Palestinian Authority Keeps a Lid on Dissent

She did it without consulting her husband, and she admits it was a long shot. She knew he wouldn’t like it.

But with her husband languishing in a Palestinian prison, Amal Hamad was so desperate that she could think of nothing else to do. In a four-paragraph statement, toned down after warnings from friends, Hamad asked the world for political asylum for herself and her children “to spare us the repression” of the Palestinian Authority.

The statement circulated on Arabic television and the Internet, and offers to give the family refuge have come from sympathetic individuals as far away as Canada and Texas.

Hamad’s husband, university professor and writer Abdel-Sattar Qassem, has been jailed without charges for the last several months. A stubborn and fierce critic of the policies of Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, he was arrested in November as part of a group of 20 intellectuals who had drafted an unusually candid petition attacking official corruption and “tyranny.”

Qassem was released with the rest of the group in early February, but he was the only one to be rearrested 10 days later. Palestinian security agents confiscated his computer hard drive and all of his private papers, Hamad said.

Qassem is not prominent politically, nor is he famous. But he has been consistent, and undiplomatically blunt, in his attacks on the Palestinian leadership in a society that is still staking out its independence from Israel and where official tolerance for criticism remains quite low.

His arrest and continued detention, analysts and human rights activists say, illustrate the “selective persecution” employed by the Palestinian Authority in quieting its critics. Rather than employing widespread repression or mass arrests, which might attract international rebuke, officials choose to make examples of one or two people, or newspapers, or organizations, that have irked the leadership.

Early this month, the Palestinian Authority shut down a radio station, the Voice of Love and Peace, after it aired an interview with a union activist working with teachers who have been staging sporadic strikes in the Palestinian-controlled territories all school year. The activist, Omar Asaf, who had accused Palestinian officials of squandering $100 million meant for the education budget, was arrested. (A week later, Arafat ordered that the radio station be allowed to broadcast again.)

“They direct pressure against specific examples, so that people ‘learn’ from those examples and impose self-censorship,” said Palestinian political analyst Ghassan Khatib. “They only have to do it with one case, and it’s enough to have everyone else get the message.”

Hamad says it is unlikely that her husband, a lifelong champion of Palestinian nationalism, would accept asylum outside his homeland. And several of his associates are angry with her, she says, for having issued the appeal.

“But,” she said last week, “I had to do it, with all the pressure we are living with. He is too old to spend his life like this. . . . His children need him.”

Hamad spoke in the living room of the family’s comfortable Nablus apartment. Four pictures of Qassem were on display, along with several framed samples of Palestinian embroidery. There were also signs of a life of caution: three locks secured the front door, whose handle had been disabled so it could be used only from the inside.

Qassem, who was educated at the University of Missouri, among other schools, was imprisoned three times by the Israelis when they controlled the West Bank. The Palestinians also arrested him, briefly, soon after they came to power in Nablus in 1996, and he was shot in the hand and legs outside his home in an August 1995 attack he blamed on the Palestinian Authority’s police force.

He has frequently criticized Arafat, has said the landmark Oslo peace accords between Israel and the Palestinians should be canceled because they are unfair to the Palestinians and has published articles in newspapers tied to the militant Islamic Hamas movement, although his family says he does not belong to that or any party.

Hamad believes that what got Qassem in hot water this time was a scathing chapter on Arafat that he included in his recent book, “The Road to Defeat.” He describes Arafat as a conniving manipulator who sows division among his people to maintain control. In the West Bank, the clandestinely printed book is available only under the table.

Hamad, 38, and Qassem, 50, have been married for 19 years. They met when she was a student of his at Nablus’ An Najah University, where he still teaches political science. They have four children, ranging in age from Mohammed, 18, to Samah, 9.

The family visits Qassem nearly every Thursday, making a 90-minute drive to Jericho, where he is held in a prison in the middle of the desert. His cell, where Hamad says he spends most of his days reading and trying to avoid the harsh sunlight, is inside a white stucco building encircled by flimsy barbed wire.

A Palestinian court ruling in March asked the police to show cause for Qassem’s detention, but the police have not responded. The office of Palestinian Police Chief Ghazi Jabali did not respond to questions about the case and instead urged a reporter to write about something more important, such as refugees.

Hamad, a woman of unusual gumption, says she is particularly frustrated that no one has taken up the cause of her husband.

“People in Palestine have, in a way, become more subdued, more afraid to get involved,” she said. “They used to speak out and fight [against Israel], but people are afraid to resist the Palestinian Authority.”