Palestinians Demand New Cabinet Roster

Back in the era of Yasser Arafat, Palestinian lawmakers were inclined to rubber-stamp just about anything their longtime leader asked of them. Even if they didn’t, the autocratic Arafat would simply ignore their wishes.

But this week, something unusual happened in the halls of the Palestinian parliament. Lawmakers rose up and vehemently declared they did not want corruption-tainted cronies of Arafat to serve in the new Cabinet.

On Tuesday, after two days of stormy debate, some of it held in the predawn hours, Prime Minister Ahmed Korei agreed to overhaul the Cabinet lineup. In a face-saving compromise, he told lawmakers he had decided to appoint technocrats rather than politicians to key posts and promised to present a new roster of ministers for approval as early as today.

Reform-minded lawmakers cheered the turn of events, even while warning that only the final outcome would tell whether things had really changed since the wheeler-dealer days of Arafat, who died Nov. 11.

“This is the beginning of what could be very good news,” said Mustafa Barghouti, who ran for the Palestinian Authority presidency last month on a reformist platform. “It shows that people are really fed up with nepotism and corruption and are seeing how democracy can change that.”

The wrangle over the Cabinet makeup spotlighted a growing rift between Mahmoud Abbas, who won the Jan. 9 race to succeed Arafat as president, and Korei, who was appointed to his post by the late leader.

The two, both stalwarts of the ruling Fatah movement, have known each other for decades. But signs of a power struggle have been evident since Abbas took office about six weeks ago.

Arab affairs commentator Danny Rubinstein, writing in Tuesday’s editions of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, said the Cabinet dispute showed “just how shaky the Fatah movement’s leadership has become as its leaders quarrel.... The feeling is prevalent that there is no longer someone in charge, the way Arafat was for decades.”

Palestinian observers took a less alarmist view.

“I think this is all a very, very healthy process,” said lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi, who resigned from Arafat’s Cabinet in the late 1990s to protest corruption. “Yes, it leaves us for the moment with a crisis to resolve over the Cabinet, but it shows that a new era of reform has been launched.”

Korei had proposed a 24-member Cabinet that included only four new members. Under intense pressure, he had already agreed to drop a few longtime Arafat loyalists.

One of those he planned to leave out was longtime Social Affairs Minister Intisar Wazir, who was widely believed to have been involved in corruption. She is the widow of one of Arafat’s closest lieutenants, Khalil Wazir, who was assassinated in 1988 by Israeli commandos. Arafat was said to have promised her that he would take care of her for the rest of her life.

The lineup Korei sought to put forward included a dozen lawmakers. On Tuesday, however, he indicated that the revamped Cabinet would include only two legislators: veteran negotiator Saeb Erekat and Nabil Shaath, formerly the foreign minister and now expected to become a deputy premier.

If Korei had not bowed to pressure, he could have been subject to a no-confidence vote by the 88-member Palestinian legislature.

Freih abu Medein, a former Palestinian justice minister, said Korei’s original Cabinet proposal was “born dead.”

“We hear the voices of our people in the street, and we know they wouldn’t be satisfied with something like this,” he said.

Abu Medein and others offered a pointed reminder that lawmakers themselves will be up for election in less than five months.

“People will remember,” Abu Medein said.

Corruption is a particularly sensitive issue because the Islamist-minded Palestinian militant group Hamas is expected to be a strong contender in parliamentary elections. Hamas is widely viewed by Palestinians as being free of the kind of fiscal malfeasance that was such a prominent feature of Arafat’s rule.

The Palestinian elections will take place before Israel’s planned pullout from the Gaza Strip, which is scheduled to begin in late July.

Settlers and their supporters are pledging to carry out a massive campaign of civil disobedience to block the uprooting of Jewish settlements.

The government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is increasingly worried that the protests could take a violent turn. The minister of public security, Gideon Ezra, said Tuesday that authorities would try to disarm extremists ahead of time. Nearly all the settlers carry weapons, many of them issued by the army for self-defense against attacks by Palestinians.