Palestinians LosingFaith in Arafat's Leadership

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday May 05, 2002 16:06 by Graham Usher - The Guardian

Palestinians are finally realising that Arafat is not the man to lead them to Freedom.

For 35 days, Marwan Swaiti was one of 10 Palestinian guards left alone to defend a three-storey block in Yasser Arafat's presidential headquarters in Ramallah. His orders were simple: 'To defend the presidential office until the last man, including the death of the president himself.'

The president, says Swaiti, stayed mostly in his office. He would usually appear twice a day - once in the morning, issuing instructions about how to sandbag the windows or prop cupboards against doors, and once in the evening, when he would take supper 'with his men', consisting, initially, of bread and olives.

'Arafat always exuded strength,' Swaiti said last week. 'He never doubted that he would survive for a moment. We were full of doubt, especially in the first five or six days of the siege. "This is war," he would say, "and we shall win it." This gave us all confidence. We knew he had lived through this before, or worse, in Beirut.'

Last week Arafat, his guards and entourage of several hundred were finally released from their siege by Israeli forces.

Outside Arafat exhibited the same mood swings as he had shown within his office, oscillating between ill-concealed fury at the devastation the 'Nazi' Israeli army had wreaked on Ramallah and the 'honour' he felt at 'leading a truly heroic people in their struggle for freedom and independence'.

He paid homage to that heroism by leading the prayers over 26 Palestinians buried in a parking lot because, under curfew, there had not been time to bury them in a cemetery. Hundreds turned out to greet him on streets strewn with gutted cars and felled trees.

But thousands did not. And for good reason, says Islah Jad, a Palestinian analyst. As Arafat turned the act of his survival into a celebration, Palestinians were dividing into two camps - between those who saw his ordeal as a victory against Ariel Sharon and those who would paint it as one of the Palestinians' most serious defeats.

'Israel's invasion of Ramallah wasn't a victory. It was a defeat for us,' said Jad. 'It was a defeat for the national and proto-state institutions we have tried to build over the past eight years. It was defeat for the mindless methods of resistance we have adopted. And it was a defeat for the message that we have tried to convey to the world. How was it that someone like Ariel Sharon successfully managed to present our people's right to resist a brutal military occupation as terrorism?'

Jad lives in a neat house a few miles east of Arafat's headquarters. Like Marwan, for 35 days Israeli tanks and snipers besieged her home and family. She felt 'powerless', and 'tired, frustrated and angry' about a leadership and political system that had brought them to such a pass.

'Of the 25 Palestinians killed in Ramallah during siege, 16 were young police officers,' she says. 'They were abandoned by their commanders. Their buildings were destroyed and they were left to fend for themselves against the strongest army in the region. These commanders have to be punished.'

She recounts the case of Jad Khalif, a 23-year-old policeman and friend of her son. He was arrested and found days later in a pool of blood, stripped to his underwear, his clothes and boots in a pile beside him. He lay in a morgue for 11 days because nobody could claim him. 'I felt so guilty. I couldn't even tell his family. Their village was cut off by the siege.'

Out of such losses lessons must be learnt, she says. 'It is not a question of challenging Arafat's leadership. It is a question of telling him that the PA cannot be run the way it has been up to now. If we are to have national institutions, they must be run professionally. If there is to be armed resistance, it must be against soldiers and settlers in the occupied territories. We must stop all attacks against civilians in Israel. And if we are to have peace with Israel, we must convey the message that our struggle is not against its existence as a state. We accept its existence. It is against Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. This we will never accept.' Will Arafat heed her message? 'I hope so,' she says.

But as he trawled around Ramallah on Thursday, Arafat was surrounded by the same cronies and signalled the same conflicting messages: now vowing 'peace with the Israelis', now promising '1,000 martyrs to liberate Jerusalem'. And everywhere he flashed V-for-victory salutes.

'Lord spare any more such victories,' said a former Palestinian negotiator. 'We really don't need any more victory celebrations. We need the wisdom of the defeated.'