published 20/08/2002 at 01:55 BST by David Hirst
A Palestinian-born patriot turned psychopath, his murderous terrorist career discredited his people and aided only Israel.
All Palestinian resistance leaders took a nom de guerre. Like Yasser Arafat's Abu Ammar, most were just names. Others embodied an idea. But the man who, at the outset of his career, so grandly
styled himself Abu Nidal, or "father of struggle", came, by the end of it, to be regarded by most of his compatriots as the antithesis of all the name stood for, the begetter of all that was most
treacherous and destructive of the cause he had seemingly espoused more passionately than anyone else. He has apparently committed suicide in Baghdad at the age of 65.
All irregulars are tempted by superfluous violence and cruelty. The Palestinians were no exception. But none within their ranks exemplified this scourge like Abu Nidal. He was the patriot turned psychopath. He served only himself, only the warped personal drives
that pushed him into hideous crime. He was the ultimate mercenary.
His genius lay in his ability to secure one patron after another - even two, possibly three, mutually hostile ones at once - for the gruesome favours he performed in that underworld of middle
eastern conflict of which, in his heyday, he was the undisputed, monstrous king. The patrons were Arab - Iraq, Syria, Libya - but, almost incredibly, they may well have been Israeli too.
It was a decade or so after the Calamity - as the Palestinians call the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, on the debris and dispersal of their own community - that a generation of exiles,
despairing of collective Arab action to liberate the lost homeland, began to think seriously of shouldering the task themselves. The Che Guevara legend was at its apogeé; they would accomplish
the return in a "people's war".
Most had been children in 1948. They were haunted not just by the loss of country, but by individual memories of the ethnic cleansing that had brought it about, the purposeful terror, killings,
expulsion from home and property, panic flight, and subsequent misery and destitution of refugee camps. In many, it bred a vague personal desire for revenge; in a few, an ambition to emulate, or
outdo, the terrorism of which they had been victims.
The experience had been searing for Abu Nidal, but, if it left unusually deep and disturbing
effects on him, that is because his was already a deeply disturbed personality. The child is father of the man, and Abu Nidal was not the only ogre of our times who, as grown man, took terrible, disproportionate revenge
on his fellow men for the sufferings of his infancy.
Unlike most leaders of the Palestine revolution, rural or lower middle-class in origin, Sabri al-Banna - such was his real name - was born to wealth, ease and respectability. Palestine was famous
for its oranges, and Sabri's father, Khalil, owned a large plantation on the coastal plain south of Jaffa. He had 11 children by his first wife; they lived in a spacious, three-storey house,
close enough to the sea for them to take a quick dip on their way to school.
The family also owned a summer home in the tree-clad highlands of northern Syria. The inhabitants of this region, the impoverished, oppressed minority Alawites, hired out their daughters as
domestic servants. In his dotage, Khalil took one of these, a 16-year-old, as his second wife. In 1937, she bore him his 12th child, Sabri. Scorned from birth by his half-brothers and sisters,
his plight grew worse when, on his father's death in 1945, his mother was turned out of the house.
Suddenly, in the winter of 1948, the once prosperous al-Banna family found themselves huddled, with the ordinary folk of Palestine, in the bitter cold of a Gaza refugee camp. Then they moved to
Jordan. There, their embittered and vengeful teenage son faced further humiliation; hungry and ragged, he survived on charity and odd jobs as errand boy or electrician's assistant. However,
though he had received almost no education, he was smart and ambitious. Struggling to read on his own, he came upon the underground literature of the Ba'ath, one of the revolutionary movements of
an Arab world then in political ferment.
He joined it. At some point, he began to study engineering in Cairo, but failed to complete the course, though while in Egypt he did meet and marry the Palestinian Hayam al-Bitar (they had one
son, Nidal). Then, like many a future resistance leader, he emigrated to the newly oil-rich Gulf.
In the Saudi capital Riyadh, he set up a successful business. At the same time, he styled himself Abu
Nidal, and gathered together a group of young men he called the Palestine Secret Organisation; its ultimate aim was to reconquer the usurped homeland.
It was one of many such groups. Much the biggest was Yasser Arafat's Fatah; in due course, Abu
Nidal joined that too. With the new calamity of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, and the loss of Palestine in its entirety, he became more fanatical, more convinced that "only the gun", never mind
the ideology behind it, counted. Expelled as a subversive from Saudi Arabia, he returned to Jordan, the new resistance base.
