Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2002, pages 48-50

Special Report

 

Abu Nidal: “Nationalist Turned Psychopath”?

 

By Sami Moubayed

One of the most destructive figures in Palestine’s modern history, who has brought nothing but blood and disgrace to the Palestinian cause, was the late Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal). His life—drenched in rivalry, assassination and espionage—reminded me of that of Elie Hobeika, which also ended abruptly when the Lebanese warlord was blown apart in a Beirut explosion in January 2002.

Over a 30-year career, Abu Nidal killed some of Palestine’s ablest statesmen, alienated foreign countries sympathetic to the Arab cause, and made the word Palestinian synonymous with the word terrorist. Patrick Seale, the Middle East expert and author of the Abu Nidal biography A Gun for Hire, described him best, as “a nationalist turned psychopath.” Abu Nidal, Seale added, was “an outlaw and a killer,” noting that “to be awash in blood [as Abu Nidal had been] is not a normal human condition.”

Abu Nidal began his career as a staunch Arab nationalist and member of Syria’s underground Ba’ath Party in Jordan, before moving on to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement. In 1970, he became Arafat’s envoy to Iraq, where he was bought off by the Ba’ath Party regime of President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr. The Iraqi president hated Arafat and wanted an effective alternative to bring him down—or at least challenge Arafat’s moderate authority and willingness to recognize and negotiate peace with Israel.

Backed by Bakr, Abu Nidal made his terrorist debut in September 1973, when he seized the Saudi Embassy in Paris and took 13 diplomats hostage. They would be freed, he claimed, only if the late Saudi King Faisal pressured King Hussein of Jordan to release the thousands of Palestinian guerrillas he had imprisoned in 1970. To show he was serious, Abu Nidal ordered his agents to fly over Riyadh and threaten to throw off the hostages, one by one, if Faisal did not comply immediately. After three days this amateur operation ended in failure—but more was yet to come.

An embarrassed Arafat expelled Abu Nidal from Fatah and, in revenge, in October 1974 Abu Nidal tried to kill the PLO’s number-two man, Abu Mazen. After being tried in absentsia in a PLO court, Abu Nidal was sentenced to death. This prompted his all-out war against Arafat, and his claim that the only way to deal with his Arab opponents was “the gun, only the gun!”

In January 1978, six months after Menachem Begin’s rise to power in Israel, Abu Nidal began to kill off PLO moderates calling for peace talks with Begin and the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. Dismissing them all as traitors, Abu Nidal murdered Said Hammami, the PLO ambassador in London, in January 1978. That August Arafat’s envoy to France, Izz al-Dinn al-Qalaq, was slain, and a few days later his ambassador to Pakistan, Yusuf Abu Hantash, barely escaped an assassination attempt.

In April 1980, Abu Nidal tried to kill Abu Iyad, the PLO’s intelligence chief in Belgrade, and in June 1981, he had Na’im Khudur, PLO ambassador in Brussels, shot. The following month veteran PLO commando Abu Dawoud barely escaped death in Warsaw, and, in April 1983, Dr. Issam Sartawi, one of the most seasoned Palestinian statesmen and vocal advocates of peace, was gunned down in Lisbon.

These were precisely the men who were internationalizing the Palestinian cause and influencing Western public opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict.

When Syria entered the war in Lebanon in June 1976, Iraqi President Bakr clashed with Damascus over its decision to support the Christian militias in their war against Lebanon’s Muslims, and unleashed Abu Nidal on the Syrians. Declaring a Black June in Damascus, similar to King Hussein’s Black September against the Palestinian commandos in 1970, Abu Nidal blew up Syrian embassies in Istanbul and Rome. He planted bombs at the Syrian Airlines offices in Kuwait and in trashcans scattered across Damascus. In September 1976, Abu Nidal’s men seized the Semiramis Hotel in downtown Damascus, taking 90 people hostage. In October 1977, he tried to kill then-Foreign Minister Abdul Halim Khaddam. Although the Syrian minister escaped, UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Sayf al-Ghubash was slain instead.

In 1980, when Iraq embarked on its war with Iran, new Iraqi President Saddam Hussain, needing to brandish his regional and international image, decided to expel Abu Nidal. In an historical irony, the Palestinian guerrilla took temporary residence in Syria, offerng his services to the Syrian government.

