RAMALLAH, 20 August 2004 — Twelve members of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) yesterday submitted a letter to the Parliament speaker asking him to suspend sessions until President Yasser Arafat introduces reforms they have been demanding for more than two years. Lawmaker Jamal Shaati, from Jenin, read the letter signed by 12 members to the PLC, but the bill failed to pass by only one vote.
The legislators agreed to wait until next Tuesday, when a 14- member parliamentary committee on reforms established last month, is scheduled to submit its report on its meetings with Arafat on the issue of reforms and the steps the president is taking.
However, the deputies narrowly rejected the motion calling for the suspension of parliament. The motion filed by 13 MPs calling for an indefinite suspension until Arafat followed up his recent admission of mistakes by his Palestinian Authority with written commitments for reform was rejected by 24 votes to 23.
Yesterday’s Parliament session was a continuation of Wednesday’s session, during which Arafat admitted “mistakes” were made in the past 10 years of Palestinian Authority autonomous rule.
Critics, however, were disappointed with Arafat’s address, saying he failed to mention any specific measures on how to correct these mistakes, in particular what is seen as widespread corruption in the PA.
The 14-member reform committee held a heated meeting with Arafat Wednesday night, lawmakers said, with Arafat telling its members that his speech had been clear and therefore there was no need for him to specify further steps.
The vote at the Parliament in this West Bank city came after Arafat rebuffed a committee of MPs as they urged him to act on his pledge to correct errors which he acknowledged on Wednesday in a keynote speech to deputies.
Committee chairman Abbas Zaki, a member of Arafat’s Fatah movement, said that the Parliament had instead agreed to adjourn until Tuesday to allow for further discussions with Arafat. “Until Tuesday we will continue our discussions with Arafat when we will put our report to the PLC (parliament),” Zaki told AFP.
Meanwhile, several hundreds of Palestinians joined a mass hunger strike in Israeli jails yesterday morning, bringing the total number of inmates refusing to eat to more than three quarters of all Palestinian security prisoners held by Israel.
Some 621 Palestinians in the “super maximum security prison” of Gilboa in northern Israel and 46 female inmates of Israel’s only women’s prison Neve Tirzah had joined the strike, prisons spokesman Ian Domnitz said. The total number of hunger strikers as now 2,885, he told Deutsche Presse-Agentur. The number excluded slightly more than 200 Palestinians who had begun eating again on day five of the strike, he said.
