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Mahmoud (Abu Mazen) Abbas

mahmoud abbas

Mahmoud (Abu Mazen) Abbas

Chairman of the Palestinian Authority

(Born 1935)

Mahmoud Abbas, the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority who is usually referred to as Abu Mazen, was born in Safed in 1935. He studied law in Egypt before doing a PhD in Moscow.

Abbas co-founded Fatah with Yasser Arafat and accompanied him into exile in Jordan, Lebanon and Tunisia. He kept to the background, but also built up a network of powerful contacts that included Arab leaders and heads of intelligence services. This enabled him to become a successful fundraiser for the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and to take on an important security role in the early 1970s, before being appointed head of the PLO's Department for National and International Relations in 1980. Abbas became a member of the PLO's Executive Committee in 1980, and was elected as the Committee's secretary-general in 1996, informally confirming his position as Arafat's deputy.

Abbas signed the 1993 Oslo peace accord with Israel. He is regarded as one of the architects of the deal and his long contacts with Israeli leftists won him a reputation as a PLO dove. When Israel's Labour party was in power, former minister Yossi Beilin conducted secret, informal discussions with Abbas about a permanent settlement, in which they raised final status issues such as a Palestinian entity, borders, settlements, refugees and Jerusalem. Together they created a draft document, known as the ‘Beilin-Abu Mazen Document' (October 1995). While this proposal garnered much attention, no actual document was ever made public and its recommendations were never officially adopted.

He has been vocal in criticising the path of the Palestinian uprising and in calling for a halt to armed attacks on Israeli targets.

Abbas was appointed to be the first Palestinian prime minister on 29 April 2003, and also held the post of interior minister in the cabinet. In September 2003, he resigned from his post, following a continuous power struggle with Yasser Arafat.

Following Yasser Arafat's death in November 2004, Abbas was named as chairman of the PLO. In January 2005, he was elected and sworn in as chairman of the Palestinian Authority.

(Sources: Jewish Virtual Library, BBC News Online)

 

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