Even then, Abu Nidal showed little taste for conventional armed struggle, still less for the
chaotic methods and factionalism of the major guerrilla outfits. He was methodical, orderly, hard-working. These qualities recommended him to the Fatah leadership, especially to its intelligence
chief, Abu Iyad. Thanks to the latter's patronage, it was as a diplomat, far from the military arena, that he now rose to prominence, first as Fatah's envoy to Khartoum, and then, in 1970, to
Ba'athist-ruled Baghdad.
In the Iraqi capital, a kindred spirit called Saddam Hussein was laying the foundations of a uniquely brutal
tyranny, and it was here, appropriately, that Abu Nidal's miscreant career truly began. That
September - "Black September" to the Palestinians - King Hussein of Jordan unleashed his bedouin troops on
Yasser Arafat's guerrilla state-within-his-state. But far from getting Iraq, which already had 14,000 troops inside the Hashemite kingdom, to come to the guerrillas' aid, Abu Nidal went on Baghdad Radio to denounce the Fatah leadership for its cowardice, singling out his
benefactor, Abu Iyad, for special abuse.
From Baghdad, in 1973, he mounted his first "foreign operation", as acts of international terrorism were euphemistically known. Typically, this was the hijacking of a Saudi, not an Israeli,
airliner. He did it at Iraq's behest - a readiness to lend himself to others' purposes that he almost flaunted when, three years later, he turned on the Ba'athist regime in Syria.
The feud between Saddam and Syria's President Assad was one of the Middle East's most vicious. In June 1975, Assad had sent his army into Lebanon, newly racked by civil war, to fight not the Israeli-backed Maronite Christians,
but the Palestinian guerrillas. It was about the worst heresy a Syrian ruler could commit. Saddam thought he
could bring the embattled heretic Assad down. So, on the Iraqi leader's behalf, in the name of an organisation
called Black June, Abu Nidal sent raiders into Syria. Once, four of them took 90 people hostage
in the Semiramis hotel in central Damascus; troops stormed the building, and three surviving gunmen were hanged outside it.
Like Saddam, Abu
Nidal did not reserve his viciousness for the enemy. Paranoid, despotic, capricious and cruel, he instituted a reign of terror within his own organisation, the so-called Fatah revolutionary
council. Cadres could be "executed" for the most trivial reasons, like going on a shopping expedition with a member of the rival, mainstream Fatah.
Officially, of course, he was doing it all for Palestine, or rather, against those who, in his view, were betraying Palestine. They had done so, in "Black September", by making peace with King
Hussein. They did so again, far more seriously, after the partial Arab success in the October 1973 war, and the new era of Arab-Israeli peace-seeking to which it gave birth.
The PLO adopted a new strategy of moderation, announcing it was ready to set up a provisional "national authority" on something less than the whole of historic Palestine as a first step towards a
final, negotiated settlement, the establishment of a Palestinian state coexistent with Israel. The move was anathema to the rejectionists, who clung to a belief in "total liberation".
Abu Nidal warned of a Palestinian civil war - and did his best to provoke it. He was the only
rejectionist not merely to oppose the moderates, but to set about killing them. So it was that this outwardly most fanatical of Israel's foes hardly bothered with Israeli targets at all. His
operations were now directed, almost exclusively, against Arafat and the "capitulationists".
In 1978, the PLO's man in London, Said Hammami, became the first of several victims. He had been meeting secretly with Israeli doves; elsewhere, Egypt's President Sadat had just concluded the
Camp David peace agreement, the first of its kind between Israel and an Arab state. The murder of the PLO's best and brightest spokesmen in the west was Abu Nidal's way of stopping the rot.
Of course, this turn of events suited Israel down to the ground. A rightwing expansionist and founding father of middle-eastern terrorism, Menachem Begin, had just come to power in Jerusalem.
Like all extremists, what he feared most was the moderation of the other side. So, even more obsessively than before, it was Israel's policy to destroy the PLO, to fix it indelibly in the
international mind as the terrorist organisation it had never wholly been (and was so less and less).
No one helped this strategy like Abu Nidal. Even though the PLO was his victim, that made little
difference to international opinion unschooled in the niceties of intra-Palestinian politics; it seemed only to bear out what Israel said about the essentially murderous nature of the whole
gang.
In the early 1980s, Saddam Hussein, hitherto the most rejectionist of Arab leaders, sought a new role as
regional strongman, and protector of western interests against Ayatollah Khomeini and the fundamentalist peril emanating from Iran. Abu Nidal did not fit this respectable image, so he was driven from Baghdad.
