Palestinian Democracy Faces Roadblock in Arafat

RAMALLAH, West Bank — In what Palestinians hope will become the first fully democratic Arab state, a popularly elected legislature meets weekly, debates sensitive national issues and passes fundamental laws that are not implemented.

Alongside the official media, 22 private radio and television stations are licensed to broadcast in the Palestinian self-rule area, although they are routinely jammed, closed down and cowed into self-censorship.

Feisty labor movements strike for better pay, as public school teachers did in March before their leaders were jailed. And human rights activists denounce government abuses, despite the risk of arrests like the one Eyad Sarraj suffered last year--17 days in solitary confinement and a beating that left him with a ruptured disk.

“It is not an easy thing to be free,” said Sarraj, head of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens’ Rights. “You have to fight for it. . . . No authority is going to hand it to you on a golden platter.”

In the nearly three years since the Palestinian Authority headed by Yasser Arafat assumed power in the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank, Palestinian political activists, journalists, human rights groups and legislators have been working hard to build strong, democratic institutions that are independent of the central government.

And the Palestinian Authority has been working nearly as hard to stop them.

Three decades of Israeli military occupation made Palestinians eager for law and order and a government that is accountable to its citizens. They want a legislature that will balance the executive, and a civil society with the means to monitor abuses by security forces and alleged corruption by public officials.

Instead, Palestinian civic and political leaders say, Arafat has been unwilling to allow the Palestinian Legislative Council to develop any power of its own and has blocked its efforts to make law. They say the Palestinian Authority has engaged in a pattern of intimidation and arrests to stifle criticism and independent actions, which it views as a challenge to Arafat.

“The Palestinian Authority is examining various strategies for scaring people and breaking down civil society,” said Khader Shkeirat, director of the East Jerusalem-based Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment.

“The arrest of activists is one strategy. Pushing nondemocratic laws is another. So is the creation of parallel networks of nongovernmental organizations--and restricting freedom of expression by arresting lawyers and journalists and closing media,” Shkeirat said.

“With all of this, in some way they succeed in creating fear in society. They have succeeded in scaring many people from talking and criticizing. On the other hand, the strategy has failed. Other people are still talking and doing their duty,” he said.

Repeated requests to speak with Arafat’s spokesman, Nabil abu Rudaineh, and other high-ranking Palestinian officials were unsuccessful.

As a former guerrilla leader and chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization for more than 30 years, Arafat has never been one to engage in open and democratic decision-making. He is used to issuing orders; he has a long history of co-opting his opposition or destroying it.

Yet Arafat is not a dictator. He was elected president of the Palestinian Authority by an overwhelming majority in January 1996, and polls show he is still the most popular Palestinian leader. Arafat has a broad-based political party--the Fatah faction of the PLO.

And by the standards of Arab states, he is not particularly repressive. While Arafat’s security forces have been brutal at times, and 12 people have died in their custody, the Palestinian entity is not Syria or Iraq: Political opponents are not routinely killed and independent media and civil rights groups are allowed to function--within limits.

Nonetheless, Palestinians say that, in the face of the collapsing Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Arafat has become increasingly intolerant of criticism and protective of his lock on power.

Activists who have run afoul of Arafat in recent months say he argues that the Palestinians must maintain a united front against the Israelis, and that internal politics must take a backseat to the Palestinians’ struggle for a fully independent state.

Palestinian activists disagree.

“There is no contradiction between the establishment of a Palestinian state and building democracy,” Shkeirat said. “We’re fighting for a state and building democracy. Otherwise we’re fighting for an empty state.”

Members of the legislature increasingly agree. Hatem Abdel Qader, a member of Arafat’s Fatah faction, says he is frustrated with the council’s “ornamental” role and has called for early election.

“The council’s role is to organize civil life, but we haven’t achieved this nearly a year and a half after elections. We can’t implement our programs for our constituents. I can’t fulfill my election promises for justice, human rights, law and order and building a country of institutions. We can’t do any of these things because of the [Palestinian] Authority,” Abdel Qader said.

“As a result, we must return to the people and tell them to choose their leaders again,” he said.

While Abdel Qader’s proposal is not expected to gather steam in the 88-member council dominated by Arafat loyalists, his open dissent is significant. He is a respected leader who says that “the council has lost its credibility with the people.”

The council has passed 167 resolutions and laws since its formation, almost all of which Arafat has ignored. The most important is the Basic Law--an interim constitution for the pseudo-state--which was approved by the council in a first reading and sent to Arafat on Oct. 31.

The council never heard back. Nor has Arafat signed the Civil Service Law or the Palestinian Monetary Authority Law that the council also sent him. He did sign a law authorizing the election of municipal councils--to take place this summer--but failed to approve accompanying legislation determining the authority of local governments.

Council members are growing restive and have begun to criticize the Palestinian Authority on other issues. Recently, members began to echo charges by average Palestinians of inefficiency and corruption in government ministries.

For months, Palestinians have been complaining that officials grant government contracts in exchange for an interest in private companies, and that government and security officials have formed business monopolies that are killing local competition.

