BACKGROUND
L'Affaire Habash
The handling of George Habash's "medical
emergency" is another example of France
coddling known terrorists.
HELEN DAVIS
Foreign Correspondent
G
eorge Habash, head
of the Popular Front
for the Liberation of
Palestine and godfather of
international terrorism, flew
out of Paris last weekend,
leaving a trail of political
devastation and wrecked ca-
reers in his wake.
Mr. Habash, whose name
is synonymous with aircraft
hijackings and whose
Syrian-based rejectionist
movement remains locked in
a Marxist-Leninist time-
warp, was flown to the
Henri-Dunant Hospital in
Paris late last week, osten-
sibly to be treated for a
stroke.
The affair provoked an
angry response in
Jerusalem, where Foreign
Minister David Levy de-
scribed it as "a slap in the
face for all those who fight
terror." It also sparked a po-
litical crisis in France,
which has an undistinguish-
ed history of cynical expe-
diency in dealing with Pa-
lestinian terrorists.
By early this week, three
top-ranking civil servants in
France's foreign and interior
ministries, as well as
Georgina Dufoix, who was
social affairs minister before
being appointed special ad-
visor to President Francois
Mitterrand, had been forced
to resign over the affair.
That, however, is unlikely
to be enough to spare the
French political echelon, and
additional well-coiffured
heads are likely to roll as the
domestic dimension of the
scandal expands.
One early political
sacrifice is expected to be
Interior Minister Philippe
Marchand. However, Mr.
Mitterrand is expected to
fight hard to prevent the fall
of Foreign Minister Roland
Dumas, his former law part-
ner, and the deeply un-
popular Prime Minister,
Edith Cresson, whose depar-
ture now would strip his so-
cialist administration of any
residual credibility.
The offense that cost the
French officials their jobs,
and which now threatens to
engulf President Mitter-
rand's most senior political
cronies, is not that they ap-
proved the entry into France
of one of the world's most
wanted terrorists, but that
they were caught doing it.
Mr. Habash, 65, the son of
a grain merchant who was
born in the village of Lydda,
reportedly suffered a stroke
while attending a PLO
meeting in Tunis. According
to the official version, his
trip was approved by Mrs.
Dufoix, who doubles as pres-
ident of the French Red
Cross, following a request
from Palestinian Red Cres-
cent head Fathi Arafat,
brother of PLO leader Yassir
Arafat.
President Mitterrand and
Mr. Dumas, who have prov-
ed staunch friends of Pales-
tinian leaders over the past
decade, were visiting the
Gulf state of Oman when
Mr. Habash touched down in
Paris and expressed surprise
when the news broke of his
arrival.
"They are all mad," Presi-
dent Mitterrand reportedly
Habash engineered
the 1976 hijacking
of a French Airbus
to Uganda that
ended with Israel's
legendary rescue
mission at
Entebbe.
said of his officials who sanc-
tioned the visit. "They have
no political sense."
While President Mitter-
rand, known to his people as
Le Sphinx, denied prior
knowledge of the visit, there
are growing doubts he was
unaware that Mrs. Dufoix,
with whom he was in cons-
tant contact, had dispatched
an ambulance plane to Tunis
and, irony of ironies, had
deployed the DST, France's
elite anti-terrorist unit, to
protect the arch-terrorist.
There are also doubts that
the Palestinian leader, who
has been partially paralyzed
since undergoing brain
surgery in 1980, was in need
of urgent treatment — or,
indeed, that this was his
first visit to France for
routine medical attention.
According to press reports,
Helda Habash said her
husband's latest visit to
France was for a strictly
non-urgent check-up: "We
had an agreement with the
French government from the
beginning that there would
be no announcement of the
visit," she said. "We were
surprised to find the press
waiting at the airport."
Interviewed on French
television at the weekend,
Mr. Habash's lawyer,
Mourad Oussedik, brought
the scandal closer to Presi-
dent Mitterrand's door when
he declared that the in-
itiative for the visit had
come from Yassir Arafat and
that decision to admit Mr.
