Palestinian Public Has a New Foe

JERICHO, West Bank — Tucked away on a quiet side street, the sand-colored mansion built two years ago by Ahmed Korei, speaker of the Palestinian legislature, was meant to be a haven for the busy politician.

Instead, the 12-room home--with its swimming pool, lush landscaping, privacy wall and guard tower--became an embarrassing liability. Why, Palestinians began to ask publicly, were senior officials living in luxury while the continuing fight with Israel drove their people deeper into poverty?

Two months ago, Korei, an architect of the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, abandoned the Jericho home. He dedicated it, according to the plaque tacked onto the perimeter wall, to Samed Institute, Workshops of the Children of the Martyrs.

Korei, better known as Abu Alaa, is abroad recovering from a heart attack and could not be reached for comment. But a lone guard at the house told a visiting reporter that the building will be remodeled as a vocational school for children of men killed fighting Israel.

Korei’s gesture is testimony to the alarm among senior Palestinian officials at the seething anger of a people who are beginning to blame their leaders’ alleged corruption and incompetence, and not just Israeli measures, for their misery.

So great is the people’s wrath toward their leaders that some Palestinian officials fear the eruption of a full-blown rebellion that would sweep aside Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat and the revolutionaries who came with him from exile in 1994 to build a Palestinian state. Some even fear internal assassinations.

No one has produced hard evidence linking any senior Palestinian official directly to corrupt practices. In fact, an investigator for the World Bank said recently that he found the levels of corruption within the Palestinian Authority “no worse than that of other Third World nations.”

But the lavish lifestyle of senior officials and the mansions built by Korei, senior negotiator Mahmoud Abbas, security chief Mohammed Dahlan, Social Affairs Minister Intisar Wazir and others, are proof enough for many Palestinians that their leaders have enriched their cronies and lined their pockets with money intended for the public coffers.

Many Palestinians now accept as fact allegations that officials take kickbacks and bribes from contractors and have misappropriated funds from Arab states meant to rebuild homes and businesses destroyed by the Israeli army.

“We are poor, we are critical, we are angry, and also we have a cause,” said Ziad abu Amr, a Palestinian legislator and academic. “This is a small society, and cases of corruption are highly visible. People believe that we are supposed to be clean, because we are fighting for our rights. So, objectively speaking, in relative terms, our corruption may be less than people think, but it doesn’t matter.”

Palestinians, Abu Amr said, are fed up with seeing “an official whose salary is $1,000 a month who buys property worth millions. There was a lot of stealing, extortion, bribery. We had a group of people who became wealthy by illegitimate means.”

“Where have the millions gone?” shouted thousands of unemployed workers who poured into the streets of Gaza City in a demonstration against the Palestinian Authority this month. It was a not-so-subtle question about how millions of dollars in aid from Arab countries and the international community have been spent by the authority since fighting erupted in September 2000.

“Soon, the situation will become so dangerous that people will start accusing everybody, including people like me, of being the symbol of destruction, of defeat,” said Abbas Zaki, a Palestinian legislator from the West Bank city of Hebron and veteran leader in Arafat’s Fatah movement.

This generation of leaders, Palestinian critics charge, has failed dismally both at making peace and at making war.

“For the people, they’re finished,” said Salah Abdul Shafi, a Gazan economist. “People now even talk about Arafat, and this is completely new. From 1994 until this intifada, they only whispered about him. Now they openly criticize him.”

Abdul Shafi said he worries that unless Arafat institutes the top-to-bottom reforms he has promised, “there will be a wave of internal assassinations.” Palestinian ministers, the economist noted, no longer attend the funerals of Palestinians killed in clashes with Israeli troops, “because they are afraid of the people.”

Palestinian officials offer little defense against the charges of corruption and mismanagement. Some publicly acknowledge that corruption has been endemic, and now enthusiastically embrace the cause of reform. Some have left government and slipped away from the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the face of growing unrest.

Nabil Amr, the former minister for parliamentary affairs who quit the Cabinet in April saying he believed that his move would spark reforms, said he left because he was disgusted by the conduct of senior officials.

“The Palestinian Authority made the mistake of distributing jobs as though they were royalties,” Amr said. “Everyone from Fatah, everyone who had someone in their family who spent time in Israeli jails or who was martyred demanded jobs. And anyone who did not get a job began to talk about corruption.”

Amr and others, including Zaki, now harshly criticize Arafat and the government he built.

At 60, Zaki has lived most of his adult life as a senior Fatah official. His personal history is entwined with the tumultuous history of the Palestine Liberation Organization. He lived through the defeat of Palestinians and other Arab forces in 1967, when Israel captured the West Bank from Jordan, and survived Jordan’s bloody expulsion of the PLO from its territory in 1970. He witnessed Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its crushing of the PLO infrastructure there.

But “none of them compares with this defeat,” Zaki said. “Then, I always felt that I was on the right path. We could understand all the defeats that we suffered outside, because we are not on our soil. But now, we are on our ground and we had enough time to succeed. Instead, we are going back to square one.”

Despite the flaws of the 1993 Oslo peace accords, Zaki said, “if we had worked hard enough and been clean enough, we would have succeeded.”

