TUNIS -- Sure, she knew she was marrying a movement, the Palestine Liberation Organization, not a man. She knew she was marrying living history, a revolution, a cause -- not just Yasser Arafat. How could she not know? That there would be little luxury, no privacy and the promise only of sharing the cross hairs with a marked man, the dubious glory of leading a people dispersed in exile and refugee camps.
She knew all that, and yet she had not the slightest clue.
She did not know that she would often wake in the morning and find her husband gone; that at all hours of the day or night bodyguards would suddenly summon her to meet The Chairman; that her every move, every detail of her appearance -- her long, blond hair and her penchant for French fashions -- would be scrutinized, chronicled and usually criticized by a merciless Arab press; that the stress would give her high blood pressure and heart palpitations; that as the youngest comer -- and the only woman -- in the jealously guarded sphere of influence around the Palestinian leader, she would have to fight to keep her place, even as his wife.
No, Suha Tawil Arafat knew none of these things.
But she does know this: "I tell you something. This life is so difficult. This lack of liberty. ... You can't go outside, always with the police, traveling in Paris with the motorcycles flashing. It's not fun. You have to love Yasser Arafat -- you have to really, really be in love with the person. ...
"If you didn't really love the person," she says, "you wouldn't do it."
Suha Arafat entered the international limelight for the first time Sept. 13, the historic date when her husband signed a treaty of peace and mutual recognition with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in Washington. While the world watched the White House signing and -- incredibly -- a handshake between Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin, Suha Arafat watched live on CNN from Tunis.
But for a long time, few people knew she existed. For two years their marriage was secret. Two years, from the wedding in July 1990 until reports began to surface in the Arab press, of hanging in the shadows, suffering the whispered indignities of "girlfriend" and "mistress." This was bad enough for a well-bred Palestinian Christian woman from the West Bank via Paris.
And then they were -- they are -- so terribly different, 30-year-old Suha Tawil and 64-year-old Yasser Arafat. The Cartesian meets the Byzantine. She of the Sorbonne, where she studied political science, he of the political underworld of terrorism and freedom fighting. She of the West Bank Establishment in Nablus and Ramallah, he of the radical cells in Gaza and Cairo. She of the Louis Feraud suits and Hermes bags, he of the ever-present kaffiyeh and military fatigues.
Who could figure? "If he finds something new in the house, he says, 'Suha, stop it,' " she says, smiling, sitting in her modest office lined with pictures of her husband: a photo of Arafat on the hajj in Mecca, an oil portrait dated 1985, a series of photos -- one entire wall -- of Arafat adjusting his kaffiyeh in a Paris hotel room. "I say, 'It's not luxurious.' He hates any luxurious gesture," she says.
Even their administrative styles are different. When the PLO leader agrees to an interview, he invariably makes the interviewer come to Tunis and sit in a hotel room anywhere from a day to a week awaiting his summons. Sometimes it comes at 3 in the morning; sometimes it never comes. His wife, on the other hand, has her secretary set an appointment (midday), sends a car within a reasonable delay and rushes in -- 25 minutes behind schedule -- hair flying, heels clattering on the tile floor. "Hello! Hello! I'm so sorry I'm late ..."
She wears a navy double-breasted blazer with gold braiding along the cuffs and bright gold buttons, slim houndstooth trousers and pumps with square gold buckles. Polished red fingernails and a diamond pave ring set off fair, very fair, skin. She has soulful brown eyes that, together with a faint lisp in English, lend her an air of sincerity.
"It's very hard. It's a challenge -- you have to ignore so many things in order to coexist," she says, referring not to life with the Israelis -- although she will get to that -- but to life in the Palestine Liberation Organization. "I'm very sensitive to our people's problems, to problems that can't arrive to Yasser Arafat because. ... Anyone can see me in this house. When there is false information about somebody {in the PLO}, they can come to me and say it's not right. I will check on it and say, 'This story is wrong.' "
Recently, for example, Yasser Arafat's longtime political adviser, Bassam Abu Sharif, has fallen out of favor with the PLO leadership. His phone has been cut; he is in financial trouble. Suha Arafat took his side and appeared with him publicly during a recent state visit to Paris.
"I can't bear people being -- what do you call it -- being misjudged," she says. "People have a tendency to make a blackout around a leader. It's very difficult to get to him." She sees her role as cutting through all that.
