IN EXCLUSIViTY Ion Mihai Pacepa, the former general in the Romanian communist political police who defected to the West in 1978 and asked for political asylum in the United States, authored the following analysis on the end of the Arafat era. MARINA CONSTANTINOIU
DOCUMENT. Pacepa (with glasses), right from Ceausescu, in 1978, at Romanian Embassy in USA Our newspaper published all comments Pacepa made for the American press, and quoted his statements from all on-line debates. When former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died we asked Pacepa to provide an analysis for the Romanian media. The following article is the first he ever authored for a Romanian media outlet since leaving his native country. Subtitles only were provided by the editors of Jurnalul national for the Romanian language copy:
"Jurnalul national daily asked me to write an obituary of Yasser Arafat, a man whose life crossed with mine in various ways, over the span of 50 years. Customarily, only nice words are said about the dead. Arafat, however, is one of the few personalities of our time who waved that courtesy to be extended to him. Even Western media outlets, which praised Arafat for decades, realized now that he was the only Nobel Prize laureate on whom the public does not hold basic information like where he came from, what was his name and what was the cause of his death. When Paul Martin, of The Washington Times, asked Arafat back in July 2004, in the last interview Arafat gave to a Western media outlet, "Where were you born," he was stopped short by Arafatâs aides: "Question not allowed," Martin was told.
Arafat was cast into a mold in Moscow and chiseled politically in Bucharest, and this is why he had to live his life and die his death shrouded in secrecy. For five decades he claimed to have been born in Jerusalem, and his final wish was to be buried there. I