The public clamor forced Arafat to order his auditor general to investigate public spending. The auditor, Jarar Kidweh, found that most ministries and official institutions had abused their authority and wasted or misused $326 million of public money in the last year.

The corruption has been presented in the Palestinian media as something done behind Arafat’s back--rather than as something Arafat at least closed his eyes to, which is what average Palestinians suspect. They blame most of the corruption--and much of the undemocratic governing--on the coterie of PLO officials who returned with Arafat to the West Bank and Gaza Strip from exile in 1994.

But while Arafat and the Legislative Council are both addressing the issue of corruption, the Palestinian leader does not want the legislature doing so publicly. At least not on television.

That appears to be the reason for the arrest last Tuesday of Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian American journalist who had been broadcasting the Legislative Council meetings on independent Palestinian television.

Kuttab began the live broadcasts on Al Quds Educational Television about two months ago. When the broadcasts suddenly were jammed, apparently by the official Palestinian Broadcasting Co., Kuttab began taping them and distributing videocassettes to independent stations.

He was detained by Ramallah police, who said the order had come from Arafat.

Kuttab’s arrest is only the latest example of widespread efforts to intimidate the Palestinian media into conforming with Palestinian Authority dictates. At Christmas 1995, Arafat had Maher Alami, an editor of Al Quds newspaper, arrested for six days after he failed to place a flattering story about Arafat on the front page.

Omar Nazzal, whose commercial Wattan television station broadcasts about 13 hours of entertainment, news and talk shows from Ramallah each day, said his station was shut down four times in its first four months of operation, including once after September 1996 clashes between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian police. Although Nazzal had complied with an order to block out the faces of Palestinian police engaged in the combat, he received a second order to close down the broadcasts.

Nazzal had his newscaster read the closure order on the air.

“That really angered them. After we read the closure order, police came and tried to confiscate our equipment,” Nazzal said. “We closed and went to the governor of Ramallah to ask why. He said, ‘If you hadn’t read the closure order on the air, you would be open now.’ ”

Nazzal believes that Palestinians must have an alternative to the official media. “This private media must be open to all Palestinian people, all political, social and economic sectors of society,” he said.

By the time a group of independent Palestinian teachers went on strike in March and April, however, it didn’t take much to convince Nazzal that he should obey orders from the governor of Ramallah forbidding Wattan to report on the strike. “We knew from previous experience . . . as far as they’re concerned, a decision is a decision. There is no debate,” he said.

The public school teachers were demanding a pay hike of 85% to 100%--but said they would accept an initial 10% increase--and the right to organize a new union free of government domination.

In March, they launched the first strikes ever against the Palestinian Authority for a day at a time. They were negotiating with the government when, on April 3, 19 of the teachers leading the strike received letters of dismissal. Then the teachers called a full strike that spread from Ramallah throughout the West Bank. On April 19, they met with Arafat.

“We were surprised to find he did not even consider our demands,” said Mishaa Bargouthi, one of the leaders of the independent teachers committee. “There was no offer of a pay increase. He told us he was very angry at us and he did not want to see our faces because of what we were doing. He said, ‘We have bigger problems than your strike.’ ”

The teachers continued the strike, and 19 of them were detained for five days. The Legislative Council called for their release and for a 10% pay hike. While the detained teachers insist no deal was made, they were freed and the strike was subsequently frozen. No pay hike was forthcoming.

“The president thinks he’s the first and the last,” said one teacher, as several of his colleagues tried to quiet him. “Whatever he wants to give the teachers he will give, and what he doesn’t want to give, he won’t. . . . He treats the Palestinian people the way the rest of the Arab leaders treat theirs.”

That is a concern among many Palestinians, who want their state to be more democratic than those of their Arab neighbors. But things do not seem to be heading that way, at least not to Rana Bishara, leader of an independent network of nongovernmental organizations that is fighting to remain independent.

The Palestinian Authority, Bishara charges, has drafted a restrictive law that would force nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs, to be licensed by the government and in many cases would require funding to pass through government ministries.

Anis Qaq, deputy planning minister in charge of NGOs, says the law was drafted in consultation with NGOs, and defends it as comparable to NGO laws in Western countries.

Bishara says the larger issue is that the Palestinian Authority views the medical, development, human rights and relief organizations as competition for international aid and popular support. Because such groups served as front organizations for the PLO during the war against Israeli occupation, Bishara and others say, Arafat is fearful that they now act as a political opposition undermining his authority.

“The NGO sector is viewed either as people who want to get money and compete with the government, or as opposition political parties hiding behind organizations,” Bishara said. “It’s nonsense. We have NGOs formerly affiliated with all political groups. If we seem to be opposition, it is because of the absence of opposition parties. We are not political, and we do not want to take the role of political parties.”

Many of the groups do want to monitor the performance of the Palestinian Authority and its security forces. A member of one such organization is Sarraj, the Palestinian human rights worker detained last year.

Sarraj notes that Arafat’s campaign of pressure and arrests is effective in quieting some criticism, acknowledging that he couches his own strictures “in the context of building and not destroying the [Palestinian] Authority. . . . Now, every time I criticize, it is in this context, so I am not attacked as a fifth column.”