| (this article was tranlated from French) 2) Arafat in an audit By Steve Rodan Police Dictatorship, " patrimonial " management, diversion of the international assistance: The overpowering assessment three years of Palestinian autonomy. Sixteen Ministers for the autonomous Palestinian Territories, in a total of eighteen, gave their resignation to Yasser Arafat on August 4, 1997. They were blamed by one internal audit of the Palestinian Authority, published on July 21. According to this document, 326 million dollars - more than 40 % of the budget of the Territories - " would have been wasted " or wasted " in 1996, if not even purely and simply diverted by the ministers or high-ranking civil servants who had been in charge of it. " The official accounts of certain ministries were open in the name of the minister, without the ministry for Finances being informed by it, note the report/ratio... Gifts and assistance's from abroad were versed on these accounts without being recorded in the ministerial budgets ". Overpowering observations. But which are themselves, according to many Palestinian or foreign observers, well in on the side of reality. In an opinion published on June 23, 1997, by the Washington Post, the Palestinian writer Fawaz Turki described the regime in place in the West Bank and at Gaza like "the dissolution of a civilized societe, of all civil norms, and all hope ". While in Guardian of July 27, 1997, the British journalist David Hirst, specialist in the Palestinian question, defined it as a "shaking building of nepotism, racket and extortion". The Palestinian Authority currently controls the near total of the Palestinian agglomerations of the West Bank and Gaza: A population of 2 million, with a GNP which would be, according to the World Bank, around 3 billion dollars. Significant disparities exist between the two Palestinian zones: in 1992, the income per capita was of 2500 dollars in the West Bank and of less than 1200 dollars in Gaza; in 1997, the income per capita staid about the same one in the West Bank, but have-fareast-make-family: ' ms Mincho' " > dropped of almost 40 % has Gaza. On paper, autonomous Palestine created in 1993, by the agreements of Oslo, and the installation are to start from 1994 as democratic institutions: the legislative Council elected in January 1996, a president elected by this Council, a government indicated by the president, a supreme Court, courts, town councils. In fact, all the POWERS are concentrated in the hands of Yasser Arafat, who is at the same time the president of autonomous Palestine and the head of the PLO, the Palestinian national movement. Installed with the head of the West Bank and Gaza, under the terms of the agreements of Oslo, HE (Arafat) controls all by force and by the money, both being tied by, make-family: Ms Mincho"> The forces, of nearly 50 000 police and secret agents recruited abroad and depending only on him (Arafat) only: What actually makes up the autonomous Palestine, observes Fawaz Turki, " A country equipped with the greatest number of police officers per capita ". According to organizations' of the humans right, 14 people at least died under torture in the Palestinian prisons since 1994; An even higher number of people "disappeared " or were executed. The money, and that of the company Al-Bahr (" Sea "), the holdings of this company chaired by Suha Arafat, the wife of the president. Created in 1995, Al-Bahr controls directly or indirectly all the economy of the autonomous Territories, and the BTP of hotel trade, the publicity of the "informatics and data processing of travel". A company that would refuse to take them as partner or associated would see refusing the attribution or the renewal of the "license ": The license, instituted by the Palestinian autonomous capacity since 1994, necessary for any industrial activity or commercial. - Al-Bahr bears its name really well, says one to Gaza. It covered Palestine with its "tides". The Al-Bahr startup capital itself was deducted from the "treasure of the revolution ": between 7 and 12 billion dollars (two to four times the GNP of the West Bank and Gaza), piled up during about thirty years by various means, the best case (of the judicious placements) in the worst case (Revolutionary "taxes" levied on the Palestinian refugees, blackmail with terrorism, of plundering and the various traffics, in particular in Lebanon between 1975 and 1982 before they were driven out by it by the Israelis). This colossal fortune is deposited throughout the world under the personal signature of Arafat. With the agreement of Oslo the day before, the head of the PLO used it to pay his 100 000 directly (!!!!) combatants and permanent politicians: by taking care never not to leave at an office or unit of the PLO more than one month in advance in the treasury. Since the installation of the autonomous Territories, Arafat tends to hold the "Treasure" for the long-term investments and has to resort to another source of financing for his political and military expenditure: international assistance. 34 countries and four international organizations engaged themselves to pour nearly 2,4 billion dollars to the Palestinian Authority over four years, between 1994 and 1998, either with the title of the assistance to the Palestinian people, or to support the process of peace in the Middle East. In 1996, at the time of the conference of Paris on the international assistance in Palestine, 865 million additional dollars were made available. Moreover, Israel grants of facilities to the treasury amounted to, according to certain estimates, 500 million dollars per annum. As well to reinforce the Al-Bahr's seizure on the Palestinian economy, and to redistribute the international assistance for his suitability, Arafat had all interest to ruin, and to disintegrate any national accounting and any regular taxation in the Territories. This collapse supported, in its turn, a corruption on a large scale. If Arafat passes to carry out a rather austere way of life personally, it does not account in the same way, indeed, of the remainder of the Palestinian Establishment: Those which one calls the "Tunisians " because they lived before 1994 in Tunis, the city where the PLO had withdrawn to after the Israeli operations on Beirut in 1982. Flashy fortunes were built in three years, while at the same time the standard of living of the Palestinians stagnated or declined. The case of Abou Mazen, one of the "architects " of the agreements of Oslo, is often quoted: The residence which was build in Gaza, in a crossed style between "the most beautiful effect, semi-Eastern ", semi-Gothic, is evaluated of more than 2 million dollars. The other godfather of the process of peace, Nabil Shaath adapted himself, with the support of Al-Bahr, the young Palestinian data-processing industry. At the time of its recent remarriage, there were no less than four receptions: In Gaza, in Cairo, in the Orient House, the semiofficial seat of the Palestinian institutions in East-Jerusalem, and finally at the Ambassador Hotel, " private " building of Jerusalem where he could accommodate in all peace his Israeli friends. The system of Arafat currently reached it's limits. 2 billion dollars of international assistance, on the 3,2 promised billion, were not versed or are "cold " until the Palestinian Authority brings of the guarantees on the employment of such funds. A donor such as Norway, which engaged itself for the completely considerable sum of 100 million dollars, was shocked to discover, for example, that funds intended for agricultural projects "had disappeared ". Great Britain did not appreciate that part of its assistance is assigned, without knowing it, to the political font of Arafat, Mukhabarat Siri. Other donors, like the United States and Israel, are less demanding in purely financial matters, but intractable with regard to the awaited political counterparts of the Palestinian Authority: The total stop of terrorism or the renunciation and rhetoric anti-Israeli and anti western jihad. The Palestinian opinion, as such, is slipping of the disenchantment in rebellion. An evolution that the repressive measurements taken against famous intellectuals to the continuation of their criticisms - the prohibition of word meant with the americano-Palestinian philosopher Edward Said, the arrest of the journalist Daoud Kuttab - accelerates issues. In its article of Washington Post, Fawaz Turki does not hesitate any more, for example, to move personally against "Yasser Arafat, this man with dubious origins who did not read a half-dozen of books of his life nor follows the least honest occupation ". It is partly this double pressure that made Arafat carry out the audit of the Palestinian Authority. A homeopathic "transparency ", to some extent. Moreover the Arab states are not as idiotic as Europeans: How many do support Palestinians ?...... |