Autonomy Stirs New Fears About Palestinians’ Rights

A terrible thought runs through the mind of Raji Sourani, director of the Gaza Center for Rights and Law, these days: What if the Palestinian government that takes over the Gaza Strip proves to be worse than Israel’s military occupation?

“I am fearful, very fearful,” Sourani said, “because we will have all the old problems from the occupation and a number of new questions for which we have no answers from the Palestinian leadership.

“It’s so important to create our Palestinian national authority correctly--it is the seedling for our future state--but I doubt very strongly that we will. That’s why I am afraid. Scared to death, in fact.”

Sourani is not alone in his skepticism and fear. Other veteran human rights campaigners and political leaders are raising serious questions about the protection of human and civil rights when the Palestine Liberation Organization assumes authority in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho next year.

Long a rallying cry for Palestinians under Israeli occupation, human rights must become a priority of the new interim authority and an issue defining the character of what Palestinians hope will become their own independent state, rights activists are telling the Palestinian leadership.

“Our people look at the political situation in Syria, in Jordan, in Egypt, in Iraq, and where do they find human rights, where do they see democracy?” asked Mahdi F. Abdul-Hadi, director of the Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs. “This is one cause for worry. Another cause is the uncertainty of this transition. What are we moving to? We have ideas, but no assurances. How will we get to this new society? Again, some ideas, but no assurances. Rights--human rights, civil rights, political rights, economic rights--are what our people want.”

But recent developments have increased Palestinian fears:

* Infighting in Gaza among members of Fatah, the principal group within the PLO, has been murderous, with assassinations frequent.

* Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the Israelis are still being executed despite amnesty calls by leaders.

* Recruits for the new Palestinian police come principally from Fatah, and PLO leaders have pledged that the new police force would be “hard and swift” in establishing order.

“When I see nothing in the declaration of principles (on Palestinian autonomy) on human rights, I get worried,” Sourani said. “When I see there is to be a ‘strong police force,’ I get afraid. And when I see the situation in the streets--85 wounded by the Israelis here in a single day just (last) week--and think about what is happening, I start to tremble.”

Last month, four exiled Palestinian leaders, including a political adviser to PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, called for assurances that the Palestine National Authority will be democratic and respect human rights.

“To do otherwise after coming this far would betray our whole struggle,” Nabil Amru, the Arafat adviser and author of the petition circulating among Palestinian exiles, said in Amman, the Jordanian capital. “But it will require a lot of effort.”

There are two sets of problems:

* Despite Israel’s overall pledge of withdrawal, its forces, in fact, will just be pulling back. Reduced numbers, even in Gaza, will remain to maintain overall security and to protect Jewish settlers.

“We will still be occupied because we still have Israeli soldiers and Israeli settlers,” Sourani said. “That means we will probably have all the old human rights issues, including detentions, torture, deportations, political prisoners, censorship, (and restrictions on) family reunification and free travel, although I hope on a reduced scale.”

Under international law, Israel will remain responsible for the occupied territories and their residents until it withdraws totally from them, according to human rights groups.

* Despite more than two years of debate by Palestinian lawyers, basic questions about the kind of political system that a self-governing Palestine will have are unresolved--and unlikely to be resolved quickly because of the very lack of a democratic, decision-making political structure.

“At the start, the new (Palestinian) authority will be ruling by decrees, absolute and unappealable,” said Jan abu Shakra, director of the Palestine Human Rights Information Center. “For a people that has experienced arbitrariness and brutality for more than 25 years, this is a cause for fear. Legally, who will be accountable to whom? We don’t know.”

A transitional Palestine National Authority is expected to promulgate basic decrees as soon as it is established and create an interim judicial system. But not even legal specialists are certain what provisions they will include. The Palestinians could find themselves governing with Israeli military regulations, the specialists say.

“We have no legislative authority to assess the situation and give answers,” Sourani said. “Elections (for a legislative council) are planned for July, but that is far away. Until then, we have quite wide areas of legal uncertainty and thus arbitrariness, and this affects not only civil rights but issues such as private investment or taxes or residence rights.”

Even more than legislation, a change in political outlook will be needed, first within the PLO as it assumes authority and then among Palestinians as a whole, said Sourani, Abu Shakra and others.

As a liberation movement, the PLO has operated mostly underground and along military lines. It has little experience in protecting human and civil rights or observing the rule of law. Current confusion and internal power struggles have slowed its evolution into an open governing authority based on democratic ideals.

“A PLO struggling against the occupation could rely on the goodwill of the people, and thus its decisions were accepted almost without question,” Abu Shakra said. “But a PLO in power is something else.”

In assuming authority in Gaza and Jericho and later in other areas of the West Bank, the PLO may take over, almost unchanged, the bureaucracy of the Israeli military government--a prospect that worries human rights activists.

“These are undemocratic structures by their nature,” Abdul-Hadi said, “and appointing Palestinians to head them ‘nationalizes’ them, if you will, but it does not democratize them. People expect more.”

To illustrate the point, Abu Shakra noted that the “glue that has held the occupation together is the penetration of the security forces into almost every aspect of everyday life.”

“Put aside the issues of detention and deportation, and there are still scores of human rights questions,” she said. “Work permits, travel permits, family reunification, business permits, construction permits--all go through the security services, and all impinge on basic human rights. There is no talk about dismantling all this, and I can see Palestinian security officers moving into the offices as the Israelis leave. We won’t have another Syria, where people are hanged in the square, but we also don’t want a country where the secret police make decisions on where a person can live or work or study.”

A radical change in outlook toward authority will also be needed among Palestinians, said Eric Goldstein, research director of Middle East Watch, a New York-based group that monitors human rights throughout the region.

“Palestinians have lived so long in resistance--resistance to the British, to the Jordanians, to the Israelis--that they will have to develop a new attitude toward authority as it becomes their own authority and they are able to participate in it,” Goldstein said.

“Among other things, this will mean respecting the human rights of people with whom they disagree. It will mean affording the opposition parties equal time on television and radio and in the press. It will mean ensuring that the elections are really open to all. It will mean public accountability at each level of authority.”

Palestinian human rights organizations, which largely grew out of the resistance to the Israeli occupation, have been debating their future role.

Most believe that they should remain outside the government and continue to focus on monitoring human rights; some are adding a strong educational element to their programs; others want to participate in shaping the political system that emerges in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank.

The Palestine Human Rights Information Center, Middle East Watch and B’Tselem, a respected Israeli group, have all laid out human rights agendas for the transitional authority, primarily out of fear that Palestinians would be left in what one called “a human rights vacuum” without reliable protection.

“There is a great urge to get into things and get them done right at the outset,” said Neil Hicks, a Middle East specialist at the Lawyers Committee on Human Rights in New York. “Some people want to get in there and start writing the constitution and laws themselves, setting up the court system and establishing the other structures.

“This is highly controversial, however, because it brings non-governmental organizations into the government, making it hard to maintain their monitoring and adversarial roles. But it is definitely good to build in safeguards at the earliest possible stage and to create a climate in which human rights are always a priority in policy-making.”

NEXT STEP

Palestinians have taken some initial steps on the human rights front. Recruits for the new Palestinian police have been lectured on what human rights mean by specialists from the International Committee of the Red Cross. The Palestine Human Rights Center is preparing a program to instruct Palestinians on civil rights at the village level. And two major conferences, one this week in Gaza and another early in 1994 in Jerusalem, will bring human rights activists together with PLO officials.