The New York Times · 4 August 1988

CP-1988-108

Arafat Describes His Early Life as a Tourist

By ROBERT PEAR

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Transcribed from the clipping

WASHINGTON, Aug. 3 — Yasir Arafat says that before he became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, he was a wealthy, free-spending tourist who traveled through Europe and lived the good life. In an interview in the September issue of Playboy magazine, Mr.

Arafat provides an account of his early years, with new details of the life he led before founding Al Fatah, one of the main groups in the P.L.O., in the 1950’s Mr. Arafat said he “visited a lot of places on vacations” as a tourist. “I was once very rich,” he said. “I used to go to Europe.

I visited Greece, Italy, France, Switzerland, Austria.” In addition, he said, “I had a pocketful of money, like any tourist, and I enjoyed myself.” “I was well on the way to being a millionaire,” Mr. Arafat said, but “I gave all my wealth to the revolution.”

He asserts that the P.L.O. has played a major role in organizing the recent uprising by Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. He said his organization had established “people’s committees in every quarter, in every camp, in every village, in every university” to resist the Israeli occupation.

In the interview, conducted by the journalist Morgan Strong in Tunis and Baghdad, Mr. Arafat said he was born in Gaza and was sent to live with an uncle in Jerusalem. Other biographical accounts say Mr. Arafat was born in Jerusalem, in 1929. Mr.

Arafat said he was the son of “a successful merchant,” received a degree in civil engineering from Cairo University, worked briefly for the Kuwaiti Government and then established his own business as a construction contractor, building roads, highways and bridges.

In the interview, he did not discuss terrorist incidents in which the P.L.O. has been involved in the last 20 years.

How this transcription was made

Read from the scan at 2.5x to 5x by a machine looking at the image of the page, not by OCR and not by a person. No masthead or folio; the date follows the dateline 'WASHINGTON, Aug. 3' plus one day, and the year is carried by the content - the Playboy interview ran in the September 1988 issue and the piece refers to the intifada as 'the recent uprising'. The paper is named by the credit line 'Special to The New York Times'. Printed error kept as set: the second paragraph ends 'in the 1950's' with no full stop. The whole article is transcribed. Arafat is quoted six times in his own words; he is the P.L.O. chairman and is not counted toward the archive's named-ordinary-Palestinians figure. The piece sets his own account of his birthplace, Gaza, against unnamed 'other biographical accounts' that say Jerusalem.

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