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Guns Turned on Arafat's Authority
via WaPo
Login: gnafgnnsy1@lnubb.org / gnafgnnsy
GAZA CITY, July 21 -- Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is facing the most serious internal threat to his authority in a decade, as militants are turning guns against their own government and long-festering political tensions are erupting into gunfights and kidnappings in the streets of the Gaza Strip, according to Palestinian officials, militant leaders and analysts.

The internecine violence has exposed deep fissures in Arafat's Fatah political movement, the dominant faction in the 10-year-old Palestinian Authority, and has escalated demands across Palestinian society that Arafat surrender some of his powers and reform a governmental system riddled with corruption.

Isolated for more than two years in his presidential compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Arafat has exercised diminishing control over his party and his supporters in Gaza. The events unfolding in this crowded, impoverished enclave suggest that Fatah is engulfed in full-scale fratricide. Feuding Fatah political leaders have created their own militias, the movement's armed wing has turned against its creators, and reform efforts have become entangled in the power struggles.
"This here street's declared for Hamas, Mahmoud. Git along!"
"No way, Ahmed, this here's for al-Aqsa!"
"No it ain't! Go fer yer shootin' arns, ya varmint!"
"It's an opportunity a catastrophe," said Ahmed Helis, general secretary of Fatah in the Gaza Strip. "The truth is that both sides are corrupt. There's not a good side and a bad side. And Fatah hasn't accepted what's really happening."
Could Ahmed be anymore clueless? Of course there's a good side, unless you're a Paleo.
"It's very serious, much more serious than any time before -- since the beginning of the Palestinian Authority, since the formation of the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] in 1964," said Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian physician, political analyst and reform advocate. "The whole society is now upset and wants reform."
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Posted by: .com 2004-07-22
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=38711