Infighting threatens Palestinian democracy
Infighting threatens Palestinian democracy
Financial Times
While local and international attention is focused on the imminent Israeli pull-out from Gaza, a multi-faceted struggle among Palestinian groups has entered a critical stage. It pits Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, against Ahmed Qurei, the PA prime minister; the "old guard" of Fatah, the dominant nationalist movement, against its "young guard'; and all sides against Hamas, the militant Islamist group.
The Fatah old guard, whose most prominent figure is Mr Qurei, is making a potentially fateful bid to block internal reform and democratisation, and to deny Hamas any chance of sharing meaningful power should it perform well in planned general elections.
Mr Qurei's faction is determined to avoid being held to account for corruption or abuse of public office since the establishment of the PA, and to retain control over massive international aid flows that it believes could help attract voters away from Hamas and allow locally-generated revenue to be spent on maintaining extensive patronage networks through unchecked public hiring.
Posted by Ted Belman at August 8, 2005 07:35 AM
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patd95
said:
When a pig is dying, do you care if it bleeds on the chicken? No poiltical refinement to an empty political strucuture is going to stop terror. So let the pig blled to death, because even if it lived, it would still send its children to murder inncoents in TelAviv and elsewhere.
Posted by: patd95 on August 8, 2005 01:39 PM
Infighting threatens Palestinian democracy
Financial Times
While local and international attention is focused on the imminent Israeli pull-out from Gaza, a multi-faceted struggle among Palestinian groups has entered a critical stage. It pits Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, against Ahmed Qurei, the PA prime minister; the "old guard" of Fatah, the dominant nationalist movement, against its "young guard'; and all sides against Hamas, the militant Islamist group.
The Fatah old guard, whose most prominent figure is Mr Qurei, is making a potentially fateful bid to block internal reform and democratisation, and to deny Hamas any chance of sharing meaningful power should it perform well in planned general elections.
Mr Qurei's faction is determined to avoid being held to account for corruption or abuse of public office since the establishment of the PA, and to retain control over massive international aid flows that it believes could help attract voters away from Hamas and allow locally-generated revenue to be spent on maintaining extensive patronage networks through unchecked public hiring.
Posted by Ted Belman at August 8, 2005 07:35 AM