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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 9 - 15 December 1999 Issue No. 459
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Debate Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Straws in the wind
By Graham UsherOn 1 December, 1,000 or so supporters of the Palestinian Authority's dominant Fatah movement took to the streets of Ramallah in a show of factional might behind Yasser Arafat. They plastered every available public space with pictures of "our leader and our national symbol" and, from the rooftops, fired round after round of Kalasnikov into the ether. With supporters bussed in from as far afield as Jenin and schools closed to swell the numbers, the "mass" demonstration had all the spontaneity of a "Baathist rally in Damascus", commented one Palestinian eyewitness.
A few hours later Palestinian Legislative Council member for Nablus, Mouawiyah Masri, was set upon by three masked men and shot in the leg. Masri said that he recognised one of the assailants as a member of the PA's security forces, an identification the PA in Nablus has rigorously denied. Masri was one of the signatories to the so-called "petition of the 20" and was insistent that the two events were connected. For the mass of Palestinians too in the self-rule areas, the petition, the "loyalist" rally in Ramallah, and the shooting, are increasingly being read as the straws in the wind that portend the storm.
Prematurely leaked on 27 November, the petition represents the most damning attack on the Oslo process and the PA's system of governance that has yet appeared in any Palestinian public forum. It defines the Oslo agreement as a cover for "more land confiscation, the building of more settlements and expansion of existing ones, the momentous conspiracy [being concocted] behind the scenes on the issue of refugees and the incarceration of our sons in PA-controlled prisons". It further charges the PA with following "a systematic method of corruption, humiliation and abuse against the people", using "the Oslo agreement like a barter trade in favour of enriching a few corrupt people".
And, unprecedentedly, it lays the blame for this state of affairs with "the president of the PA", who "has paved the way for some opportunists to spread corruption in the Palestinian community". It was this personal attribution that most incurred Arafat's wrath, say Palestinian sources. But his utterly disproportionate response to the "slander" also betrays the vulnerability of his leadership at this juncture in the Oslo process and just how narrow has become his support base in the West Bank and Gaza.
Aside from shows of muscle like the Fatah demonstration in Ramallah, Arafat's main retort to the charges has been to suppress them. His security forces scooped up without charge the nine independent intellectuals who signed the petition and placed two others -- the ex-mayors of Nablus and Anabta, Bassam Shakaa and Walid Hamdullah -- under house arrest. Initially, there were signs that it might also go after the other nine PLC and Fatah signatories. But Arafat appears to have been restrained by virtue of their parliamentary immunity as well as by the fact that several of them started to back-pedal once the heat stirred by the petition started to rise.
But there was also an orchestrated campaign of innuendo against the "suspect" political credentials of some signatories. Much play was made of the "coincidence" of the petition's release with the current crackdown on Fatah in Lebanon. Finally, Arafat whipped the PLC into being the legislative rubber stamp for the PA's increasingly authoritarian executive. At a closed session in Gaza on 1 December, the PLC "discussed" the petition. While quietly protesting the arrests, the main thrust of the PLC's concluding communiqué was to condemn the signatories for "incitement and fomenting sedition" and "besmirching the name of President Yasser Arafat". It also agreed to set up a committee to "monitor the behaviour of Council members," a decision which (as several Human Rights organisations made clear) makes a nonsense of the notion of parliamentary immunity.
Nonsense or no, 33 PLC members endorsed the communiqué, eight voted against and 13 abstained. Thirty-seven members did not bother to attend.
Against these assorted forms of intimidation, Palestinian opposition was courageous but with a base in Palestinian society not much broader than its adversary. Palestinian Human Rights organisations fired off a blizzard of press statements, contesting both the illegality of the arrests and the spinelessness of the PLC. These protests were amplified by statement from mainly diasporal Palestinian intellectuals who condemned the arrests and charged the PA with "using the mantle of nationalism and the language of unity to stifle legitimate and necessary criticism and debate". By 6 December, the statement had acquired some one thousand signatures, including those of Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi and Hisham Sharabi.
But the mass of Palestinians felt typically unrepresented throughout the whole affair. On the one hand, many would concur with the petitioners' charge that corruption is now so endemic to PA governance as to be almost structural, influencing almost every public transaction and (as put by the petition) dividing Palestinian society between "a minority that manipulates and steals and a majority that complains and looks for a redeemer". Nor do Palestinians need to be told that a leadership that has fared so poorly in negotiating Oslo's interim arrangements should be both changed and held absolutely accountable for such life-and-death issues as Jerusalem, refugees and borders. But many Palestinians also felt alarmed by the inflammatory and "politicised" tone of the petition, especially the demand that "the oppressed to work together against the tyranny". In the Arabic, this read as a virtual call to arms and a recipe for civil war.
If the silent majority had a consensus, it was voiced by the "Public Opinion Communiqué" signed by some 200 Palestinian political personalities from the West Bank and Gaza, including Haidar Abel-Shafi, Mustafa Barghouti and Eyad Sarraj. While demanding that the PA "release immediately" all those arrested and defending freedom of opinion, the statement "strongly emphasised" that "dialogue" is the only way to bring about "national unity" within the "framework of public freedoms and political and intellectual diversity". It is a sad testament to the times that most Palestinians will have not read this communiqué -- and despite being submitted on 2 December, none of the three main Palestinian newspapers have so far published it.
It may be that the squall whipped up by the petition will subside, though the decision on 5 December by three of the still imprisoned nine signatories to mount a hunger strike until they are freed is likely to stay a thorn in the PA's side. But it would be unwise for Arafat and the PA leadership to believe that because it has ridden this storm it can ride the storms to come. This is because the petition crisis was "an explosion deferred", in the opinion of PLO Central Council member, Mandour Nofal. And it reached such dimensions because it was not one crisis but a compound of three.
"The crisis in governance is inseparable from the crisis in the peace process," he says. "It is because the people have lost hope in the national struggle that they are increasingly preoccupied with domestic issues, with corruption, with bread, and with the fact that the PA is now seen as no more than a Fatah-authority. This is why the struggle for democracy is so important in this period and why the lack of a democratic movement among Palestinians is so palpable."
