Arafat studied civil engineering and served as president of the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) from 1952 to 1956.
Yasser Arafat is not the only leader whose body has recently been exhumed. South America has seen a wave of exhumations of political leaders who died in debatable circumstances. Bolívar’s televised exhumation in 2010 was orchestrated by Hugo Chávez, who wanted to prove that Colombian oligarchs had poisoned the liberator of Latin America. In 2011 in Chile, Salvador Allende was exhumed at the request of state prosecutors to ascertain whether the two bullet holes in his skull were self-inflicted or whether at least one was the work of Pinochet’s troops. Both exhumations failed to prove murder. Last year Chile also exhumed Pablo Neruda, to determine whether his apparent death from cancer in 1973, shortly after he published an article denouncing Pinochet, was actually the result of poisoning. No signs of poison were found, but the Chilean Communist Party complained that the forensic pathologists had failed to test for biological as well as chemical agents. In Brazil, a truth commission examining the abuses of the country’s long dictatorship has just exhumed João Goulart, the president toppled in the US-backed coup of 1964, in an attempt to establish whether he was poisoned while in exile in 1976.
The modern history of forensics is most often seen as one in which states police their subjects. But these exhumations are part of a narrative in which the victims of power are used in evidence against the state. That the anti-imperial heroes of the past are being dug up is a sign that their politics are in short supply among the living. The turn to forensics as a tool for uncovering past political crimes – as well as a way of gathering evidence of mass violence, as in the case of large-scale exhumations conducted in Bosnia, Spain, Guatemala and elsewhere – is in part a reaction to the obsession, dominant at the end of the 20th century, with the verbal testimony of victims. In recent years, as a means of adjudicating on the past, the ambiguities of memory and trauma have been replaced with the supposedly conclusive proofs of natural science. But, as the story of Arafat’s exhumation demonstrates, forensic findings are very often not conclusive – are subject, as science is, to degrees of probability and margins of error – and the practice itself is invariably politicised. There is a clue in the word: ‘forensics’ is derived from the Latin forensis, meaning ‘pertaining to the forum’; forensics is concerned not only with scientific study but, crucially, with its presentation.
....
The museum, which stands next to Arafat’s grave, is the work of the Jordanian architect Jafar Tukan. Its modern, sober look is meant to reflect the PA’s pretensions to legitimacy. Tukan also built the mausoleum that adjoins the museum, a cubic structure – 11 metres by 11, for 11 November, the day of Arafat’s death – surrounded by a reflecting pool. A mosque was built nearby; its minaret is designed to shine a laser beam that via several reflectors along the way would finally land at the al-Aqsa Mosque, where Arafat specified in his will that he wished to be buried. Israel vetoed the laser. The PA declared that this would merely be a temporary resting place for Arafat, until a Palestinian state was formed, at which point his remains would be exhumed and reburied in the Haram al-Sharif. The quality and expense of the mausoleum suggest that the PA didn’t believe the move was imminent.
From the mausoleum visitors will now be able to walk a short distance to enter the museum building, where four long ramps follow a timeline depicting Arafat’s life in photographs, documents and filmed material. On the second floor, the path turns into a bridge that leads to the remaining section of the original presidential headquarters, where Arafat was confined for the last two years of his life. When the architects decided to preserve his windowless office and his sleeping quarters with his bed, desk and effects ‘as they were during a prolonged Israeli siege’, they weren’t aware they were preserving forensic material.