Key Arafat Aide Gives Up Fight to Reform PLO

The photographs and paintings were off the walls. The embroidered slipcovers were off the sofas and packed away in boxes. In the hollow silence of an almost empty villa, Yusif A. Sayigh prepared to abandon, perhaps forever, the revolution he has fought with his fine mind for 45 years.

It was with a sense of frustration, dashed hopes and a little fear that Sayigh, the Palestine Liberation Organization’s senior economic planner, boarded an outbound flight Friday, having, at least for a time, given up the fight.

Sayigh, the man who has overseen the preparation of the PLO’s $11.6-billion economic development plan, is a 77-year-old economist, a former lecturer at Harvard, Princeton and Oxford, who finds himself in a strange position: He is at odds with Palestinian radicals, who are angry at his key role in the PLO’s new peace strategy with Israel. And now he is at odds with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, who has bristled at Sayigh’s insistent demands that the PLO of the future be democratic and accountable, and not simply subject to the whims of the Palestinian chief.

For PLO leaders, these are unsettled times. The Dec. 13 deadline approaches for signing an interim peace accord with Israel, but Saturday, nine days before Israeli troops are scheduled to begin withdrawing from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho, the PLO still has designated no government to take over.

A growing number of PLO advisers--from Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Maazen), a close Arafat adviser who signed the initial peace agreement with Israel on Sept. 13, to Sayigh--are expressing impatience with the PLO chairman, who single-handedly makes nearly all decisions for the organization.

Arafat can no longer claim the unequivocal support of the PLO’s 18-member Executive Committee: Six of the committee’s original members have resigned in opposition to the peace plan, and others have boycotted its meetings out of impatience with Arafat’s dictatorial style.

And the challenges in the next few weeks--completing a peace agreement with Israel, planning the management and expenditure of $2.5 billion from foreign donors to develop Gaza and Jericho, beginning the transfer of authority and security to Palestinian hands in the occupied territories--are the greatest in the history of the 28-year-old revolutionary movement.

In the past few days, Palestinians have mounted unprecedented demands for retaking control of the PLO’s evolution. After two days of meetings in Tunis, the PLO Executive Committee ordered Saturday that representatives of the leadership, and not just Arafat alone, would begin directing the peace talks with Israel.

Sayigh’s story is typical of the dilemma facing Palestinian technocrats and intellectuals as they try to move the PLO away from a past of paternalism, patronage and violence.

Sayigh, who has been the PLO’s main link with the World Bank, says he has found since his public clashes with Arafat that he is under unusual scrutiny these days by Arafat’s elite security network, Force 17.

The son of a Presbyterian minister, soft-spoken, goateed and partial to tweed, Sayigh is not at all like the pistol-toting Arafat. He worked closely with Ahmed Suleiman Khoury (Abu Alaa), who conducted the secret talks with Israel in Oslo that led to the initial peace accord. The two men worked to fashion a new Palestinian economic institution that would collect the billions of dollars in foreign aid bound for Palestine.

Sayigh well knew that the international donor community and the World Bank would never accept the strategies of the past, when the PLO’s pocketbook was administered by a single man, Arafat.

So what he and Khoury proposed for the Palestinian Economic Development and Reconstruction Authority was a board of governors composed of economists, bankers, planners and development specialists that would meet regularly to tend the financial needs of the fledgling Palestinian government.

Bowing to the politicians, they also proposed an advisory council, headed by Arafat and giving due representation to the various political and family factions within the PLO, that would meet twice a year in a general policy-making role. Instead, Arafat came back with a proposal naming himself as head of the board of governors.

After a collision with the World Bank and international donors, who feared a return to the fiscal irresponsibility of the PLO’s past, a compromise was achieved. Under it, Arafat remains the point man.

Although the international community has signed off on the compromise, Sayigh says he has grave fears that the structure will allow Arafat to dictate which contracts are awarded to whom and make economic development subject to political whim.

Thus, the elderly economist has clashed frequently with the PLO chairman, most recently last week, when he presented his arguments about accountability and transparency in Palestinian finances at a meeting of the PLO leadership.

Arafat, Sayigh says, was arguing for the creation of a Palestinian development bank, a $300-million to $500-million institution that, Sayigh argued, needed not only a great deal of planning but new laws authorizing it.

“I told him it couldn’t be done in two days. He said, ‘If you’re going to work so slowly, I will show you how it’s done! I will issue a decree right now!’

“I said, ‘What legal authority do you have to do that?’ I said, ‘We are not allowed to make laws until there is a Palestinian National Authority, and you have not yet created the Palestinian National Authority.’

“He said, ‘Your reading of the situation is an Israeli reading.’

“His voice was shrieking. Have you ever heard him when he’s shrieking? But all of this was so simple, so elementary, I felt embarrassed even to have to state it.”

Sayigh says he will come back in five weeks, if he has decided that the PLO is truly committed to democracy.

“What I have been trying to say is that I am not against Arafat,” he said. “. . . It’s simply that I feel this is not the optimal way of doing things.”