Giving Peace A Chance : ‘Mostly, I’m Afraid for Us to Fail’ : A top Arafat adviser is worried. So are other PLO members--about money, politics and how well they will perform as government leaders.

Being invited to the office of Bassam abu Sharif, the chief public liaison for the Palestine Liberation Organization, is a little like arriving at Alice in Wonderland’s mad tea party after most of the guests have been there far too long.

People who had appointments for hours earlier sit in the reception room and stare vacantly into space. Small cats race between the guests’ feet until a woman rushes in from the kitchen and scoops them up. Bodyguards, a reminder that Abu Sharif once lost part of his hand to a bomb, lounge and chain-smoke in the halls with automatic rifles at their sides.

Abu Sharif himself, looking harried and distracted, speaks in 30-second intervals interrupted by phone calls. “ Habibi! (My friend!)” he yells into the phone with delight each time, and any attempt at rational conversation in the room is gone.

Most of the time, these scenes take place somewhere between 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. The PLO naps by day, gears up in the evening and works frenetically until dawn.

With the possibility of Palestinian self-rule emerging soon in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, the question emerges: Is this any way to run a government?

“If the government would be running like this, it would be a catastrophe,” Abu Sharif admits. “Of course we’re worried. But this is natural. When children go for the first day to the university, they get tense. On the day when a woman gets married, she gets tense. . . . We are about to start something new after 45 years of mobilization on both sides.”

How the PLO will transform itself from a 1960s-style national liberation movement--a band of revolutionaries exiled amid the white-tile villas of Tunis who still use words like armed struggle in casual conversation--to a government of institutions and accountability is anybody’s guess.

But these are questions that the international community--and Palestinians themselves--will want answered soon. The PLO says it needs $11.9 billion from the international community and Palestinian investors over the next seven years to carry out its development program in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

How readily will money flow to an organization dogged by allegations of corruption and run under a one-man chain of command?

Increasingly in recent years, Palestinians have complained that without Chairman Yasser Arafat’s say-so, most all Palestinian business grinds to a halt. The PLO functions almost exclusively by way of a phone call in the middle of the night from its temperamental leader--or a communique from the bank of fax machines he keeps in his office or the portable fax that follows him onto his private plane.

“No Palestinian can go to sleep without a telephone next to his head,” one Arafat aide said ruefully of the chairman’s penchant for pre-dawn business emergencies. “Of course, you can’t run a country the way you run a revolution.”

Can you run a country on coffee, cigarettes and marathon late-night meetings?

“Smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee is not only a trait of the Palestinian people. You find it elsewhere,” a senior Arafat aide replied reproachfully.

“We have a democratic leader who listens to the views of all of his advisers and his opponents, who works long hours. And he cannot be stopped, if there is a necessity to call somebody in the middle of the night . . . just because (that somebody) is sleeping. We have a job to do,” he said.

“Maybe that doesn’t happen in other countries, but they are settled societies,” the aide said. “We are not a settled society. We have worked very hard for 30 years now, and we have come out now with this accord. I would be lying if I tell you the institutions are all there. The institutional framework is there, and it has to be developed. We have the political will, and we have the people who are ready to create something out of nothing.”

For years, the PLO has been running hospitals, clinics, orphanages, universities, schools and syndicates in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Ahmed Suleiman Khoury, the head of the PLO economic wing, Samed, who led the secret peace talks in Oslo, has also been in charge of the next step--coming up with a full seven-year development program. It is a sophisticated proposal for regional and international economic cooperation, developing infrastructure, creating new jobs to bring down an unemployment rate of 54%, developing agriculture and establishing a Palestinian banking system.

It envisions building 235,000 new housing units in the first five years and projects the need for a Palestinian economy that will generate $2 billion a year.

But with the cutoff in funding from the wealthy Arab Gulf countries that followed the PLO’s support for Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the PLO is in a financial mess.

Salaries have had to be cut for bureaucrats, teachers, doctors and other public servants in both Tunis and the occupied territories.

PLO offices around the world have had to close, and support payments to the families of fighters killed or wounded during the 5-year-old intifada have been slashed.

