RAMALLAH, West Bank – Yasser Arafat was buried Friday in the place where he spent his last years as a virtual prisoner, seen off in a huge and chaotic outpouring of grief for the man who embodied the Palestinian people’s dream of statehood.
Police firing in the air failed to restore order as the tens of thousands of mourners rushed toward the coffin, struggling to be close to their leader – hailed as a Nobel Peace laureate and branded a terrorist – for one final time.
“President Arafat would have wanted it this way, with exhilaration, feelings of loyalty, pain, sadness and love all at once,” Palestinian legislator Hanan Ashrawi said. “The people reclaimed him. They wanted to say goodbye without distance.”
Just hours after Arafat was laid to rest in a stone-and-marble tomb, President Bush said his death provided “a great chance to establish a Palestinian state,” and pledged in his second term “to spend the capital of the United States on such a state.”
The frenzied burial took place at Arafat’s headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, where Israel had kept him under siege for nearly three years. It came just hours after an orderly funeral ceremony in Cairo, where the only outburst of emotion was the quiet weeping of Arafat’s 9-year-old daughter, Zahwa, standing beside her veiled mother, Suha.
Where that service gave foreign dignitaries an opportunity to bid a formal farewell to the 75-year-old Palestinian leader, his burial in Ramallah allowed the Palestinian masses, who adored Arafat even as the United States and Israel tried to marginalize him, to say goodbye.
“Everyone wanted to carry the coffin, to touch it, to say goodbye to the president,” said Ahmed Tirawi, 22, a West Bank villager.
Arafat’s death Thursday at a French military hospital shocked many Palestinians, who had never considered life without the man who led them for nearly four decades and transformed their struggle from a refugee problem into an international crisis.
Associated Press
Palestinians watch from a tree as others carry the coffin of Yasser Arafat in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Friday.
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