Is Arafat's death a threat or an opportunity?

1.00pm - By DONALD MACINTYRE in Ramallah

The issue of who will succeed late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat - and even more important by what process and on what platform the succession will take place - is of fundamental importance to the Middle East and a troubled and fearful world beyond.

It lies behind the laconic remark of Ariel Sharon that the natural death of a man he often wished aloud he had killed in the bloody invasion of Lebanon in 1982, was a "turning point."

It will be the main topic among the foreign dignitaries who gathered briefly in Cairo this morning for an airport ceremony that will bring two sides of a divided world uneasily together as perhaps no other has done since the death of Josef Tito.

It will surely dominate the talks between Tony Blair and George Bush in Washington today. For it goes to the heart of the biggest question for the world's most intractable conflict since the Oslo accords, perhaps since the Six-Day War in 1967. Is Arafat's death a threat or an opportunity?

Each of the parties to the conflict Arafat did so much to define for a generation face a momentous decision in the days ahead. The transitional Palestinian leadership say an orderly, but also a democratic, succession is paramount.

The one certainty is that Raouhi Fattouh, the Gazan Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council who was solemnly sworn in with impressive speed yesterday as the second President in the Palestinian Authority's inglorious ten-year history, is no more than a temporary figurehead.

The real power in that period will be wielded by Abu Mazen, as the head of the PLO, and, to a perhaps slightly lesser extent, Ahmed Qureia, the Prime Minister.

The signs at present - though the 60 days within which Fattouh is bound to call them under the PA basic law is a very long time indeed in Palestinian politics - are that Abu Mazen recognises that elections for the Presidency, as the Authority's basic law requires, recognise that elections are vital for the Arafat succession's legitimacy not least in the Palestinian public.

It was hard to find anyone on the Ramallah streets - boarded up as shops were closed in mourning - who didn't want them to happen soon.

Asked who she thought would succeed Arafat as president yesterday, one mourner, Areej Daibas, declared pointedly: "It will be whom the people choose."

It also goes without saying that a new President also needs that legitimacy if he is to have any hope of assuming some of the authority as well as the office of dead President; even more so if he were to try to curb militant violence as well as represent his people in the future negotiations that some believe could just be possible now that Israeli Prime Minister's principal reason for refusing them has been removed from the stage.

The promise of elections would not itself remove the threat of what some Palestinians fear will be an outbreak of blood-letting and murderous score-settling in the wake of Mr Arafat's death, though they may well help.

There may also yet be argument over whether Abu Mazen or another figure like Marwan Barghouti, currently languishing in an Israeli jail, whom Mr Yusef and many of the younger Fatah activists would prefer, emerges as Fatah candidate, could also trigger conflict.

The election yesterday of Farouk Kaddoumi a leading opponent of the Oslo peace accord in which Mr Qureia and Abu Mazen were key participants, to replace Arafat as the leader of the Fatah faction at least complicates that choice.

But there will also be decisions for Israel, which would have a crucial role, if elections were to go ahead, for example in easing the roadblocks and closures throughout the occupied territories that would currently make national campaigning an almost impossible task-and perhaps even in granting immunity to wanted men from the militant factions that wanted to take part.

The European Union will urge Mr Sharon's government to do so; most European leaders believe the risks of successes by militant factions in such elections would be offset by the gains of their entry into the democratic process.

And they believe that Abu Mazen, still the likeliest Fatah candidate and a figure interested in the possibility of negotiations with Israel, would stand a reasonable chance - though no certainty at all, of course - of winning.

As so often, however, the outcome could depend on the intentions of the US, the one power with real traction over Israeli policy.

Up to now Washington has been largely silent on the subject. On the one hand it will hardly want to incur ridicule, as a superpower committed to exporting democracy to the Middle East, by allowing Israel to hamper attempts by the Palestinians to hold free elections.

On the other it might make what may yet prove a historic error of thinking that a price worth paying to ensure that militants do not gain from such elections, particularly if, as some Palestinian politicians suggest, a ceasefire would be called by the militant factions.

If Mr Blair represents European thinking in his talks with President Bush today, he will urge him to press Mr Sharon to do everything he can to make credible elections possible.

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In Ramallah yesterday as elsewhere in the West Bank, hundreds of men and sprinklings of women, many clad in black and white keffiyahs round their necks marched chanting through the streets chanting slogans like: "Do not worry Abu Ammar, from Ramallah to the Jordan river we will hold your line."

Arafat will be buried in a stone coffin at the Manara, the main square and commercial heart of the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Outside the walls of the Muqata, more than a dozen women, many weeping, sang an elegiac lament for the departed leader: "The light has gone out. The jewel has fallen."

A group of six masked young men dressed in black marched repeatedly through the streets around the Manara carrying hatchets and firing round from a 9mm automatic pistol into the air.

The grief expressed by many who turned out yesterday was ritually expressed by some but palpably genuine in others, including those who might have freely criticised his Palestinian Authority while he was alive.

"Congratulations to Sharon for his death," said Ibrahim Hassan, 57, bitterly. "All the people were with Arafat."

- INDEPENDENT