PLO officials admit they will have to develop both institutions and accountability before any significant new amounts of money come in.

And there are more lingering questions to be addressed.

What to do, for example, with the alphabet soup of Palestine liberation factions that still exist throughout the Middle East under the banner of the PLO--many of which have failed to make the transition from military organization to political movement? “You can see the composition of the (PLO) Executive Committee, which is a composition of guerrilla groups, is caduc, “ said Executive Committee member Suleiman Najjab, playing off Arafat’s oft-used French term for declaring parts of the Palestinian charter obsolete.

“I think the voting (on the peace plan) shows how obsolete this form of alliance is and how it has to be replaced by a new composition that reflects the real balance of forces among the Palestinians,” he said.

Several members of the committee representing radical groups based in Damascus, Syria, including the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, boycotted the meetings and then resigned from the Executive Committee.

Najjab said the PLO’s movement back into the occupied territories and outside the shelter of various Arab regimes like Syria and Iraq will speed its transformation into a genuine political organization.

“Because the PLO was outside the territories, it was under the influence of many Arab countries. By moving back to the motherland, the influence of these regimes fades,” he said.

PLO officials realize that they have to act fast or lose any hope of establishing an independent Palestinian state on the lands for which they soon will take over administrative authority.

“The idea is, we have to start building a Palestinian entity and develop that entity on the ground, by building infrastructure, by building institutions, so that in a very short time, not exceeding three or four years, a state will be a fait accompli, an inevitable consequence,” said senior PLO official Jamal Hillal.

But there is a more persistent worry for many Palestinians in the occupied territories, along with millions of other Palestinians spread throughout the Middle East who constitute the Arab world’s best-educated and most politically sophisticated national group.

Without democratic guarantees and political institutions in place, with the prospect of a new era of martial law under the PLO to establish security on the ground, what is to guarantee that the new Palestine will not evolve into the same kind of autocratic, repressive regime as those other Arab regimes under which Palestinians have suffered during years of exile?

“Great sacrifices have been made by Palestinians to reach independence, and those sacrifices have been made by people of very greatly differing political and ideological points of view, and everybody should have a part of building a new system. The strength of a future independent state depends on it,” Hillal said.

In one of Arafat’s offices in a Tunis suburb, one of his senior advisers was asked what he is now most worried about. He didn’t think long before answering.

“Mostly, I am afraid for us to fail,” he said. “I am afraid of us falling into the trap of other Arab states: autocratic leadership, controlled press, state-run economies. I am afraid of losing the best among us to other countries.

“You know, the infrastructure is very bad. The electricity works and then it doesn’t. The roads are bad. Garbage piles up in the streets. This is what I’m afraid of. . . . After all these years, we will have a Palestine that no one wants to live in.”

An Alphabet Soup

A number of Palestinian political and guerrilla organizations have stepped forward through the years of strife in the Middle East. Compounding the personal and ideological rivalries among those organizations are factional differences within the many of the groups themselves.

Some of the principle Palestinian groups:

* PLO: The Palestinian Liberation Organization is an umbrella organization for groups with different ideologies but the common goal of achieving a Palestinian state. Policy is set by 450-member parliament in exile, the Palestine National Council. Now generally recognized as the principle representative of the Palestinian people.

Leader: Yaser Arafat

* PFLP: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist faction, is the largest and strongest of the rejectionist groups which long opposed any political settlement with Israel.

Leader: Dr. George Habash

* PFLP-GC: Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command is a small guerrilla faction that broke from PFLP in 1968. Strongly opposes political settlement with Israel and has issued death threat against Arafat.

Leader: Ahmed Jabril

* DFLP: The Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine began as an extreme leftist breakaway from the PFLP in 1969, but has since moderated. Supports negotiated settlement with Israel.

Leader: Nayif Hawatama

* Hamas: The Islamic Resistance Movement, founded in 1988, calls for holy war against Israel and establishment of an Islamic state throughout historic Palestine.

Founder and Spiritual Leader: Ahmed Yasin

* PIJ: The Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a loose collection of Islamic fundamentalist factions that share militant opposition to Israel and which have threatened Palestinian peace negotiators.

Leader: Various factions divided by personal rivalries.