PLO’s Peace Moves Erode Support in Lebanon Camps

The Palestine Liberation Organization is struggling to hold onto its grass-roots followers in refugee camps across Lebanon as refugees rebel against Chairman Yasser Arafat’s moves to open peace talks with Israel.

In Rashidiyeh, an impoverished camp near Tyre in southern Lebanon, hundreds of demonstrators marched in protest last month, brandishing rifles, chanting slogans and waving the red, white, green and black Palestinian flag. A week later, residents of the Ein el Hilwa camp in the port of Sidon, 25 miles north of Tyre, also protested.

The refugees are chafing under orders issued by the PLO’s majority Fatah faction, headed by Arafat, to refrain from infiltrating and making raids on Israel--the traditional, if largely unsuccessful, strategy of the past. They also complain bitterly about an economic squeeze caused by salary cuts that Arafat ordered for guerrillas languishing in the camps.

“It is hard to tell fighters that after 20 years or 40 years, they may have to do something else, stop fighting for now, take up a trade,” one Western relief official said. “This is a problem with all such movements, and it is a problem for the PLO.”

The restlessness indicates the PLO’s difficulties in gaining support for its new, moderate policy, which has shifted away from fighting Israel and toward creation of a Palestinian state. And it suggests its leaders do not have unlimited time to show results.

An official of an international relief agency in Lebanon observed: “There is a feeling the clock is ticking on Arafat. He has to work hard to convince his people that he is not wasting time.”

To ease discontent, the PLO recently dispatched top officials from Beirut to the camps to insist that Arafat’s diplomacy is gaining ground and that the budget cuts--designed to divert funds to the 14-month-old Palestinian uprising in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip--are temporary.

As an added morale booster, a group of 13 Palestinians recently expelled from the occupied territories lectured the refugees on the gains of the intifada, as the uprising is known.

The refugees’ hard-edged attitude reflects the debate among the PLO’s top officials, Lebanese and Palestinian sources say.

In recent days, reports from Tunisia, where the PLO maintains its headquarters, have exposed a growing impatience with Washington. Since talks between the United States and the PLO began in December, the Americans have tried to focus mainly on ending terrorism, PLO officials say, while the Palestinians want to focus on ways to bring Israel to the negotiating table.

“It’s very disappointing,” said one aide to a PLO leader who has met with the Americans. “They’re not saying anything about the behavior of the Israelis, who are killing civilians every day in the occupied territories.”

Another PLO spokesman added: “At the beginning, they talked of a substantial dialogue, but all we hear from them these days is quibbles. If they think this is the way to influence the PLO, I think they’ll get negative results.”

In regrets expressed to a Lebanese newspaper, Nayef Hawatmeh, head of the radical Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of five PLO factions, lamented the willingness of “rightist” PLO officials to surrender “national unity” in favor of talks with the Americans.

Hawatmeh seemed to directly challenge the hold of Arafat’s Fatah on the PLO by calling for an end to “dominant control” by any one segment of the organization.

Attacks on Israel

Radical PLO factions like Hawatmeh’s are promising out-of-work guerrillas that they can take part in attacks on the northern frontier of Israel if they bolt from Fatah, Arab and Western sources say. The factions consider refugee camps, where poverty and isolation are softened only by dreams of “struggle,” “advance” and “victory,” to be fertile ground for their appeals.

A unit of the Marxist-led Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, another PLO faction out of Arafat’s direct control, recently attempted to raid Israel in what was considered a display of purpose designed to contrast with Fatah’s impotence. Israeli troops operating in Israel’s security zone in southern Lebanon aborted the raid, shooting five Palestinians in an ambush.

News of the failed operation fueled the latest Israeli efforts to persuade the United States to drop contact with the PLO on grounds that it is still wedded to terrorism. In response, the U.S. ambassador in Tunisia expressed Washington’s “concern” over the commando action to PLO officials.

Discontent in Territories

As Arafat’s talks with the United States limp along, indications of discontent in the West Bank and Gaza also have surfaced. Both the Popular Front and Islamic fundamentalists operating there have criticized Arafat’s willingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The simmering skepticism is having an effect on tactics inside the intifada , reported one Palestinian source in Jerusalem, who is in contact with intifada leaders. After a few months of drift, intifada leaders are considering stepping up protests, beginning in March.

Although the opening of talks with Washington was an accomplishment, it is not an end in itself, the leaders have decided, and the uprising will have to pick up steam if something more is to come out of it.

In Lebanon, both Arab and Western sources report, the unhappiness has prompted Palestinians to take to the streets.

About 150,000 Palestinians live in refugee camps run by the United Nations in Lebanon; another 135,000 reside outside the camps, although they are still registered as refugees. Altogether, about 1.5 million refugees reside in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, making up a sizable constituency for the PLO. In the West Bank and Gaza, 800,000 Palestinians are registered as refugees out of a total population of 1.7 million.

The first demonstration against Arafat’s policies erupted in Rashidiyeh, a camp of 17,000 where political divisions sharpened after Arafat recognized Israel last fall. So split on the question is Rashidiyeh that various sectors in the camp are controlled by different PLO factions. Passage from one cinder-block neighborhood to another depends upon the whims of armed mini-militias--a version of the fractured geography of Lebanese cities, like Beirut, gripped by civil war.

“In this camp, Fatah has not imposed its control,” said Hassan, a Lebanese member of a local militia that has access to the camp. “To do so now would mean war, and it wants to avoid that. So it lets things go on in this tense way.”

Effort to Dispel Tension

As part of the effort to dispel that tension, the group of Palestinians expelled from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had planned to affirm Arafat’s leadership as the most representative of all Palestinian interests.

“We have to get everyone unified. We are united in the intifada, and that is what has kept us going,” said Rizek Bayari, a local leader from Gaza.

When asked about the divisions among the refugees, Bayari responded with the colorful, if sometimes empty, Arab rhetoric: “Sometimes when brothers live in the same house, they fight. But they are still brothers.”

Reporters who encountered the traveling exiles in Tyre were barred from going with them into Rashidiyeh. Passions were too raw for exposure to foreigners, the Palestinians explained.

Bayari conceded that some aspects of the PLO’s new moderation were bound to bother the refugees, notably its ambiguity about the “right of return,” a long-held dogma among Palestinians.

The “right of return” claims the prerogative of all Palestinians to go back to their place of origin, even if it is now inside Israel proper. Thousands of Arabs were driven from their homes during various Israeli-Arab wars.

Recently, Palestinians in the West Bank have begun to speak of exchanging the “right of return” for monetary compensation. But such a move would leave refugees like those in Rashidiyeh in a foreign land among clannish people who have never welcomed their presence.

“The question of the right of return should be the last one brought up in any negotiation,” the Palestinian source in Jerusalem said. “It is the one that could bring Arafat the most trouble.”