Palestinians’ Gun Culture Poses Political, Social Perils

When Ahlam Duqmaq was gunned down in her father’s butcher shop by gangs looking for her brothers, Palestinians were outraged. Is our life this cheap? they asked. Who will protect us?

Duqmaq’s killing became a glaring example of what Palestinians complain is a growing scourge: the militarization of their society, in a land where rival security forces shoot it out in public, young civilian men swagger through marketplaces with assault rifles, and criminal gangs terrorize rival clans, catching bystanders in the cross-fire.

Largely unregulated, the flow and availability of weapons present Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with one of the most complicated problems he will face as he moves to declare an independent state: imposing law and order on a West Bank and Gaza Strip awash with guns.

The widespread presence of weapons has long been a major worry to Israelis too. They fear that they will become targets.

For ordinary Palestinians, though, it is much more than a future policy problem: It is a frighteningly immediate phenomenon.

“We live in complete fear,” Najah Duqmaq says in her family’s bullet-shredded living room as she receives condolences from visitors for the recent death of her sister Ahlam. “All these people have weapons. Why? Who gives them the guns? It’s not the shooters who should be punished. It’s the people behind them, the ones who give them weapons.”

The night before they killed her, Ahlam Duqmaq’s Palestinian attackers sprayed her family’s living room with dozens of bullets. The bullets pierced the television set and whizzed by her mother.

Later that night, the gunmen returned, menacing Ahlam, 25, and her sisters. The women’s calls to the local police, one of more than a dozen Palestinian police forces, went unheeded.

The next morning, as Ahlam Duqmaq worked in her father’s butcher shop in downtown Ramallah, the gunmen returned and opened fire, and she was dead.

The violence spawned more violence. First the Duqmaq killing, and then the arrest of a suspect, a resident of the Amari refugee camp nearby, sent rival mobs rampaging in the streets of the West Bank city. They looted stores, trashed traffic lights and battled with Arafat’s forces.

It was the latest glaring example of what human rights activists, politicians and ordinary Palestinians agree is a major problem for Palestinian society. But increasingly, the people are raising their own voices in opposition to the proliferation of guns and the lawlessness that stalks the streets of their cities and towns.

Pacts Required Surrender of Weapons

Under peace agreements that Arafat has signed since the start of the Palestinians’ rapprochement with Israel seven years ago, the Palestinian Authority should have confiscated weapons from all but authorized security forces, whose number was to be limited to 24,000--nearly half of what it is thought to be today. Arafat neither can nor will round up firearms, nor has he made any effort to reduce the size of an estimated 14 security and intelligence services.

Smuggled in from Israel, Egypt and Jordan, weapons have passed beyond the hands of legal police forces to extralegal militia-style groups within Arafat’s Fatah movement.

The future Palestine is not alone in reveling in a gun culture. Throughout the Middle East, both in Arab societies and in Israel, guns are commonplace and have been for years.

But Palestinians say they are alarmed by growing gun abuse. Hardly a political demonstration goes by without young men flaunting their pistols and rifles. Celebratory shooting during weddings, though recently outlawed, is as routine as the bridal bouquet and often harms.

In the roughhewn West Bank city of Nablus, Palestinians remember the day Arafat tried to round up the guns.

Long disturbed at the firepower emanating from the Balata refugee camp on the outskirts of Nablus, Palestinian Authority agents moved in to disarm camp residents after an anti-government and anti-Israel protest. But days of gun battles ensued, leaving dozens of people injured and the authorities in retreat.

Ever since that sequence of events late last year, a kind of tense standoff has existed between the antagonists in Nablus and Balata, with each side keeping its distance and not daring to cross the line into the other’s territory.

Within Nablus and Balata, however, the men are not shy about showing their guns.

Men Wear Pistols Next to Cell Phones

At the Committee for the Defense of Palestinian Refugee Rights in Balata, a casual meeting one recent afternoon attracted about 20 men. Nearly every one wore a pistol at his waist, next to a cellular phone. Two had M-16s slung across their backs. Some were agents of authorized security forces, others were not. All were members of Arafat’s Fatah movement, a political organization that has served as his power base during decades of exile and, more recently, self-rule in the territories.

“In the United States, every person thinks they have to own a house or a car. Here it’s a gun,” said Hussam Khader, who heads the committee and is an elected member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, the Palestinian parliament. “Guns for us are part of our culture, our tradition, our dignity. We do not give up weapons so easily.”

All those attending the meeting insisted that they need a gun to fight and defend themselves against Israeli soldiers and settlers who live in the West Bank. In addition, they confessed, there is the need to take on rival Palestinian factions.

Balata is the largest and most militant refugee camp in the West Bank, a hodgepodge of squat concrete homes and crowded alleyways. Formed after Israel’s War of Independence displaced tens of thousands of Palestinians, it has nearly 20,000 residents who hail from 69 different villages in the area around what is today Jaffa and, as such, act as one extended clan.