But her role is not, she makes clear, to give her husband political advice, though she does express her opinions. She was not aware of the secret peace negotiations in Oslo.
"I never ask the very curious question. The less you know, the more you are in peace. I think it's better -- this information belongs to the Palestinian people, to their history. When he's tired, he wants to come home. I am not going to ask him {questions}," she says. "When you live with Yasser Arafat you don't speak about flowers or the nice weather. But sometimes when I want to know what's happening politically, if he doesn't have time for me I ask the leadership, 'What's going on? My husband doesn't want to talk to me ...' "
She is half-joking. This is not frivolity, it is just reality in the PLO. On the other hand, Suha Arafat is well aware of her ability to enhance her husband's image abroad, and she has shown that she knows how to wield her influence when she wants to. When some of the PLO's senior leaders objected to her attending the peace treaty signing ceremony in Washington, she agreed to stay home -- but she summoned CNN to film her, live, watching the event. She got far more attention than any political wife who was there.
The Real Yasser
In love?
With Yasser Arafat? That toadish, unshaven character in the olive drabs with the salesman's Half-Price-Special-for-You grin?
Suha Arafat reassures the incredulous. True, they may not have a typical home life, but they are a real couple. When Yasser Arafat is in Tunis they see each other every day. Sometimes they stay in this house, sometimes in the villa that serves as his principal office, or one of the others he uses for security reasons. After the chairman is done with work, the couple may watch television or a video; often they just talk. Suha Arafat, an avid reader of the international press, briefs her husband on news from abroad and gives him interesting books -- such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher's new memoirs. They talk about politics. She tells him that polygamy must be illegal in the future Palestinian state; he is not sure. "We must be pioneers, in the avant-garde, with real rights for women," she tells him. He answers: "But polygamy is in the Koran."
Suha Arafat says that in private her husband is very different from the man reporters see in his office. "He's very charming -- really he's charming," she insists. "Really. He's very, very, very charming. ... At home he's different. He's funny, he has a lot of anecdotes," she says, profferring a chocolate and unwrapping one herself. "If I'm upset, he senses it. He's very refined, gallant -- in this, really. If he didn't have an open-minded mentality {the marriage} wouldn't work."
But, she notes, she has not changed him, nor has she tried. "He's still a bachelor in his habits. I'm against a woman changing her husband -- certainly not a man who has been alone for almost 60 years," she says. "I added to his life, I didn't change it." She pauses. "I added the moral presence of a woman."
She has also added -- and subtracted -- a few other things. She's brought in a decent kitchen staff (importing the family cook from Ramallah), gotten rid of the retinue of cigarette-smoking, Kalashnikov-toting men who inhabit the ground floor of other PLO villas, and banned all smoking in the second floor living quarters. She's added the sparkle of her personality, her youth; she's ignored the sage advice of men -- always men -- to be more serious, more measured, less open.
Still, it is hard. She has few companions other than her husband. She speaks often to her three sisters and daily to her mother in Paris; she escapes to her parents' home about once a month. Tunis is a mental struggle. "When you fall in love with somebody -- and he's not just anybody -- you don't think about other things. You just think about the person," she says. "We live in an office -- I don't have a house or a place to receive people. It's" -- she stops a moment -- "his bodyguard, my bodyguard, talking on the talkie-walkie. It's not exciting. I like to live in one house, to have my husband sleep in the same house, not to wake up to find he's traveled somewhere -- to know at the last minute where my husband is. It's frustrating sometimes, but it is a way of life. This is our destiny."
She is not well, either. The stress of being part of Yasser Arafat's turbulent life is taking its toll: She has recurrent headaches, hypertension, heart palpitations. Doctors have recommended breathing exercises, yoga, sleep and a careful diet. She does what she can. Her medical visits and her pallor have fueled rumors that she is pregnant; she says that she is not.
Suha Arafat's mother worries about her constantly. "My God," says Raymonda Tawil, heaving an enormous sigh over the phone from her home in Paris. "Every day we receive news about the situation in Tunis. Oh. She's not safe in the territories and not in Tunis. ... I've been twice to Tunis, but even then I can't see her very much. Her house is full of security measures. She has a special life. When I go to see her, frankly speaking, I feel like I am in a jail. It's like being in jail."