Sitting in the gloomy, threadbare offices of Fatah’s Hebron headquarters, Zaki said Fatah today is practically nonexistent, as is the Palestinian Authority. He dismissed Arafat’s recently announced 100-day reform plan as a sham that will do nothing to arrest the disintegration of government and security in the West Bank and Gaza or reverse Israel’s reoccupation of towns and villages.

Nothing will change, Zaki said, until Arafat decides “whether he wants to be the leader of a revolution or a statesman.”

But Arafat’s moment of truth, if there is one, may well come too late. The man still regarded by most Palestinians as an enduring symbol of their national struggle today is publicly taken to task by his people in ways that would have been unthinkable even six months ago. The outpouring of criticism began when Israel’s first large-scale invasion of the West Bank ended this spring and Arafat emerged from the siege of his headquarters to survey the destruction of Palestinian Authority ministries and the heavy damage in cities and refugee camps where Israeli troops fought Palestinian gunmen.

The crowds that turned out to greet him were thin, their calls of support muted. His visits to the scenes of devastation seemed to underscore Arafat’s inability to protect his people or lead them out of a struggle that seems unending.

Today, Arafat once again sits surrounded by Israeli troops in the crumbling remnants of his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah. And even as he is besieged, the Palestinian leader finds himself assailed for everything from his failure to organize meaningful resistance to the Israeli army to his failure to supply hundreds of thousands of jobless Palestinians with unemployment checks.

In the Gaza Strip, Jarar Kidwa, the Palestinian Authority’s auditor general, said he finds the public anger alarming. If the authority is to save itself, Kidwa said, it must quickly enact reform.

But Arafat, he fears, is cut off from the reality around him and hardly capable any longer of making decisions.

Kidwa, a cousin of Arafat, attended Cairo University with him and bears a strong resemblance to the Palestinian leader. Arafat’s portraits adorn Kidwa’s well-appointed offices in Gaza City. But he spoke angrily about the fraud and abuse he says he has seen in government ministries since the inception of the Palestinian Authority.

“I told [Arafat]: ‘Let me, I can clean up all the government administration,’ but he didn’t say a word,” Kidwa said of a recent telephone conversation with his cousin. “It is not that we don’t know how to run a country. But he is still holding all the reins in his hands instead of devolving authority.”

In May 1997, Kidwa issued the first publicized report on corruption within the Palestinian Authority. It detailed misuse of funds by government departments and caused such an uproar among Palestinians and donor nations that Arafat never allowed Kidwa to publish another one.

A retired Citibank official, Kidwa continues to investigate fraud and mismanagement in government agencies and tries to oversee the expenditure of public funds. Waving a sheaf of phone bills, he boasted of paying “every one” of the personal calls he placed from his government office.

“When I am given evidence of wrongdoing, I investigate,” he said. But he acknowledged that he has never been allowed to oversee the security services or Arafat’s office, or investigate Palestinian Authority investments. And each year, when he completes his report, only one other man sees it.

“I am not allowed to make my report public. Our enemies can use it against us,” Kidwa explained. “So I prepare it and present it to the president.”

It is the authority’s failure to publish his reports and to hold wrongdoers accountable, Kidwa said, that has fueled what he says is the false perception of corruption on a massive scale.

There have been abuses of government funds by some departments, fictitious employees on payrolls, kickbacks to some contractors, bloated entourages accompanying some ministers on unnecessary overseas trips, he said. “But there are offenses and people abusing their authority in every country in the world,” he said.

Still, Kidwa said, the exiles who returned with Arafat from his headquarters in Tunisia were ill-prepared to run government ministries. In Tunis, he said, “there was a lot of corruption. The PLO didn’t have auditors, didn’t have controls. Now, they have actual government departments. In Tunis, there were 2,000 to 5,000 people on the payroll. Here, there are 121,546 civil servants.”

Trouble is, he said, Arafat and his men tried to run their state-in-the-making as if it were still a small guerrilla operation.

In the cramped Nablus offices of the refugee lobbying organization he heads, Palestinian legislator Hussam Khader allowed himself to indulge in “I told you so” for a moment. For years, when it was still dangerous to speak out about it, Khader, a strongman in the Balata refugee camp who spent long stints in Israeli prisons and years in exile as a Fatah official, has publicly complained about the corruption of senior Palestinian officials.

He caused a stir at the start of the current revolt when he claimed that 50 Palestinian officials had sent their families abroad to spare them the suffering ordinary Palestinians were asked to endure.

Khader has watched with disbelief as the very ministers he has attacked for corruption have begun to call for reform and denounce corruption.

He dismissed the notion that the system can be cleaned up as long as Arafat is in power.

“He’s a failure,” he said. “I hope we kick him out” in upcoming elections, scheduled for January.

For Khader, the talk of reform is too little, too late. After nearly two years of bloodshed, he is tired and despondent. He has watched his friends die, seen his camp reoccupied by Israeli troops, had his home trashed by invading soldiers and seen many of the young generation of Palestinians broken by the fighting that has neither ended the occupation nor produced peace.

“Every time,” he said, “Arafat wins the battle and the Palestinian people lose the war. Even when he is in the ground, he will think that he is in control.”

Yes, the people are openly expressing their anger now, Khader said. But he fears that the wave of criticism will not lead to the establishment of a new political system.

“The people talk about their anger, but they won’t come in the streets,” he predicted. “We still have people who worship Yasser Arafat as much as they worship God.”