United States and British officials are battling to save Mahmoud Abbas, the man they helped install as Palestinian prime minister, in a power struggle with Yasser Arafat that could bury what remains of the battered US-led ”road map” to peace.
Abbas defended his first 100 days in office to an increasingly hostile Parliament on Thursday and demanded members support his attempts to assert authority over security forces under Arafat’s control.
But the Palestinian prime minister’s office denied reports that he sought a vote of confidence and threatened to resign if he lost.
However, US officials feared Arafat would force a showdown if he used his supporters in the legislature to press for a vote.
On Wednesday the Palestinian president was already pronouncing the death of the road map that brought Abbas to power.
This week the Parliament’s Speaker, Ahmed Qureia, said that the two Palestinian leaders now hate each other.
Members of Abbas’s government predicted that the prime minister would survive the confrontation, but warned that he is vulnerable to the challenge from Arafat because of a much deeper crisis caused by growing disillusionment with the road map among Palestinians angry that it has failed to deliver relief from the hardships of occupation.
They said Israel is widely seen to have wrecked the peace process by resuming its ”targeted assassinations” against Hamas and similar groups, contributing to the collapse of a seven-week ceasefire.
Ahead of Thursday’s debate, the Palestinian president’s supporters in Parliament pressed Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, to accept a compromise that would place all Palestinian security forces under the control of a council chaired by Arafat, but with the prime minister and some of his Cabinet as members.
”Abu Mazen’s position is in jeopardy,” said Fares Qadura, one of the legislators behind the compromise, on Wednesday.
”The Palestinian people have put a lot of hope in the change, but now we are going from one crisis to another. We don’t want to hold Abu Mazen responsible for the failure of the peace process because Israel is to blame. But every month we have a crisis between Arafat and Abu Mazen and the issue is security. This cannot go on. Either Abu Mazen compromises or he has to go.”
US road map envoy John Wolf visited Qureia to warn him that a ”no confidence” vote would kill what remains of the tattered peace plan. American and British diplomats had delivered a similar message to other Palestinian politicians.
The Israelis said they will not recognise any post-Abbas government that falls under Arafat’s influence. The hardline Defence Minister, Shaul Mofaz, proposed forcing the Palestinian president into exile.
But while Israel and the US are keen to blame Arafat for the road map’s problems, Palestinians on both sides of the Arafat-Abbas divide say there is a much graver threat from Israeli tactics and American acquiescence.
”There is a deep crisis in the political process with the collapse of the road map,” said a Palestinian Cabinet minister, Ghassan Khatib.
”Abu Mazen gave the impression that he was giving hope to the public and he was under the impression with his appointment and with his success in bringing the ceasefire and reforms that the other side would be delivering. Unfortunately that is not happening.”
Other officials said Abbas would be more secure if the US had pressed Israel to deliver tangible benefits in return for the Palestinian ceasefire, particularly easing the hardships of occupation by lifting roadblocks that curtail movement on the West Bank, and halting construction of the controversial ”security fence” through Palestinian territory.
”Instead of keep calling Abu Mazen a good man, the Americans should get the roadblocks removed. Then they could call him a bad man, and at least he would be popular,” said Qadura.
”They have not put any pressure on the Israelis to change the policy on the ground to improve daily life for the Palestinians. The US hasn’t realised how important this is to Abu Mazen.
”We have totally dealt positively with American demands but they haven’t dealt with the everyday needs of the Palestinian people. The Americans are worried about the long term but they are not aware of how to lay the foundation for what Bush envisions for years from now.”
That compliance is seen by some as collaboration. This week, a faction of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade in Bethlehem accused Abbas’s government of being ”conspirators … who serve the interests of their American and Israeli masters”.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian MP and former peace negotiator, says the prime minister was further weakened by US insistence on ostracising Arafat, which only strengthened the Palestinian president.
”Since the US and Israel attacked him, people have been rallying around him,” she wrote in a newspaper column this week. ”By trying to isolate Arafat, the Americans also mistakenly distanced themselves from a source of legitimate power and decision-making in Palestine. So now they have to get to Arafat indirectly, through intermediaries, whereas before they could influence him directly.”
A fortnight ago, US Secretary of State Colin Powell appealed to Arafat to help save the road map, an implicit recognition of the power the Palestinian president still wields despite US and Israeli efforts to isolate him.
Abbas is struggling to reinstate the ceasefire central to his political strategy of bringing Hamas and other groups into the political process instead of fighting them, as the Israelis would like.
But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s Cabinet this week said it is too late for another truce. On Monday, the government said ”there can be no going back to the rules of the ceasefire … an aggressive policy must be adopted against Hamas for the sake of future regional stability”. — Â