But the mercenary in him had no qualms about finding a new home in Ba'athist Syria, whose once "treacherous, Alawite, sectarian regime" now became the "citadel of Arabism" standing against the
"fascist dictator" Saddam. Damascus had one task for Abu Nidal: to shoot Jordanian diplomats wherever he could, Jordan, with its peace overtures to Israel,
being Syria's chief enemy of the moment.
After two years of that, Abu Nidal moved, in 1985, to Libya, his most congenial home. He and
Colonel Gadafy were instant buddies - Abu Nidal called Gadafy "the latter-day Saladin", and, in
return, was showered with favours of all kinds, the use of planes, embassies, diplomatic pouches, free apartments, and even a couple of farms to remind him of the orange groves of his youth.
According to his biographer Patrick Seale (Abu Nidal: A Gun For Hire, 1992), he all but took
control of the Libyan intelligence apparatus.
Once again, he loyally performed his mercenary chores. He helped kill "stray dogs", as Gadafy called his opponents in exile; in one particularly horrible exploit, in 1986, Abu Nidal hijacked an Egyptian airliner - the Colonel had it in for President Mubarak at the time - and 61 passengers died when Egyptian commandos stormed the plane in Malta. He was, by
now, a big-league international gangster too; blackmailing oil-rich Arab and European states, he amassed a fortune eventually estimated at $400m, financing an organisation at least 2,000-strong,
with agents in the Middle East, Europe and Asia. Pure extortion accounted for a goodly portion of the 900 or so exploits in 20 countries that his career encompassed.
Abu Nidal's international notoriety reached its apogee in the late 1980s, with such activities as
the machine-gun and grenade attack on a synagogue in Istanbul and the onslaught on the El Al counters at Rome and Vienna airports. Astonishingly, aside from the 1982 shooting of the Israeli
ambassador in London, which triggered Begin's invasion of Lebanon, these were the first, and virtually the only, attacks he mounted on Jewish or Israeli targets.
But they did no less disservice to the Palestine cause. They disgraced it in western eyes. Indeed, Rome and Vienna were chosen because Italy and Austria were, at the time, showing such sympathy
for that cause, and seeking to legitimise the PLO.
It was all the more outrageous in that Abu Nidal never even bothered to prove his patriotic
credentials in the way that others, moderate or rejectionist, always had. He had many followers in south Lebanon, but not once did they mount a conventional guerrilla raid into Israel. When, in
1987, the first Palestinian intifada broke out in the occupied territories, his men did not throw a single stone. He persisted in random atrocities whose only conceivable purpose, if purpose they
had, was to alienate the very countries where Palestine was most in favour.
In the end, it became so outrageous that, in the late 1980s, his own best men rebelled against it. Their leader, Atif Abu Bakr, wanted to end all foreign operations, rejoin the PLO, participate
in conventional armed struggle and back the intifada. But Abu Nidal was too smart and ruthless
for them; he regained control with a purge, carried out by his committee for revolutionary justice, in which some 600 men, almost a third of his org- anisation, were murdered in Lebanon and
Libya. He would order executions in the middle of the night when, after a heavy bout of whisky-drinking, his paranoia and vindictiveness were at their worst.
Sometimes, while the committee waited for its leader to confirm a death sentence, a prisoner would be placed in a freshly-dug grave with the earth shoveled over. A steel pipe in his mouth allowed
him to breathe. Water was poured in from time to time to keep him alive. When the word came, a bullet was shot down the tube, which was removed and the hole filled up.
By this time, it seems, Abu Nidal was just about insane - insane enough, perhaps, for his
mercenary impulses to have carried him into the service of the "Zionist enemy" itself. That he was Israel's supreme intelligence coup, its agent extraordinary, had long been the conviction of
many, and none more so than his earliest patron, Fatah second-in-command Abu Iyad. In 1991, after many attempts, he had him killed in Tunis.
This was Abu Nidal's last recorded triumph. Little was heard of him thereafter, until, in 1998,
it was reported that he had found yet another patron, none other than peaceable, respectable, pro-western Egypt, which had borrowed him from Libya for its war on Islamist terror.
It was rather a comedown for the man whom the United States used to call "the most dangerous terrorist in the world." But, in any case, that distinction had already passed to the billionaire
Saudi Islamist, Osama bin Laden, and, as a product of an earlier, secular radicalism, Abu Nidal's
time was past.
Whether he was literally Israel's man or not, one thing is sure: no terrorist - except Begin himself - rendered Israel greater services.
Abu Nidal (Sabri al-Banna), terrorist, born May 1937; died August 16 2002