-Caveat Lector- WJPBR Email News List [EMAIL PROTECTED] Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War! Secret links with Arafat signal Sharon landslide By Tom Gross and Inigo, Gilmore in Jerusalem SECRET contacts have been initiated between Ariel Sharon and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in advance of Tuesday's Israeli elections which Mr Sharon looks set to win by a landslide. At Mr Arafat's request, three senior aides to Mr Sharon recently held secret talks in Vienna with Muhammad Rashid, Mr Arafat's most trusted adviser. According to Israeli intelligence experts, Mr Rashid, an Iraqi-born Kurd, is the only person with whom Mr Arafat shares full knowledge of the PLO's worldwide financial holdings, which are said to include billions of pounds in hidden assets. Although Mr Arafat had made no secret of his electoral preference for Ehud Barak, the incumbent Labour prime minister, he authorised the mission to open contacts with Mr Sharon as it became clear that Mr Barak's campaign was doomed. News of the Arafat-Sharon contact comes at a time when the Right-wing former general is moulding his image as a potential peacemaker rather than hardline hawk. This is the first time that Israelis have gone to the polls purely to vote for the post of prime minister and not to choose a party for the Knesset. For this reason, the issue of personality has become more crucial. Mr Sharon's campaign team, run by the same Israeli PR agency that swept Benjamin Netanyahu to victory in the 1996 elections, has portrayed their candidate as an affable grandfather and family man. Television advertisements show the 72-year-old Likud leader wandering through a field of wheat in the setting sun, cuddling a baby lamb and carrying his young grandson. His team has distanced him from his familiar international image as the strong man who led Israel into a disastrous war against Lebanon in 1982 and whose walk to the disputed holy site of Temple Mount in September preceded the current wave of violence. At a time when there are daily shooting attacks against Israelis and ferocious demonstrations throughout the Arab world calling for the destruction of Israel, many Sharon voters say that although they desperately want peace, above all they want protection. "Sharon is clear, consistent and confident. He projects trust and power," explained Linor Dloomy, an accountant. "Barak on the other hand zigzags all over the place with the messages he sends out, and he comes across terribly on TV." With few policy successes to point to, Mr Barak's campaign strategists have retaliated with their own series of television commercials demonising Mr Sharon. If the pollsters are to be believed, they seem to have had little impact. Rachel Lerner, a computer programmer, said : "The idea that Sharon is uniquely warlike is nonsense. He probably has less blood on his hands than Barak does." Mr Sharon's closest advisers claim that while the general has long been the bete noire of the Arab world, he is privately a peacemaker and in power might surprise his critics and Palestinians who know him as the Butcher of Beirut or Mr Bulldozer. His son Omri, his chief campaign manager, yesterday issued an unequivocal assurance to the Middle East that there will be no war if his father wins the election. He told The Telegraph: "We are not threatening war and we believe we are not going to have a war. I can assure you there won't be." Omri, who gave up his career as an investment banker to work for his father with whom he lives on a farm in the Negev desert, claimed that Mr Sharon had been "much misunderstood" in the past. He said: "My father is not a warmonger. The problem he has had is that he was prepared to stick his neck out and that gave him a bad image." He added that the recent meeting in Vienna had been very useful: "We opened a channel to talk after the elections," he said. Ron Tira, a political analyst, said: "Sharon is much more moderate than he is perceived to be in the West. He was the minister who forcibly evacuated thousands of Jewish settlers from Sinai in April 1982, during the final stage of the Camp David agreement. He was also foreign minister in the Netanyahu government which in 1998 gave 85 percent of Hebron - Judaism's second holiest city - to Yasser Arafat and later signed the Wye Plantation deal which agreed to hand over a further 13 per cent of the West Bank to Arafat." Mr Arafat began putting out feelers to Mr Sharon some time before the Vienna meeting. When Mr Sharon's wife Lilly died last year, Mr Arafat sent him a personal condolence card. Mr Sharon returned the gesture last month, when he sent Mr Arafat a greetings card celebrating the Id al-Fitr holiday which marks the end of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Despite the talks, Palestinians on the streets of Gaza predicted this weekend that Mr Sharon's election would lead to a serious escalation in their intifada, or uprising. A senior official in Mr Arafat's Fatah movement said yesterday that it would step up its campaign after Tuesday, regardless of the victor. Analysts said that it would be in keeping with Mr Arafat's track record to pursue the tactics of violence at the same time as establishing links with Mr Sharon. *COPYRIGHT NOTICE** In accordance with Title 17 U. S. C. 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