Cypriot limbo for Palestinian

After 3 months in exile, Arafat’s intelligence chief still awaits offer of permanent home country

By Hamza Hendawi - The Associated Press

NICOSIA - Back home he was a powerful intelligence chief. Israel called him a terrorist. Now, exiled and stranded on a Mediterranean island, Abdullah Daoud watches his back and passes the time reading Hemingway and Jane Austen.

In one of the stranger twists of fortune in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this 41-year-old Palestinian has temporarily beached on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, and is waiting for a European country to take him in.

Daoud is considered by Israel to be the most dangerous of 13 Palestinian militants it expelled in May after a standoff at Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity. Under a deal mediated in part by the European Union, the other 12 have all moved on to Ireland, Belgium, Portugal, Spain, Greece and Italy. But for reasons unknown, no country has agreed to take in Daoud.

Meanwhile, some Cypriot officials are saying he has outstayed his welcome.

Last week, Cypriot Justice Minister Nikos Koshis asked that Daoud be deported for allegedly failing to cooperate with authorities and associating with “suspicious persons.”

Koshis did not elaborate, and Daoud strongly denies the charge.

“I am a rational and pragmatic man with a great deal of patience,” he says, “and I am also an Arab who knows how to behave when I am a guest.”

Cyprus’s landscape of rocky hills, olive groves and pine forests is not unlike that of the West Bank where Daoud was the intelligence chief for Bethlehem and other towns in Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.

But his wife Kifah, daughter Heba, 9, and son Youssef, 6, are 250 miles (400 kilometers) away in the West Bank city of Nablus, and won’t join him until a European Union country steps forward to accept him permanently. Until then, home is a hotel room in Nicosia, the capital in the middle of the island.

“It’s time to go to bed, my dear,” Daoud told Heba on the phone Wednesday night. “You must prepare your brother for school.” Youssef starts school as a first-grader later this month.

“Heba and even Youssef understand my situation like all Palestinian children who start being aware at an early age,” he said. “When they get emotional, I tell them that they should be grateful that their father is not dead or in an Israeli jail.”

Slender and mustachioed, he has taken to wearing a baseball cap and blue jeans. He takes long walks, and spends most mornings drinking tea and smoking cigarettes in the company of other Palestinians at the Palestinian Authority mission, a run-down building in a fashionable part of Nicosia.

“I have met a few people here but made no friends,” he said.

He has bought two dozen novels and is reading voraciously — Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea,” for instance, and an abridged version of Jane Austin’s “Emma.”

“It’s true that my situation is very difficult but I have the ability to persevere,” said Daoud. “I read, read and I read, and if I start a novel, very often I don’t leave it until I read it to the end.”

As a result, his English has improved. “Books have been my best companion in Cyprus,” he said.

The group of exiles arrived on May 10 and were soon gone.

On May 22, Cyprus authorities said Daoud would be leaving in a week or two. Nearly three months later, he’s still here.

He now talks of finally leaving in September.

Daoud is an unwavering supporter of Arafat and a longtime member of his Fatah faction. Israel says he sheltered terrorists, helped transport explosives and planned attacks. He says there’s no proof, and surmises that the Israelis misread what he was doing as an intelligence official.

Cyprus has long been a battleground in the Arab-Israeli intelligence wars, but Daoud insists he doesn’t worry about being assassinated by Israeli agents.

Still, he took care to sit with his back to the wall when dining in a Nicosia restaurant on Wednesday. “We are used to this in the intelligence community,” he explained.

The Cypriot government is paying for his hotel and breakfast. His family and the Palestinian Authority pay for the rest of his needs, he said.

Daoud is accustomed to exile and hardship. He was expelled from the West Bank in 1992 and has done at least half a dozen stints in Israeli detention since 1978, a year after he joined Arafat’s Fatah. His longest term was three years.

The most painful was in 1988 when he was arrested four days after he got married. He spent 37 days behind bars.