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CounterPunch
August
20, 2002
The Two Deaths of Abu Nidal
by Robert Fisk
The Independent
He has died again. This time, Abu Nidal has killed
himself. Ten years ago, he died of cancer. Before that, he was
shot to death in Libya. Sabri al-Banna, among the most vicious
criminals of the Middle East, seems to go on being reincarnated
for the benefit of dying all over again. Now it's by his own
hand, of gunshot wounds in Baghdad.
All things to all men, I suppose it's
inevitable that he would have to die in every way. He worked
for the Iraqi secret service and the Libyan secret service and,
briefly it seems, for the Syrian secret service. Patrick Seale,
the only writer to attempt a serious biography, claimed he also
worked for Mossad, Israel's equally incompetent intelligence
service. Abu Nidal was the beast before the beast before Osama
bin Laden.
Remember him? He was the face on the
Newsweek magazine report that Colonel Oliver North flourished
before the American inquiry into the Iran-Contra scandal.
We have a habit of dispatching our most
hated enemies before their deaths. The Times sent Ayatollah Khomeini
on his way five years before his death. We warned of Colonel
Muammar Gaddafi's imminent demise--from cancer, of course--even
before we first announced Abu Nidal's death. Yasser Arafat's
political death has been declared in 1978, 1982, 1983, 1990,
2001 and 2002. Saddam Hussein's demise was predicted in 1980,
1986, 1988, 1990, 1991, 2001 and 2002. And yes, President Saddam
often had cancer too. Just as Osama bin Laden now has kidney
failure ...
The fictional death should not obscure
the fact that Abu Nidal is/was/used to be one of the nastiest
criminals of the Middle East. He was a gun to hire, a man who
ordered the killing of Jews in an Istanbul synagogue, of moderate
Palestinians close to Mr Arafat (including Abu Iyad), of passengers
at Rome and Vienna airports, the man who tried to kill the Israeli
ambassador to London in 1982, the event that gave Israel the
excuse to invade Lebanon with the claim--totally untrue--that
Mr Arafat had ordered the murder.
He had staged attacks in 20 countries
over more than three decades, had visited eastern Europe during
the Warsaw Pact years, had even arranged the murder of one of
the Palestinians' first envoys to Britain. He drank--or drinks,
for let us not be sure he is really dead yet--copious amounts
of whiskey but disdains other vices, save murder, that is.
His Fatah Revolutionary Council regularly
suffered internal revolutions that left its own members in their
graves. In Lebanon, suspected collaborators were buried alive,
fed juice through a tube into their mouths and then, when word
came from Libya that they should be executed, a bullet would
be fired down the tube.
Abu Nidal spent part of his youth in
Nablus in the Israeli-occupied West Bank but, presumably, we
shall never know what he thought of the collapse of the Oslo
"peace"--an event he would profoundly have wished to
see.
At his movement's office in Beirut yesterday,
there was not a black flag or a wreath to be seen. In fact, it
was totally empty--not unlike the group of ruthless and cruel
gunmen who worked for him over more than a quarter of a century.
His "suicide" might come as
a gift to an American administration longing to connect Saddam
Hussein to "world terror". As for his real death, I
suspect it came long ago.
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August 20,
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