Habash had been made at
the highest level.
"The president of the re-
public," he declared flatly,
"could not have been ig-
norant."
It has since emerged that
France was chosen as the
venue for the medical ex-
amination after the Swiss
government rejected a re-
quest from Mr. Arafat for
Mr. Habash to visit a clinic
in Switzerland.
The leak that Mr. Habash
was heading for Paris was
made to the French televi-
sion network Antenne-2, but
like many other aspects of
the affair, the source of the
leak is shrouded in mystery,
a network official saying
only that the tip-off came
from "a well-informed unof-
ficial source who was neither
Tunisian nor French."
Media coverage of the ar-
rival at Le Bourget Airport
on the night of Jan. 29, and
of subsequent demonstra-
tions outside the hospital,
where Mr. Habash was
ensconced in a first-floor
suite, caused deep em-
barrassment for President
Mitterrand's government.
With developments
deviating seriously from the
carefully prepared script and
now rapidly spinning out of
control, the government's
predicament was compound-
ed when Jean-Louis
Bruguiere, France's top anti-
terrorist investigator, or-
dered Mr. Habash detained.
Suddenly, the scores of gen-
darmes and marksmen who
had been deployed inside
and outside the hospital to
protect Mr. Habash became
his jailers.
The evidence against Mr.
Habash, a physician who is
known to his followers as
"Al-Hakim" (the Wise One),
has been splashed across the
George Habash, leader of the Radical Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine.
front pages of the world's
newspapers over the past 20
years.
Among the atrocities
claimed by Mr. Habash was
the triple hijacking in 1970
and the deliberate destruc-
tion of the three civilian
airliners at Dawson's Field
in Jordan, an act that spark-
ed a civil war, led to the ex-
pulsion of the PLO from Jor-
dan and gave birth to the in-
famous Black September
movement.
Then there was the 1976
hijacking of a French Air-
bus, which was seized on a
flight from Tel Aviv to Paris
and forced to land in Idi
Amin's Uganda,
precipitating Israel's
legendary rescue mission at
Entebbe.
In between was one of the
most horrifying of all ter-
rorist acts for which Mr.
Habash claimed respon-
sibility: the 1972 massacre
of 27 Christian pilgrims in
the arrivals hall of Tel Aviv
airport by a group of
kamikaze-like Japanese Red
Brigades terrorists who had
been recruited for the mis-
sion by Mr. Habash.
Also during the 1970s, Mr.
Habash, who has worked at
various times for Syria,
South Yemen and Libya, is
believed to have controlled
Venezuelan-born Illyich
Ramirez Sanchez, the in-
famous "Carlos" who spe-
cialized in assassinating
prominent Jewish leaders
and Israeli officials in
France and other European
capitals.
Mr. Habash was
catapulted into the
headlines again during the
Gulf crisis when he offered
unequivocal support to Iraqi
leader Saddam Hussein and
uttered the chilling threat:
"We have our fingers on
the trigger to shoot at
American and Western in-
terests the moment any at-
tack on Iraq is launched."
The warning was taken se-
riously by Western intel-
ligence agencies, but in this
case Mr. Habash was reign-
ed in by Syrian President
Hafez Assad, who was
rapidly reassigning
priorities following the
demise of the Soviet Union
and urgently seeking to im-
prove relations with Wash-
ington.
If anything, Mr. Habash's
popularity has increased
since the start of the intifada
in December 1987, when the
Christian-born Marxist
forged an unlikely alliance
with leaders of the Islamic
fundamentalist Hamas
movement, who share a
mutual hatred of Israel and
an implacable opposition to
any negotiated deal with the
Jewish state.
Since then, Mr. Habash,
who is perceived by many
secular Palestinian purists
as the "conscience" of their
cause, has become the rally-
ing point for Palestinian re-
jectionists in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
His speeches and writings
are widely circulated and
encourage an intensification
of armed attacks against
Israelis, four of whom have
been killed since the Madrid
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
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