WORLD, Page 69Finis for the Master Terrorist?After 15 years of bombs and bloodshed, Abu Nidal is said to beill and his organization rapidly disintegrating
The U.S. State Department last year described it as "the most
dangerous terrorist organization in existence." Its leader is
possibly the world's most wanted man, accused of killing or
wounding nearly 1,000 people, most of them innocent people, in
attacks around the world over the past 15 years. But last week
there were reports that this ferocious dealer of death and
destruction, Abu Nidal, 52, head of the Libyan-based Fatah
Revolutionary Council, is ill and possibly dying in a hospital in
the Libyan capital of Tripoli, his illness variously reported to
be cancer and heart disease. Declared a Cairo-based official of the
Palestine Liberation Organization, from which the terrorist leader
broke away in 1973: "Abu Nidal is in a very tough way."
So, by all accounts, is his organization. With many
Palestinians who once saw their future through the barrel of a gun
now seeking a seat at the peace table, a senior P.L.O. official
claims that the terrorist network is disintegrating. And it is
doing so in a shower of blood. P.L.O. officials recount how three
of Abu Nidal's top lieutenants were shot at his house near Tripoli
late last year and their bodies buried under tons of concrete. In
all, says the P.L.O., 25 associates have been murdered at the
house, and other F.R.C. members suspected of disloyalty have been
executed in Syria and Lebanon.
The killing is largely the result of a struggle throughout much
of the Middle East between followers of Abu Nidal (a nom de guerre
for Jaffa-born Sabri Khalil al-Banna) and supporters of P.L.O.
leader Yasser Arafat. In southern Lebanon, according to the P.L.O.,
about 150 F.R.C. followers have died in clashes between the two
groups over the past two years.
The demise of the F.R.C. and Abu Nidal says a great deal about
the changing climate throughout much of the Middle East. One
powerful curb on Abu Nidal's activities is the apparent turn to
moderation of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, who is seeking to
bring his country out of isolation. Last October Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak bluntly told the Libyan that improved relations with
Cairo depend on Gaddafi's abandoning his support of terrorism. So
hostile has Gaddafi become to terrorist groups that some reports
place Abu Nidal not in a hospital but under house arrest in
Tripoli.
Another Arab leader who has seen the antiterrorist light -- or
at least wants the world to think he has -- is Arafat, whose
credibility rests on dissociating his mainstream Palestinian
movement from the murderous activities of Abu Nidal. Arafat's
recognition of Israel and renunciation of terrorism last December
-- however grudging and ambiguous -- helped isolate Abu Nidal in
the Arab world, and may have intensified the infighting within
F.R.C. ranks. The P.L.O.'s concern is that the taint of terrorism
could deny it a major role in Israeli-proposed Palestinian
elections. Last week Arafat persuaded a meeting of Arab foreign
ministers in Tunis to urge Presidents Bush and Gorbachev to
recognize the P.L.O. as a major force for peace.
Arafat particularly wants to be seen as a peacemaker at the
United Nations, where he is trying to win recognition of the P.L.O.
as the representative of a Palestinian state. The U.S. has
threatened to withdraw its contribution to the U.N. if such a
resolution is passed.
Although the P.L.O. may profit from the perception that it
rejects Abu Nidal's movement, terrorism's tentacles are spreading.
Alliances are said to be forming in Lebanon between followers of
the F.R.C. and members of the pro-Iranian Shi`ite Hizballah. "I
spend more time worrying about the fractionalization of terrorism
than I do about the disintegration of (Abu Nidal's)
organization," says a Western diplomat in Cairo. "Smaller groups
