Farouk Kaddoumi (1931-) was the Secretary-General of the Central Committee of Fatah and the head of their political department in Tunisia.
Biography[]
Farouk Kaddoumi was born in 1931 in Jinsafut, a town near Nablus in what was then Mandatory Palestine. Kaddoumi spent most of his life in exile, working for ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, joining the Ba'ath Party in Egypt while studying economics and political science, and working at the Ministry of Health of Kuwait. In 1958, Kaddoumi and Yasser Arafat jointly founded student groups calling for the liberation of Palestine. Kaddoumi and Arafat formally formed Fatah in 1965, and he was expelled from Kuwait a year later for involvement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and by 1973 he became the leader of its political department. Kaddoumi became the head of the PLO's political department in Tunisia after the group left Lebanon in 1983, and Kaddoumi made controversial claims such as Leon Klinghoffer being thrown off of the Achille Lauro by his wife for insurance purposes, while the Palestine Liberation Front had actually killed him and thrown him overboard. After Yasser Arafat's death, he constitutionally succeeded him as chairman of Fatah, but Mahmoud Abbas instead took power. Kaddoumi became a militant opponent of Abbas from his base in Tunisia, and he accused Abbas of poisoning Arafat to take power. Kaddoumi was accused of inciting internal strife in Fatah by Abbas, and Kaddoumi betrayed Fatah by being pro-Bashar al-Assad, representing the Palestinian people in Syria.