“We come together to act against outside dangers, whether from Israel or from the [Palestinian Authority],” said Maged al Masri, 26, who described himself as a “sometime” policeman.

“Even though some of us may be members of the official security forces, we have to stay together,” he said. “We have to stand for Balata first.”

Masri, a wire-thin father of two, whipped out his Czech-made, black-and-steel-gray automatic pistol for a brief inspection. It was one of two weapons he was carrying.

“We are all trained in using these weapons,” he said. Most of the Fatah gunmen are battle-hardened veterans of the intifada, the Palestinian uprising against Israel that raged in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In addition to the arsenals left over from those days, the Fatah men said, they acquire weapons from Israeli dealers or from smugglers who use hidden desert tunnels from Egypt into Gaza, or who cross the Dead Sea from Jordan or arrive via the Mediterranean. In addition, according to Israeli and Fatah sources, Palestinian officials have been known to sneak guns into the West Bank in their VIP cars, which are exempt from Israeli inspection. It is an expensive vocation: a Baretta can cost $1,000, an M-16 $5,000, according to Fatah activists.

Gun indoctrination starts early. This summer, for the third year in a row, Fatah is holding camps for thousands of boys, teaching them how to shoot and kidnap Israelis, fabricate firebombs, and break down and reassemble automatic rifles. In schools, where children sometimes bring guns from home, teachers extol the use of force as a way to gain long-denied rights.

Israeli military officials say the Palestinians have thousands of rifles--Kalashnikovs and M-16s--as well as countless pistols, some heavy machine guns, mortars, antitank missiles and possibly even rocket-propelled grenades. While posing little serious military threat to Israel, the Palestinian weaponry is sufficient to wreak major havoc, the officials say.

Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, said in an interview that, as recently as May, he personally asked Arafat to confiscate the illegal firearms. The same plea was made to Arafat’s two top security officials, Col. Jibril Rajoub, who is in charge of the West Bank, and his Gaza counterpart, Col. Mohammed Dahlan. But to no avail, Mofaz said.

In rioting in May, Palestinian police and civilians fired live ammunition on Israelis for the first time in years, further raising Israeli alarm.

Rajoub, speaking to reporters this week, conceded that the presence of armed militias “is a threat to our security and our authority.” He said illegal guns would be confiscated--once a Palestinian state is formed.

In the Balata camp, where Masri and the other Fatah men answer only to their own leaders, the perils of attempting to crack down on weapons are evident. Balata leaders issued their version of a death warrant against Arafat’s Nablus security chief, known by the nom de guerre Castro, after he made a futile attempt to confiscate a cache of submachine guns. Castro now steers clear of Balata, Masri said.

Al Masri and the other Fatah men meeting in the Defense Committee offices displayed a mixture of bravado and frustration. Next to Masri sat Nassar abu Rajab, 29. Employed by one of Arafat’s security services, Abu Rajab claimed to be on a list of Palestinians accused by Israel of being part of the group that opened fire on Israeli soldiers in May. Israel is demanding the arrest or punishment of about 20 Palestinian police officers identified from videotapes as the shooters. Palestinian authorities have refused to oblige.

Abu Rajab and the others insisted that killings of Palestinians by fellow Palestinians are isolated accidents. Once Palestinians gain statehood, they said, they will be happy to turn in their weapons.

None of this sounds credible to the grieving Duqmaq family, nor to human rights activists who say armed Palestinian gangs have become the Frankensteins of the future state and won’t be reined in so easily.

“Ignoring the situation only contributes to a state of lawlessness and insecurity among the Palestinian people,” warned Khader Shkirat, director of the Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment, which is tracking shootings that involve illegal firearms. Among other cases, it documented four fatalities in one nine-day period in July, including a 7-year-old girl killed at a wedding.

Ahlam Duqmaq was killed after her brothers became embroiled in a long-running dispute with other Palestinians over stolen cars. The quarrel escalated until the gunmen apparently decided to punish the Duqmaq family.

After the shooting, a suspect, Raji Saqer, 29, was arrested and submitted to the summary judgment of the Palestinian State Security Court, a secretive military tribunal. A quick trial held in the middle of the night sentenced Saqer to death.

The Duqmaq family believes that Saqer is being made a scapegoat. Palestinians are convinced that most criminal gangs operate under the direct supervision or patronage of senior security officials.

Arafat himself visited the Duqmaq home to pay condolences and urge the family to remain calm. Ahlam was the most pious of five sisters and was planning to marry in this month.

Her eldest sister, Butheina, a lawyer, said lawlessness and the lack of personal security have grown in recent months as the peace process has contributed to a general unease. The police are afraid to act, she said, because they are often outgunned by the gangs.

“If our sister had to die to make the Palestinian Authority act, then so be it,” she said. “I hope she will be the last victim before they understand the importance of gun control and law and order.”