The PLO is under pressure to prove it can a government
by Todd Shields, David Makovsky, Khaled Abu Toameh, Jihan El- Tahri, Louise Lief
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Palestinian activist Adnan Hamad has a modest second-floor office on a main street in Jericho, just down the block from the town's barricaded police station. He knows the Israelis, who have occupied the town since 1967, are ready to hand the building over to Yassir Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization, but he's worried about the PLO's ability to take responsibility for Jericho and Gaza after the Israelis depart. "They talk of building a new state, but they are not [providing] the tools on the ground here," he says of the Palestinian leadership. "They talk of 3,000 policemen. We say OK, but where will they live? What about houses for the leaders?"
Hamad, a member of a moderate and secular Palestinian faction, is sure the problems can be solved. But in the Gaza Strip, which is plagued by more violence, poverty and factionalism than Jericho, other Palestinians predict failure. "Give them time, give them a chance to practice this autonomy," says Mahmoud Zahar, a leading Islamic fundamentalist and an opponent of Arafat's peace deal. "We are not in a hurry."
The pressure, however, is mounting on Arafat's PLO to demonstrate that it is ready to accept the new responsibilities it has won at the bargaining table, willing to combat militant Arab foes of the peace accord and able to provide both a better life for Palestinians and security for their Jewish neighbors. Last week's omens were not encouraging. Despite heavy prodding from the Clinton administration, the PLO failed to condemn a suicide car bomber who killed seven Israelis in the Israeli town of Afula and, according to one witness, left children "burning like torches." An attack at a bus stop in Israel the next day left one Israeli and the Arab gunman dead, and at week's end Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin barred the 1.8 million Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza from entering Israel.
High stakes. If the terror attacks continue, public support for September's accords will plummet -- and with it backing for Rabin's coalition government. Rabin's maneuvering room is shrinking. Deporting militant Islamic leaders would help restore his tough-guy image at home but would seriously weaken his negotiating partner Arafat. Cracking down on militant Israeli settlers, who after the February 25 massacre of 29 Arabs in Hebron are threatening renewed violence of their own, might reassure Arabs but would outrage many Israelis.
Hard choices. Arafat finds himself in a parallel bind. Condemning Arab terrorism would deepen the already bloody divisions between the PLO and rejectionist rivals such as the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, which claimed responsibility for the Afula attack. But without clearer proof that Arafat has abandoned terrorism, Israelis are unlikely to back further compromises with the PLO or negotiations with other Arab countries, especially Syria. "The Israeli public will test any agreement with the Palestinians first and foremost on how it affects personal security," says Rabin adviser Gad Ben Ari.
In order to counter the appeal of Hamas and other violent opponents of Arab Israeli negotiations, the PLO must prove it can bring a better life to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza after 27 years of Israeli rule. So far, though, Arafat has failed to create the new institutions needed to provide jobs, roads, sewers, health care and other services, or to abandon the autocratic leadership style that has paralyzed the PLO.
Critics say Arafat and his advisers have parceled out top jobs to loyalists and to exiled Palestinians, ignoring many educated and talented Palestinians within the territories. "They're dealing with institution building as a matter of political patronage," says activist Hanan Ashrawi in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Ashrawi and others fear Arafat's new government will face an immediate crisis not only of legitimacy but also of competence, as key posts go unfilled or are filled by political hacks. Already, they say, the PLO's poor performance is visible in the slow pace of preparations for self-rule. And they warn that the coming Palestinian administration needs to perform well, not only to maintain public support but to buttress the PLO positions in future negotiations over Israeli settlements, expanding self-rule to the rest of the West Bank and the status of Jerusalem.
"It is necessary to see Palestinian competence, to demonstrate our ability to run our own affairs," says Haidar Abdel-Shafi, a Palestinian leader in Gaza City who left the peace negotiations over the issue of Israeli settlements and over the lack of democracy in the PLO. "Competence should not be subjected to political matters."
PLO officials in the occupied territories say all is ready, and plans willbe announced at some undetermined date. But even figures close to Arafatacknowledge problems. According to a source present at the Israeli-PLO negotiations, the Palestinians insisted that their self-governing authority must be responsible for electric power in Gaza. The Israelis quickly agreed that Israel's power plant would supply only the remaining Jewish settlements in the area. Only then did the Palestinians discover they had no alternative source of electricity and no technicians to run or maintain a power plant of their own. The PLO was obliged to sign an agreement permitting Israel to supply all the electricity in Gaza.
Fur lining. "By the way things are going, it seems the police force will be the only aspect of life in Gaza and Jericho," says one senior Palestinian in Cairo for last week's Israeli-PLO negotiations on the force's size and deployment. "They are giving more importance to the details of police uniforms than moving on to establish credible bodies which the people will deal with on a daily basis." The uniforms, however, should be snappy, if not suitable for Gaza summers: Norway has provided 3,000 of the 10,000 uniforms it has promised all of them with fur linings.
Nabil Shaath, the PLO's top negotiator, says preparations have gone forward but argues that a lack of funding has slowed the process. "We are getting zero money to prepare," he says. Saudi Arabian sources say that in January the country, which cut off funds to the PLO after Arafat supported Iraq in the gulf war but has pledged $100 million for self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, paid the PLO $2.4 million collected from Palestinians in Saudi Arabia, the fourth such payment in 10 months. Indonesia's President Suharto has paid $2 million of the $5 million his country has promised, PLO sources say, and the United States will contribute $125 million in grants and credits the first year.
Cash flow. But the donors, who have pledged $570 million for the first year of self-rule, say most of the money won't flow until the PLO has a credible way to account for it. PECDAR, the Palestinian Economic Council for Development and Reconstruction, exists mostly on paper. "Every time we ask about it, we hear `this month,' `this month,'" says a State Department official.
PECDAR, however, is already falling short of the standards of financial PECDAR, however, is already falling short of the standards of financial probity donors want to see. In one of its first acts, the body issued public tenders for furniture to fill an East Jerusalem villa it has rented for $100,000 a year. Merchants claim PECDAR officials asked furniture dealers for kickbacks on the contracts.
These problems occur against a continuing backdrop of internal tensions. Within the occupied territories, the offices of Fatah, Arafat's mainstream PLO faction, have been temporarily closed. PLO officials say this was done to protest the Hebron massacre, but analysts widely ascribe the action to tensions between bureaucrats in the organization's Tunis headquarters and younger street leaders of the intifida, the seven-year revolt against Israeli occupation.