From Damascus, Abu Nidal provided his new patrons with information on the Muslim Brotherhood, who were waging a war against the regime of Hafez Al-Assad (and whom he had helped train in Baghdad), and pledged to destabilize the throne of Jordan’s King Hussein, who also was at odds with the late Syrian president.

In October 1983, the Jordanian ambassador in New Delhi was killed. The following March Abu Nidal set off a bomb next to the Amman Intercontinental Hotel. In December 1984, he killed the Jordanian envoy to Bucharest and, in April 1985, blew up Amman’s embassy in Rome. In July 1985, the Madrid office of Alia (the Jordanian airline) was gunned-down.

Fed up, Hussein brought Abu Nidal onto his payroll. While still residing on Syrian soil, Abu Nidal began launching attacks on his host country. He set off bombs at the Damascus offices of the Syrian Arab News Agency and the Syrian Minister of Interior, and tried to demolish the Syrian Embassy in London.

When he finally fell from grace in both Damascus and Amman, he turned to the Arab Gulf—not for the cause of Palestine, but simply to make more money. Biographer Seale describes Abu Nidal as having become nothing more than a “highway robber.”

In June 1982, he killed a Kuwaiti diplomat in Delhi, and that September murdered another in Madrid. Then, in February 1984, Abu Nidal killed the UAE ambassador to Paris, and in April 1987 crashed a Gulf Air plane en route from Dubai to Karachi. He then moved to Libya, where he was charged with killing off members of the opposition to leader Muammar Qaddafi’s regime.

Following Abu Nidal’s death in August, his former right-hand man, Atif Abu Bakr, who was director of the Revolutionary Council’s political bureau, gave a series of interviews to the London-based al-Hayat implicating him in the December 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.

When the first Palestinian intifada broke out in 1987, Abu Nidal refused to support it or provide it with money, claiming that it was pro-Arafat. Instead, he worked to further alienate foreign opinion for the Palestinian cause. He began to kill indiscriminately—not Palestinian opponents, not Arabs, nor Israelis, but foreigners who were unconnected in any way to the Arab-Israeli conflict. In 1988, he set off a car bomb in Cyprus, killing tens and alienating Cypriot opinion from the Arab cause. Other senseless killings were made in the Sudan and in Athens, where he attacked a cruise ship on holiday. Abu Nidal killed off Saudi diplomats and took French children hostages—damaging whatever support Palestine had in Europe. He followed the same policy regarding the current intifada that broke out in September 2000.

Now Abu Nidal is dead, and nobody in the world seems to miss him. The contradicting reports from Baghdad show, however, that, even in death, Abu Nidal raises controversy. Some claim that President Saddam Hussain ordered his death, to prove that he was keen on cracking down on terrorism himself. Supporters of this argument claim that the official Iraqi alibi, which claims that Abu Nidal committed suicide when summoned for interrogation for illegally entering the country on a false passport, is hard to believe. First, the Iraqis know more than anyone that Abu Nidal had never in his life carried a real passport and that all his identity papers were fake. Moreover, in a regime like Iraq’s, fearful as it is of a possible U.S. attack, it is unlikely that someone as controversial as Abu Nidal, who is very well known in Baghdad, would be living in the country without government approval.

Another, more convincing theory claims that Abu Nidal had been working as a double agent for both the Kuwaiti and Iraqi governments since the 1991 Gulf war. Published in the Paris-based al-Watan al-Arabi, this version has it that Abu Nidal’s bases on the outskirts of Baghdad were transformed into detention centers for Kuwaitis following the Gulf war. Abu Nidal, it is said, was able to compile files on the names, location and condition of all Kuwaiti nationals in Iraq, along with tape recordings and video footage of their interrogation, and had been negotiating a deal with the Kuwaiti government to exchange the files for $150 million in order to frame Baghdad in the context of the upcoming U.S. offensive. After much debate, the story goes, the figure had been lowered to $100 million.

If the Iraqis did kill him for this—or any—reason, however, they have done humanity a favor. If, on the other hand, Abu Nidal killed himself, as the Iraqis claim, it is only natural that a man so immersed in blood, so accustomed to taking the life of others, would allow no one but himself to take his own life.

Either way, Abu Nidal is dead—and the world is a little better than it was before.

Sami Moubayed is a Syrian political analyst.

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