Dr Issam Sartawi (1935 – April 10, 1983) in Arabic عصام السرطاوي was a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Contents |
Issam Sartawi attended university in Baghdad, graduating in medicine, before specializing in cardiology and getting his MD in the United States.
Sartawi returned to Palestine in 1967, joined the Fatah movement and helped establish the Palestine Red Crescent Society. He quickly rose to become Yasser Arafat's adviser on Europe and North America. In the mid-1970s he participated with other moderate PLO members at meetings of the Israel-Palestine Peace Council. Sartawi and the senior Israeli negotiator, Aryeh "Lova" Eliav, jointly received the Austrian Kreisky prize in 1979 for seeking an end to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and for securing the recognition of the state of Israel by the PLO. The meetings between the PLO and the Israel-Palestine Peace Council were detailed in the book 'My Friend, the Enemy' by the Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery who was one of the negotiators. Palestinian hard-liners were unhappy with Sartawi's peace efforts and induced him to resign from the Palestine National Council. However, Arafat would not accept Sartawi's resignation.
In February 1983, Portuguese socialist leader Mario Soares formally invited the PLO to send an observer to the April 1983 congress of the Socialist International in Sydney. The passionately pro-Israeli Australian Labour prime minister, Bob Hawke, strongly objected to the PLO's invitation; and the SI congress was hurriedly relocated to Albufeira, Portugal. Sartawi was selected by the PLO as its representative at this meeting in Portugal. Because the SI counted both the Israeli Labor Party and the PLO as members, it was hoped that such a meeting could promote the Middle Eastern peace process.
On April 10, 1983 Sartawi was shot and killed in the lobby of the Montechoro Hotel in Albufeira, Portugal. The gunman escaped. Sartawi's assassination (later claimed by the Abu Nidal Organization) was witnessed by SI secretary-general, Bernt Carlsson, and was assumed to have been carried out so as to frustrate Carlsson's peace efforts.[1] Sartawi's funeral took place in Amman and was attended by all factions of the PLO – even including Abu Nidal Organization members (according to Maxim Ghilan, founder of the International Jewish Peace Union).
In 1998, the Issam Sartawi Center for the Advancement of Peace and Democracy (ISCAPD) was established at the Al-Quds University (the Arab University in Jerusalem) in memory of Sartawi.[2] In 1999, a Portuguese author André Neves Bento wrote a detailed account of Issam Sartawi's assassination. During his investigations, André Neves Bento has found transfers from a bank account in the name of Samir Najem A-Din, portrayed in the Western press as one of the leading PLO money men, from which account money was taken for a variety of purposes. On 13th of March, 1984, less than one year of Sartawi's assassination, for example, the owner of the account instructed the bank to transfer $17,000 to the Dafex arms factory in Portugal. A directive given by Najem A-din to the bank was also discovered, in which he orders the monthly transfer of 10,000 pounds to the account of Amin al- Banna, apparently the cousin of Abu Nidal. Al-Banna is suspected of involvement in the murder of Issam Sartawi, Arafat's political adviser.[3]