15 - 21 November 2001
Issue No.560
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 15 - 21 November 2001 Issue No.560 |
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An autumn of fury
Last week a senior Palestinian leader threatened to resign because of the Palestinian Authority's political arrest campaign and exposed all that is wrong in the heart of the regime. Graham Usher reports from Gaza
Rafah, 100 metres from Israel's Termite military base on the Egyptian border. "The hottest place in the occupied territories," says one local. Not so hot today -- more a monument to a year's worth of loss from a war fought out between poorly armed Palestinian guerrillas and Israel's most lethal armed outpost, and at a toll of one dead soldier to 30 dead Palestinians.
Like Mahmoud Shar, killed on 27 September. "He was killed there," says one man, pointing to a pile of concrete that was once a family's home. "The Israelis blew up the house with dynamite. The blast was so strong it threw his body up here," he says, running up the shrapnel scarred steps to his house.
"He hit here," waving to a wall inside his home smeared with blood. "And landed up here," he finishes, standing beside a broken table with chairs. "He no longer had his head or his arms."
"Where is the mercy?" I think he is talking about the Israelis. He isn't. "Where is the Authority? They are thieves. They came in the night and stole my water system. Where are the police? This house cost me $120,000. Now look at it. Where is the help? Do you know the help I received after the army shelled my house? Twenty-five kilos of rice!"
We are standing on a poster, face down on a floor caked in sand and blood. It is a portrait of Yasser Arafat. "The president loves his people," says the man, eyes gleaming. "With exceptions."
You hear the same litany everywhere in Gaza. No one talks much about the Intifada any more. ("It's become routine," says a Palestinian in Rafah. "They shell us. We mortar them. We lose. But of course you support the resistance. Because," he shrugs, "because what else can you do?"). Palestinians talk about "the Authority."
More precisely, they talk about corruption and mismanagement and the colossal failure of governance the Intifada has exposed, leaving its victims homeless, destitute and bereaved with only the most minimal public assistance or care. They talk about political ineptitude and where their Intifada is heading after a year that brought them unity, cost them much, but so far has brought them nothing by way of national achievement.
Above all, they talk about the "arrests." In the last month -- and under the heel of American and European pressure -- the Palestinian Authority has undertaken its largest arrest sweep in four years.
Following the assassination of Israeli Cabinet Minister Rahavam Zeevi on 17 October, PA police forces detained 60 real, imagined and lapsed members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, all without any semblance of due process. Thirty-five remain detained without charge or trial. "I guess it's all part of the international war against terrorism," says one recently released PFLP member, "because I don't know why I was arrested. They never interrogated me."
After two Islamic Jihad operations inside Israel, seven members of the Islamist group were given seven months administrative detention, a wholly illegal form of punishment which the Palestinians fought when it was deployed against them by the Israeli occupation.
They are fighting against it now. On numerous occasions PA police have entered refugee camps and neighborhoods to pick up this or that PFLP or Jihad leader only to be quietly warned by the residents that it would be better if they left. Mostly -- and wisely -- they have done so.
A committee to defend the political prisoners has been formed, backed by former Palestinian delegation head Haidar Abdal-Shafi and all the Palestinian factions, including Arafat's Fatah movement.
On 7 November the Palestinian High Court of Justice ordered the immediate release of two detainees -- Dr Rabah Muhanna and the lawyer Yunis Jaru -- on the grounds that the PA had violated its own legal procedures in making the arrests. The two remain imprisoned.
Nor is the rupture only between the people, civil organisations and factions on the side and the PA on the other. It is also within the regime. On 5 November a meeting of the Palestinian leadership was held in Gaza. Chief of the PA's Preventive Security Force in Gaza Mohamed Dahlan, declared opposition to the arrest campaign.
He had his reasons According to Palestinian sources, 80 PSF officers in the southern Gaza area disobeyed the arrest orders and 15 senior commanders threatened to resign. There were similar rumblings of discontent in other PA security forces.
But Dahlan's critique wasn't just about the arrests, which he viewed as undermining what little nationalist credibility the PA still enjoyed among the people. He railed against corruption within the regime and the need to replace "failed" PA officials with ones trusted by the people and adequate to the tasks required.
But his main gripe was the absence of any political strategy on the part of the leadership and the utter confusion caused by its commitment to a "cease-fire" on the one hand and its laissez-faire approach to the Palestinian militias on the other. Instead he argued the leadership must agree a common policy with the factions which all would then adhere to.
He also made the elementary point that no cease-fire would hold until Israel first withdrew from the Palestinian areas and ended assassinations of Palestinian leaders. Without this, "security cooperation" with Israel was not only impossible, it was a trap primed by Ariel Sharon for the Palestinians to walk into.
Arafat reprimanded his young colonel for speaking out of turn. Dahlan tendered his resignation. Arafat refused to accept it but let it known he was setting up a new security force that would protect "Palestinian Authority institutions." The message was twofold: one, Dahlan is expendable; two, the campaign of political repression will continue.
How significant was the challenge? For many Palestinians Dahlan's championing of reform was an exercise in opportunism. "He is too much part of the system to really want to change it," was the verdict of one. Others thought the critique sincere.
"It's true he played the game of Oslo," said one former PFLP leader, who has known Dahlan all his life. "But he doesn't want to play the game any longer. Or at least he wants to change the rules of the game. And he's popular, has the support of Fatah and many others within the PA. He knows the people's concerns since his forces come from Gaza and have to deal with the complaints every day. Above all, he is starting to realise the problems we face cannot be solved by security measures alone."
Whatever Dahlan's motives the arrests and his response to them has exposed three widening chasms: between the people and the PA, the factions and the people and within the regime itself. Without quick redress the gaps may become unbridgeable.
And what will fill the void? Many Palestinians long for a genuine movement of democratic reform but doubt any of the factions have either the will or organisational capacity to build one. Others expect a power struggle within the regime that may bring cosmetic change but will leave the main flaws intact. And a few predict a collapse born of the most desperate political violence. There is only one consensus: the status quo in the PA's internal regime and policy cannot hold.
One seasoned Palestinian observer in Gaza answered my question with another. "Have you read Heikal's book on the assassination of Sadat? He called it Egypt's autumn of fury. Well," he added, clasping his fingers in a bridge, "we may just be entering ours.
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