyeer Square in Sana’a. I was one of millions of revolutionary youth. There, we were not even able to secure our safety from the repression and oppression of the regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh. At that moment, I contemplated the distinction between the meanings of peace celebrated by the Nobel Prize, and the tragedy of the aggression waged… against the forces of peaceful change. However, our joy of being on the right side of history made it easier for us to bear the devastating irony. Tawakel, moved by Tunisian Revolution, mobilized a large number of youngsters for a protest. Karman advocacy started when she formed in 2005 the Women Journalists Without Chains to assist in the dissemination of information about the oppression of the members of the press by the Yemeni government (Anarwala 51). Yet, she achieved worldwide acclaim when she participated in the 2011 youth revolution in Yemen. At the beginning of the revolution, Karman was taken into custody on the allegation of mobilizing an unlawful public assembly and afterward freed after a torrent of public support (White 184). Interestingly, Karman is a constituent of the Al-Islah political party—a group considered by the youth as incompetent as the present administration. Hence, although some have referred to her ‘the mother of the revolution’, others argue that she has seized the revolution from the youth. Karman answered this allegation, stating, “Our party needs the youth, but the youth also need the parties to help them organize. Neither will succeed in overthrowing this regime without the other” (Anarwala 51). Karman publicly expressed her gratitude to the Yemeni people who acted out their opposition nonviolently when they could simply have initiated an armed struggle. This proves their commitment to maintain the serenity and diplomacy of their truthful motives, according to Karman. Tawakel carried the revolution to New York in 2011, in a discussion with Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon and mobilizing protests at the UN head office in Manhattan (Nelson 129). Her objective is to pressure the UN Security Council to implement a decision that represented the desires of the massive numbers of Yemeni people who had carried out diplomatic protests for reform. The fact that the Yemeni revolution was being headed by a woman was an appealing idea to numerous international scholars. Nevertheless, the biography of Karman and her reputation as an activist were more complicated than the citation of the Nobel Committee proposed. She was without a doubt deserving of the international acclaim accompanying the Peace Prize, but not essentially due to the reasons specified. The Committee acknowledged Karman, together with Liberian activists Leymah Gbowee and Ellen Sirleaf, “for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women’s rights to full participation in peace-building work” (Anarwala 52). But Karman visited the UN pressuring the organization to initiate political change, of the sort that would expand the political autonomy of the Yemeni people, and build a new administration more responsible and answerable to the people. She was definitely not fighting for the rights of women. The Committee, in its citation, undervalued the efforts of a multifaceted militant whose attempts had been limited outside and within the party from which she surfaced (Anarwala 52). Failing to recognize Tawakel as both a source and outcome of reform in the relationship between society and state in Yemen, it is very hard to appreciate her efforts or the fact that a large number of Yemenis were highly receptive to her demand for continuous diplomacy. Discussion and Conclusions As true leaders, both Yasser Arafat and Tawakel Karman tried to surpass all the limitations or hindrances to their vision. They both confronted the adversities. Due to their dedication and audacity, they gained the confidence, sympathy, and respect of their people. They are the great enemies of their governments, and are their people’s champions. Both fought for freedom: Arafat for Palestinian freedom, and Karman for freedom of expression and the press. Both were severely criticized for their actions, but both remained undaunted. Both had a similar adversary: the dominant regime that oppresses and marginalizes its people. And ultimately, both used their intellect and charisma to advance their objectives and interests. There are only a few differences between these two great leaders. First is the scope of their objectives. Arafat has a bigger objective, that is, to build a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, while Karman has a narrower goal, that is, to promote freedom of expression. Second is the method of struggle. Arafat used armed conflict whereas Karman used nonviolent means. Third is their target of manipulation. Arafat focused on Arab leaders whereas Karman tried to pressure global organizations, like the United Nations. And lastly is the nature of adversities confronted. Arafat’s misfortunes were mostly caused by political forces while Karman’s tragedies were both political and social (i.e. being a woman) in nature. The Nobel Peace Prize is a very prestigious award. Not only because it is internationally recognized, but because of the nature of the award itself. In a world fraught with wars, conflicts, and disagreements, it becomes almost impossible to promote peace. But Arafat and Karman proved the world wrong, which is why they are deserving of the award. Even though many criticize them for their methods and intentions, they both firmly upheld their aspirations for their country and their people. Both belonged to conflict-ridden countries, but still found the audacity to fight the oppressive system. They gave up their personal safety, particularly Arafat, to advance their cause. They informed the people of their rights and their capabilities to advance these rights through peaceful means. Even though there are those who opposed them, it remains clear that many of their people value them as leaders. Works Cited Anarwala, Zeeba. “Tawakkul Karman: First Female Arab Nobel Laureate”, Islamic Horizons 41.1 (2012): 51-53. Print. Nelson, Alyse. Vital Voices: The Power of Women Leading Change Around the World. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2012. Print. Rubin, Barry. Revolution Until Victory? The Politics and History of the PLO. New York: Harvard University Press, 1994. Print. Rubin, Barry & Judy Rubin. Yasir Arafat: a political biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print. White, Jenny. Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Print. Read More