Scribblings

Bye, bye Yasser Arafat

So it’s goodbye to Yasser Arafat. It’s difficult to know what to say about him. He was a complicated, flawed man but one who managed to keep the plight of the Palestinian people in the news for forty years. Until he came along they had simply been a ‘refugee problem’. Now they are seen, quite rightly, as a people without a country. I only hope that whoever succeeds him manages to keep that image intact and, more importantly, achieves at least some of the degree of nationhood which had eluded Arafat for so long.

Posted 12 November 2004, 15:23
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