Palestinians Long to End Lawlessness : Mideast: With the occupied West Bank in limbo, hopes for civil order have been shaken by actions of armed youths acting in the name of the PLO.

For Palestinians living in the West Bank’s largest city, what started as a minor traffic accident has become a metaphor for the lawlessness engulfing their society as they await the Palestine Liberation Organization’s arrival.

At noon on Oct. 29, Sami Tayyem--a bodyguard hired to work in the PLO’s Nablus office--and nine of his friends stormed into the local office of the National Insurance Co. All were armed, according to witnesses.

What followed played like a scene from a Western movie: After ordering the firm’s terrified employees into the street, Tayyem and his friends trained their guns on the office’s computers and other equipment. By the time the shooting stopped, the office was a shambles. An estimated $7,000 in damage had been done.

Tayyem launched the attack, witnesses said, because the insurer had failed to immediately pay a claim he filed for a minor car accident that had occurred two days before. Damage to his car was estimated at $100.

The incident caused an uproar here, home to some of the West Bank’s largest, wealthiest families and a city known for its strong support of the PLO.

“Such actions not only damage the image of those who committed the crime but also does damage to the Palestinian people and their leadership,” the insurer raged in an advertisement it ran in the Arabic press. “The National Co. does not denounce the action because that brings no results. However, it does, with great sorrow, mourn the death of morals, ethics and principles.”

“This was a miserable action,” said Said Kanaan, a Nablus businessman close to the PLO. “But it was not the first such miserable action to occur here, and it is not the last that will occur.”

What horrified residents here was not only the violence but that it was committed by gunmen hired by the PLO. The same people who attacked the insurance firm presumably will be among those enforcing the law in Nablus once PLO authority is extended throughout the West Bank.

“The bullets used to damage our office should be used for the security and protection of our people, and these young men should be the guardians of law and order--not chaos and disorder,” the company admonished in its ad.

For years, Nablus residents say, civil order in their community has been steadily deteriorating. It started to decline, they say, with the 1987 eruption of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation. After the intifada began, Palestinian police who worked under Israeli authority in the West Bank quit what suddenly had become dishonorable jobs.

Since they departed, Palestinians in the territories have gotten by with no formal agency to deal with common crimes. Palestinians tried various means to maintain social order. They formed popular committees and gave traditional tribal law a greater role. Gradually--and reluctantly--they came to rely on groups of armed youths.

“The vacuum started with the resignation of the policemen and the creation of a social state of civil disobedience against Israeli rule,” said Amin Makbool, a senior PLO official in Nablus. “The community started to use the organizations of the intifada youth to enforce law. But sometimes, the youth made mistakes.”

One prominent Nablus businessman observed, “It is ridiculous: People turn to 16-year-olds to settle their disputes, because those are the ones who are armed.”

With the 1993 signing of the Israeli-PLO framework for peace, however, people began to look forward to a restoration of services, including police protection. They thought that Arafat would move to curb the aggressive behavior of some of the Fatah activists.

But those expectations have been shaken by the conduct of youths acting in the name of Fatah, the largest PLO faction, in Nablus and other West Bank towns. The PLO opened several offices in Nablus, including the one where Tayyem landed a job. Initially, the offices were meant to establish a political presence for the PLO in the northern West Bank. But soon they were swamped with requests to intervene in civil disputes.

“People came to the offices to solve problems, and the offices responded,” Makbool said. “That was a mistake, because the people working in the offices didn’t have experience in this field. Problems accumulated.”

Nablus residents said they complained to PLO officials, even to Chairman Yasser Arafat, about the employees. But the PLO leader, beset with problems in Gaza, did nothing.

Then Tayyem decided to take matters into his own hands with the National Insurance Co.

Arafat reportedly was so embarrassed by the attack on the Nablus insurer that he ordered the PLO office here temporarily closed. The PLO promised that Tayyem and his fellow gunmen will be punished. But residents here say that no action has been taken. Makbool insisted in an interview that the Palestinian Authority will move against Tayyem and the others, but he could not say how or when.

The incident cast doubt on Arafat’s ability to provide Palestinians a sense of personal security--the one area where even his harshest Palestinian critics give him credit for performing well in the Gaza Strip, seat of the Palestinian Authority.

Crime is said to be down in Gaza; Gazans feel safe walking their streets, even late at night. But Arafat’s rule extends only throughout Gaza and to the tiny West Bank town of Jericho.

In the rest of the West Bank, Palestinians are still living under Israeli military control; Arafat has allowed the informal groups of youths to continue roaming the streets, often with weapons.

“Whenever there is a time of uncertainty, the guns that people have stashed under their floorboards begin to come out,” said one official in the Israeli civil administration. “That is what we are seeing in Nablus and in other parts of the West Bank.”

Talks between Israel and the PLO on extending Palestinian authority throughout the West Bank are scheduled to resume in Cairo by the end of this month. But no one expects them to yield quick results. Optimists in both camps say an Israeli redeployment out of Palestinian population centers and the hand-over of authority to the Palestinians may occur next spring.

That leaves the estimated 1 million Palestinians of the West Bank living in political, economic and social limbo until then.

Palestinians say that the knowledge that the Israeli military’s days in the West Bank are numbered, coupled with the absence of a real Palestinian authority, has created a dangerous power vacuum. For now, undisciplined thugs are the only ones around to fill it.

And there is no shortage of thugs.

Israel has released thousands of Palestinian prisoners in keeping with agreements signed with the PLO. Most have made their way back to homes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. But many have found that the society they left years ago no longer has space for them.

“Most of these people are old freedom fighters,” said Zuhair a-Dibi, himself a former prisoner and now the editor of a Nablus newspaper. “They have no education, no skills, no jobs. They were heroes during the intifada. Then they spent years in prison. Now they feel that they have no part in the political developments that are going on.”

Israeli officials deny they are ignoring the problem but say their hands are full dealing with security issues that affect Israelis.

But it is also true that when Nablus Mayor Ghassan Shakka recently declared that the municipality wanted to hire and deploy 100 police to deal with the city’s monumental traffic and parking problems, the civil administration blocked the initiative.

No police can be deployed under Palestinian authority in the West Bank, the civil administration said, until security arrangements are negotiated between Israel and the PLO.

“If we are not allowed a police force to deal with traffic, how can we deal with armed gangsters?” Shakka asked. The mayor said he is so frustrated by Nablus’ deterioration, and his inability to do anything about it, that he is considering resigning. That would leave Nablus still waiting for Arafat to tame the growing chaos in its streets.

Summer Assad of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau contributed to this report.