JERUSALEM, 2 August 2004 — Palestinians factions were heading for another confrontation yesterday.
Gunmen loyal to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat opened fire at a conference of Arafat’s Fatah movement in the West Bank town of Nablus. The Fatah conference was convened to discuss reform in the Palestinian Authority and to call for elections to the Fatah leadership committees, which have not been held for 15 years.
The meeting of about 70 legislators and senior Fatah officials followed weeks of demonstrations against the disarray in the security services and corruption in the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
About 20 armed men broke into the conference on the first day of the weeklong event, firing into the air and above the stage where speakers were seated. No one was injured, but the meeting broke up. Several delegates met with the gunmen to discuss whether the conference could continue.
The gunmen identified themselves as members of the Al-Awda Brigades. One member said the group believed the meeting was part of a conspiracy against Arafat.
A letter to Arafat drafted by conference delegates denounced the lawlessness in the territories and corruption in the Palestinian Authority.
“President Arafat, this might be the last chance for reforming our situation before reaching the end. We need a revolution within our Fatah movement,” the letter said.
In another West Bank town, Jenin, thousands of protesters took to the streets in support of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades after the group torched the local offices of the district governor and the security services.
Dozens of gunmen fired off rounds into the air, pledging support for the powerful local leader of the Brigades, Zakaria Zubeidi. “Anyone touches him (Zubeidi), we will kill him. Anyone who touches him is a collaborator,” the crowds, who numbered at least 5,000, chanted in unison.
Zubeidi has defended Saturday’s arson of the security services’ offices by charging its officers were “cooperating” with Israel’s Shin Bet domestic intelligence service to wipe out members of his organization.
The march began from the local refugee camp and headed toward the center of town, past the blackened offices of the governor and security services.
Television footage broadcast over the weekend showed Al-Aqsa activists, their faces uncovered, ransacking the offices of Gov. Qaddura Moussa and tearing down portraits of Arafat from the walls to throw them in the fire.
Al-Aqsa has traditionally been loyal to Arafat but become increasingly frustrated at what it sees as widespread corruption within both the Palestinian Authority and Fatah.
Meanwhile, a former Palestinian security chief for the Gaza Strip, Mohammed Dahlan, warned in remarks published yesterday of mass protests in the territory if Arafat failed to implement reforms within 10 days.
“The situation in Palestine can no longer tolerate corruption, and reforms decreed by Arafat should be implemented,” he told the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan.
If these reforms are not implemented by Aug. 10, “huge protests numbering 30,000 Palestinians will take to the streets of the Gaza Strip in support of reforms,” said Dahlan, a strong critic of Arafat’s centralization of power. Arafat “is sitting on the corpses and destruction of Palestinians at a time when they are in huge need of support and a new mentality,” he said.
Dahlan also claimed the Palestinian Authority had received a total of $5 billion in international aid that had “gone with the wind. We don’t know its fate so far.”
“We’ve decided to operate in the street and what has happened in Gaza is an expression of our calls for reform,” Dahlan said, stressing that Palestinian reformists were “fighting the corrupt”. A general breakdown in law and order last month in the Gaza Strip amid an unprecedented spate of kidnappings and violent protests led Prime Minister Ahmed Qorei to tender his resignation, although he later agreed to stay on in the job.
But Dahlan denied in an interview on July 25 with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper that he was behind the recent wave of protests in Gaza.
