TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052592/0525520.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 12.9 KB | 252 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 48

Voice of Her People


By JOHANNA MCGEARY RAMALLAH


    The perfect coincidence of need and ability: the
Palestinians and Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi. That's why it is her
face you see, her voice you hear speaking for her people,
brilliantly recasting their cause as a cry for human justice.
No longer can the world sum up -- and dismiss -- the
Palestinians in the portrait of a stubble-bearded man wrapped
in a kaffiyeh. This woman looks civilized, unthreatening,
someone you'd like to invite to dinner, and she speaks with a
compelling eloquence. With exquisite timing or luck or
preternatural planning, she was there, this medieval-literature
scholar, devoted mother, Christian and woman, exactly when the
Palestinians were ready to put on a new face.

     The bravura performance in Madrid at the opening of the
Arab-Israeli peace talks seven months ago that catapulted her
to world attention surprised no one who knew her. "The person
was formed," says Albert Agazerian, a colleague at Bir Zeit
University. "It just required the moment to bring it on center
stage." She says, "I know I can make a difference."

     Such self-confidence. She is today the best known of the
New Palestinians, the most prominent woman in the Arab world,
and she is very comfortable with that. This is not a lady you
can shake. Only the way she chain-smokes Salem Lights betrays
the pressure she is under.

     The most interesting thing about Hanan (everyone --
Secretary of State James Baker, the old man in the street who
shuffles up to shake her hand, her friends, her enemies -- calls
her Hanan, a mark of honor and a measure of her prominence) is
that the public person is the private person. The 45 years of
her life have woven seamlessly into a single fabric. Her long
battle as a woman to find an identity and equality is the same
as the struggle for Palestinian identity and equality. She
sounds the same at home as she does on a podium: there is no
difference between the parent talking to her child, the
spokeswoman jousting with the press, the Palestinian arguing for
the cause. She has a rare ability to translate her people's
longings into homely domestic terms, to turn an abstract
dissertation on rights into a mother's plea for her children.
That is real; that is how she sees it. "I do it," she says
flatly, "for my daughters."

     Yes, she turns on for the camera, no doubt about it. But
this is no act, only the projection of a lifetime's commitment
to alleviating the pain that history has imposed on her people.
The intensity in her may be veiled by no-nonsense tones and a
vocabulary of moderation, but it is always there. "I feel a very
strong need to convey the human quality, the real image of our
people, that never came through before," she says. "I am never
far away from Palestinian reality."

     She came to that rather late. Hanan, cushioned in a
wealthy, educated, upper-class family, the youngest of five
daughters of a respected physician, had a political awareness
that was largely theoretical until the day in June 1967 when
Israel took over her hometown of Ramallah. She was a student at
the American University in Beirut, then a hotbed of Arab
nationalism. She joined in eagerly: "I was going to change the
world." But on that June day she heard rumors that her house was
being shelled, her parents were perhaps dead, her town occupied.
As she stood in a long line at the Red Cross waiting for news,
"I knew then what the Palestinian predicament meant. It was not
my parents' issue but my own. I realized," she says, "that it
was my enduring responsibility to see that this oppression did
not go on." Hanan was not allowed to go home again for seven
years.

     She was, in a way, always preparing to shoulder that
burden. She could read at three. Her mother was a devout
Christian who taught her girls to emulate Jesus. But it was her
father -- a dedicated doctor who never refused a call, an
unusually enlightened man who preached women's equality, a
socialist and a founder of the P.L.O. -- who profoundly defined
her outlook. "Be daring," he told Hanan, "in the pursuit of the
right." He made his children learn English from babyhood. Early
on, he gave Hanan a copy of Nehru's diary, and she remembers the
impact to this day: "I discovered the power of words."

     Words, and a dagger-sharp talent for choosing the right
ones to turn tired propaganda into poignant exhortations or
make diplomatic doublespeak sound incisive, are Hanan's stock
in trade. Her colleagues at Bir Zeit University, where she
taught English literature for 17 years, were always awed, and
often overruled, by her command of the language. She could
outtalk them as well in Arabic as in English. She has a good ear
for saying the right thing the right way, says a member of the
peace delegation -- not talking, as Palestinians are wont to do,
out of two sides of her mouth, but shaping a single message to
penetrate the preconceptions of different listeners. She also
has a talent, aggravating to her rivals, for expressing a
position better than the person who created it. "She knows,"
says one of her critics, "that language is a major ingredient
in making a public figure today."

     Her English, in fact, made her a star. First on Nightline,
back in April 1988: she was one of six Palestinians invited to
the first Israeli-Arab town meeting to discuss the intifadeh.
People saw the stones, but she gave the uprising words. Then
with Faisal Husseini, the No. 1 political leader in the occupied
territories, who linked up with her as his voice (his own
English is poor) and his guide to the American mind (she was a
graduate student in Virginia for three years) when the
Palestinians first engaged in a dialogue with Baker. Then she
won over Baker himself. "When I first met him, I saw only cold,
sharp, calculating eyes," she says. "I wondered, Is he human?"
She managed to kindle his sense of moral outrage, and the rest,
as they say, is history.

     The West -- and many ordinary Palestinians -- fell in love
with her at Madrid, but the West Bank political establishment
did not. Her portable phone buzzes with requests for speeches,
appearances, interviews, meetings -- from foreigners. "Wow," her
admirers from abroad think. "She's female, educated, talks like
us: our kind of Arab. She's so rational, so pragmatic." But the
camera-clicking adulation that follows her every move abroad
produces a distinctly muted reaction at home.

