Palestinians Worry About Blueprint for Living : Mideast: Arafat has sent faxes on minor changes such as working hours. But guidelines on how to run a government are nonexistent.

The first message from Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and head of the new Palestinian government here, was reassuring--all 11,200 Palestinians employed by the Gaza Strip’s civil administration will keep their jobs.

The second message, also faxed from PLO headquarters in Tunis, Tunisia, left Mohammed Abdul Aziz, acting head of the Gaza administration, bemused: He and other senior officials, who had all worked through the long Israeli occupation, had been appointed colonels in the Palestine Liberation Army.

The third and fourth messages from Arafat changed the government’s working hours, shortening them but adding Saturday to the workweek to eliminate the Jewish Sabbath as a day off.

But after that--nothing. No broad policy guidelines, no 100-day plan, no list of senior officials and, of most concern to Abdul Aziz, no information on how he is to meet the administration’s $3.3-million monthly payroll and other operating costs.

“Things will work out,” said Dr. Zakaria Agha, one of 18 members of the provisional council that will govern the Gaza Strip and the West Bank town of Jericho prior to elections. “Step by step, we are assuming power, and step by step we will put things in order after 27 years of Israeli occupation. Our first job is to make life easier for our people.”

Yet there is a sense among many Palestinians, including leaders here and in the West Bank, that the PLO will be tested hard as much by the problems of day-to-day administration as by the challenge of establishing a democratic government among a people who have never governed themselves.

“There is no plan,” said Tawfik Mabhouh, a leader of the pro-Communist Palestine People’s Party. “Tunis has no blueprint, no scenario, no timetable. All the decisions are ad hoc, and most deal with minutiae. . . . I suppose the PLO thought this day would never come, though it has been clear for months that it would eventually, and so it saw little need for concrete planning. This has meant a very slow start to autonomy. When their jubilation quiets down, people will ask what comes next.”

Abdul Aziz, a 31-year veteran of the Gaza administration, said he and his workers will carry on, as they have under the Israelis, running hospitals and schools, issuing driver’s licenses and marriage certificates, collecting taxes and taking care, as best they can with very limited money, of the local infrastructure.

“The civil administration is, and always has been, Palestinian at its core--working for the Palestinian people of Gaza,” Abdul Aziz said. “Before, under the Israelis, we did whatever we could to help our people. Now, under this new Palestinian Authority, I am sure we will be free to do much more.”

Unlike at Gaza’s military bases and police stations, which Israeli forces stripped before leaving them to Palestinian police, Israel left behind a sophisticated $1-million computer system with meticulous files documenting all aspects of life among Gaza’s 850,000 people for the past 27 years.

But the impoverished Gaza Strip is an infrastructure nightmare. Its streets are piled with garbage, and they wind for miles through the squalor of more than half a dozen refugee camps. The municipal water system is dangerously saline. Forty percent to 50% of the work force is unemployed. And, after decades of occupation--by Britain, then Egypt and finally Israel--there is no tradition of local government as there is in the West Bank.

Jamal Zakout, a PLO negotiator, said the new Palestinian Authority will keep current government structures--a bureaucracy of 38 departments--intact for now but plans to overhaul them to make them more responsive to people’s needs.

“We are obliged to begin from zero, but we do not want to always be like this,” Zakout said. “The PLO has ordered all employees and directors to continue their jobs, but when the national authority comes, it will fix a new structure. What was appropriate for an occupation is not appropriate in self-government.”

But there is no date for the new 25-member Palestinian council to begin operations, and not all the members have been named. At the administration’s main office, employees are so unsure of the changes in the days ahead that they have closed the gates until further notice.

The 700 Israelis who administered Gaza--in actuality, the military government for the region--were largely in supervisory and policy-making posts; Palestinian administrators, engineers, physicians, educators, clerks and other employees made up most of the civil service.

“It is complex and complicated, but all in all what you need is experience to get on top of all the issues,” Brig. Gen. Dov Gazit, the outgoing Israeli head of the civil administration, said this week as he turned over control to the Palestinian Authority. “There will be difficulties. There must be difficulties. But there is a big difference between daily difficulties, even big ones, and chaos. I do not expect chaos.”

Israel withdrew the last of its troops from Arab population areas in Gaza early Wednesday under its agreement with the PLO on limited Palestinian self-government. Last Friday, it completed its pullout from Jericho, the other autonomous area. Israeli troops will remain stationed around Jewish settlements in Gaza.

To replace Israeli administrators in Gaza and Jericho, the PLO plans to send in 1,000 of its people from Tunis and other centers, in addition to the 7,000 officers it is bringing in this month for its security forces.

“The transfer of authority is more difficult than most people suppose--it’s not simply a matter of taking over an office and putting your own men in,” said Jamil Tarifi, former mayor of the West Bank town of Al Birah, who negotiated the transfer of civilian functions on behalf of the PLO.

Despite faxed orders from Tunis, a power vacuum is already developing because Agha, and Arafat’s other appointees, lack real authority and must refer all issues, big and small, to PLO headquarters in Tunis. There, Arafat attempts to micromanage everything and largely ignores the extensive planning done by West Bank and Gaza residents for Palestinian autonomy.

“We call them ‘mailmen’ because all they do is take the problem back to Tunis,” Mabhouh said of Arafat appointees. “Yes, our bureaucrats can run the civil administration from one day to the next, but they have no policy framework. Beyond that, there is a question of legitimacy that only elections can answer. So now we are in the transition, hoping for elections later this year.”

Those elections appear likely to be contested fiercely. Fatah, Arafat’s own group within the PLO, is divided into 11 factions in Gaza and two more in Jericho. Other PLO groups will field candidates; the fundamentalist Islamic movement Hamas also appears likely to participate.

“Today we have to send faxes to Tunis and wait for Arafat’s answer, but in the future authority will be here,” said Tawfik abu Khousa, a leader of the Fatah Hawks militia in Gaza and a Fatah dissident. “We are against the appointment of people from outside. The PLO’s thinking is a top-down pyramid, but people here believe that authority flows from them.”