A Lively Upbringing
Suha Tawil was born July 17, 1963, in Jerusalem, the fourth of five children in an upper-class Christian family from Nablus. When she was 13 the family moved to Ramallah, where she attended a French-speaking Catholic school. Her father, now retired, was a banker, and her mother is a prominent writer and journalist who has been a Palestinian activist ever since Suha was small.
"Our house was always invaded by journalists and the press, so this new life with Yasser Arafat is not so new for me," she says. "My mother brought us up not to be passive. She would take us to the refugee camps, she would take journalists there to show them the reality of what was going on. There were always people in our house -- congressmen, Israelis, consul-generals, {Canadian Jewish leader} Edgar Bronfman, {British U.N. Ambassador} Lord Caradon ... {Israeli doves} Uri Avineri, Matti Peled."
In 1976 her mother -- who founded the Palestinian Press Service (PPS), a still-thriving news agency -- was placed under house arrest, the family home encircled by Israeli soldiers, and later sent briefly to jail. Then in 1985 Raymonda Tawil received death threats, presumably from the radical Jewish terrorist underground active at the time, and a bomb exploded in her car. The family fled to Paris.
In 1988, the year Arafat publicly recognized the state of Israel, Suha Tawil began to deliver messages between her mother -- who ran a branch of the PPS from Paris -- and the PLO leader in Tunis. From the moment she walked into his office, she could tell. "Chemistry," she says, clicking her fingers. "It was clear." Arafat never said anything, but, she says, there were "little signs. He kept calling me. He asked me to work with him. I said, 'If I do that I'll never go back to my country.' He said, 'We'll go together.' "
But after they married they kept delaying the announcement. (Suha converted to Islam, but is still attached to her Christianity.) "It was a messy situation," she says. "There was the intifada {the Palestinian revolt in the occupied territories}, people were being killed. Every month there was something. We didn't want to open the door to festivities. Then there was the gulf war."
Finally the news leaked out, and was confirmed. Yasser Arafat the lifelong bachelor -- married to the revolution -- had taken a wife of flesh and blood.
Girl Talk & Good Deeds
Lunchtime with Suha Arafat. The chairman's wife insists on serving her guest at a table set for six with Limoges china and a white lace tablecloth.
There is a steaming tureen of soup with pureed vegetables and chicken, heaping platters of fragrant rice with eggplant, meat in yogurt sauce and sliced potatoes, small fried fish, green salad and a plate of beets and other vegetables sprinkled with parsley. A feast for two. She pats her hip and laughs, "I have put on weight." Girl talk, a rarity in the PLO.
Her secretary looks into the room and asks if she will take a call from the Tunisian prime minister's wife. Arafat bounds to the phone and chirps in a stream of Arab solicitude.
In her functions as Mrs. Arafat, she visits hospitals, meets with dignitaries and, as often as she can, looks in on a houseful of 50 children that her husband adopted from the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon, where an Israeli-backed Christian militia massacred Palestinians in 1982. This she does with grace and energy; she enjoys good works.
But the rest? "A mother is always afraid for her children," says Raymonda Tawil. "I have seen too much blood and assassination in Tunis -- Abu Jihad, Abu Iyad. ..." Both PLO leaders were gunned down in villas in Tunis, the former by the Mossad in 1989, the latter probably by left-wing Palestinian rejectionists in 1991. "The mere fact that she's living there -- I wasn't sleeping at night. I was having nightmares."
At lunch Arafat eats little, talking about her hopes for a Palestinian state, her concerns over fundamentalist Islamic groups that are powerful in the Gaza Strip. They will not like her Western ways, and she has no plans to start wearing a veil.
When she thinks of the future, of life in Jericho, the city that will form the nucleus of some future Palestinian state, she wonders: Will it be even harder? At least in the West Bank she has longtime friends and family. Once there, she will work for women's rights and for children. But that is months away; the Arafats have made no preparations yet to move. All depends, Suha Arafat says, on what happens in mid-December, when the Israelis are scheduled to withdraw from Jericho and the Gaza Strip.
In the meantime, she struggles through Tunis. "I don't have to make poses. No one has to give me advice," she says. "They try to put me in a frame. I refuse all frames. If I have children they will be normal, they will go to school, they will" -- she breaks off. "Power goes and comes. The person stays. You must always live in a single line -- you are in a palace, {visiting} the Elysee, and then you come to live in this house ..."
It is not a big place, this soldier's house. It wasn't what she expected, perhaps. But who could have known what to expect, marrying Yasser Arafat?
