RAMALLAH, 3 January 2006 — One year after taking office as Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas finds himself between the hammer and the anvil as armed groups in the Palestinian areas cross one red line after another and members of his Fatah party challenge his leadership. The increasing chaos and lawlessness which is overtaking the Gaza Strip and the West Bank makes naive the hopes which accompanied Abbas’ election to succeed Yasser Arafat; and each act of unchecked anarchy reinforces the image of him as one who has a title of president, but not the authority.
Abbas’ great, perhaps only, success in his first year in office has been to persuade the main militant groups to declare a hiatus in their attacks against Israel. This was more or less adhered to, but on New Years’ Eve the groups announced it was over. Observers believe Abbas is sincere in his intentions to engage in nation-building, but is too weak to take on the militant groups or control the current situation in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, which is fast spiraling into anarchy. Groups of gunmen are repeatedly, and successfully, taking the law into their own hands to press their own agenda, storming public buildings, kidnapping foreigners, and even having shoot-outs with each other or with the police. And the police are feeling helpless. On Monday, 200 armed police stormed the municipality building in the southern Gaza Strip town of Rafah to demand an end to the rising chaos and to call for additional protection. Although Palestinians feel Abbas, or specifically his policies of inaction, bear a lot of the responsibility for the current lawlessness, they admit the situation is not of his making. He inherited from Yasser Arafat a fractured and unwieldy security force, split into different and competing groups, run almost as personal fiefdoms by senior officers who know they stand to lose power and prestige if Abbas carries out the reforms he wants. Abbas’ problem, say analysts, is that he is caught between his desire to work for the public good, and his need to appease powerbrokers within his Fatah party whose narrow interests may not coincide with those of the president.
“Abbas’ main challenge comes from Fatah, not from the (armed) groups,” one Palestinian analyst said. The analyst, who did not want to be named, thinks the current chaos in the Palestinian areas may even be caused, or at least supported, by members of the so-called “old guard” of Fatah, whose hold on the party is being openly contested by the so-called “young generation”. The battle between the two generations has so far dominated Fatah’s preparations for the upcoming Jan. 25 elections and according to the conventional wisdom among Palestinians, the old guard are frightened they will be overtaken by the young generation and so lose their power, status and privileges.
With the chaos growing and the possibility of Fatah being embarrassed at the polls by the Islamic militant Hamas movement, Abbas is under pressure from senior Fatah members of the old guard to cancel the elections, although he has repeatedly said he will not do so. Chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat warned Monday that if the Palestinian Legislative elections are postponed, “the situation would be disastrous and the whole area would sink into chaos and violence”. The majority of Palestinians want the elections to go ahead. They hope things will change after the poll, especially if Hamas does well.