     Here is what rivals, and even friends, say. She never
lived in a refugee camp, spent time in jail, proved her activist
credentials: "We don't know her history, where she stands."
She's not from any faction, and among Palestinians, who you are
is whom you belong to. Her enemies accuse her of being a tool
of the P.L.O., which pays her salary, supplies her bodyguards,
keeps her in power. No, others say, she's there only because the
Americans want her there. She's too compromising: "People think
she negotiates on behalf of Baker instead of negotiating with
Baker on behalf of the Palestinians." She's a woman. She's a
Christian woman: "Some do not like to have a woman speaking for
Palestine, let alone from a minority." She talks too much. She's
aggressive. She's bossy, insists on being in control, doesn't
take criticism well. She's a workaholic who has sacrificed her
friends and her family for her job. She has a big ego. She's too
individualistic; no, she's just a staff officer. She likes the
limelight. She loves it, it's gone to her head: "Watch her on
TV. She's reveling in it." She wants power and more power:
"There's no limit to her aspirations." Who is she to be . . .

     There is some truth to all of the above. Actually, a great
deal of truth. She does relish the power, the limelight, the
prominence. "Frankly, I would prefer a more private life," she
says, but no one believes her, not even her husband. "For her,
this is work that has to be done and that has priority over
everything else," he says. Later on she is a little more honest:
"I can imagine myself going back to teaching, but I don't know
if I'd be able to."

     The flip side of her passionate commitment and shatara (an
admiring Arabic word for intellect and savvy) is an arrogance
that makes her bluntly impatient with anyone less smart, less
quick, less decisive. She can assume too much and forget who
really is boss. After she independently agreed with Baker in
Madrid that Washington would be the venue for bilateral talks
with the Israelis, Yasser Arafat himself slapped her down. "Who
appointed you," he reportedly asked, "Baker or me?" (She is
careful to admit no connection to the P.L.O. )

     The more puzzling question is the exact nature of Hanan's
importance to the peace delegation. She is adamant: "My input
is substantive as well as in terms of image." She could not
convey so skillfully the Palestinian position, she says, were
she not central to its formulation. She insisted on being titled
official, not media, spokesperson, to emphasize the substantive
nature of her role. "As official spokesperson, I present the
binding view."


     That is not what others say. One member of the peace team
disparages even her p.r. success. "It's not the person telling
the story that matters," he says. "It's the willingness of the
world to listen." While Hanan is a member of the "higher
committee" that determines Palestinian positions in the
negotiations, her colleagues differ on how influential she is
there. She does not have the automatic gravitas belonging to
representatives of the various factions; on the other hand, her
often sound advice follows no party line. Another delegate says
she is just an "excellent packager." A third says "the real
power is elsewhere."

     Washington, surprisingly enough, rates her an admirable
spokeswoman but not much more. She is not, after all, one of the
14 Palestinian negotiators; merely a member of the outsize
advisory team that pushes and pulls at the official delegates.
Her early intimacy with Baker has waned now that formal talks
are under way. Her influence remains informal, exercised through
carefully cultivated personal contacts with the leading
Americans. Frankly, says a U.S. diplomat, "her importance is in
the corridors, not in the negotiating room."

     Sometimes the Americans find that convenient. She was
publicly -- well, in a background briefing, which is about as
public as Washington gets -- made the scapegoat for complaints
that the Palestinians were paying more attention to the TV
cameras and their constituents back home than to sound
negotiating positions. Hanan did not take that lying down. She
telephoned directly to the official involved, a very
high-ranking man, and told him just how upset she was. "She took
it personally," he says, but shrugs off her dismay.

     Usually, she is the one to brush off criticism. "That's
the price of success," she says. She knows that the person out
front must absorb the most blows. She knows she has to handle
the unrealistic expectations and frustrated disappointment of
the Palestinian public; if the peace process fails, her
political future, even she herself, would be in danger. She
knows that hard-liners who oppose the negotiations take it out
on her. "They try to attack the person, not the issues," she
says. She knows a lot of it is envy, from rivals who wonder why
they are not in her shoes.

     But sometimes in the dark of night it hurts. At a
televised press conference not long ago, after the Israelis
announced plans to deport a dozen Palestinians, one of the wives
unleashed a vicious diatribe against Hanan, blaming her for
compromising with the enemy. When asked to comment, she said,
"I understand her bitterness." But Hanan was shocked and deeply
wounded, and she hated appearing to be rejected by her own
people. "Why me?" she asked her husband that night. "What did
I do?"

     The blindingly plain fact about Hanan, the thing you
cannot doubt, is her passion and compassion. She interrupts an
endless day's work to receive two unexpected callers: Ramallah
women she's never met before who seek her help to free their
sons held in Israeli detention. "To me," she says, "this is the
horror of it. This is why I do it." To have a nation is the only
way to stop the wrenching apart of families, she says. There is
no way you can question the authenticity of her commitment, the
ferocity of her determination to bring the occupation to an end.

     "The really fundamental thing is that you're never free of
it," she says as she closes her front door. "You're always
reminded you're not free." Outside that door is her own
perpetual reminder, the first thing she sees in the morning, the
last thing she sees at night: the barbed-wire compound of the
Israeli prison across the street that incarcerates her fellow
Palestinians.