Palestinian officials trying to prepare for a smooth transfer of power after Yasser Arafat dies are having to make sense of a tangle of institutions created by and for Arafat that may be unmanageable without him. Arafat officially is president of the Palestinian Authority. He also is chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, the one time revolutionary body that has evolved into a large bureaucracy; and head of the PLO’s dominant faction, Fatah, which functions as a political party often indistinguishable from the government. Even as Arafat lay in a coma at a French military hospital, his deputies, allies and rivals were trying to take control of those organisations and establish new lines of authority. ‘‘We couldn’t build institutions with Arafat,’’ said Hatem Abdel el-Khader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and a senior Fatah member. ‘‘Now we have to rebuild our democracy.’’ El-Khader continued, ‘‘We need a new generation of leaders, new ideas and new styles. We must rearrange our home so it is clean of corruption. We are not divided, but I think we are challenged.’’ Officials in Ramallah—the seat of the Palestinian government—seem to be amicably dividing up duties. They have persuaded militant factions to suspend attacks against Israelis and against each other. This initial goodwill was challenged on Monday by Arafat’s wife, Suha. She maintained control over Yasser Arafat’s medical treatment and the release of information about him. Suha had told Al-Jazeera television in an interview, that officials in Ramallah were conspiring to ‘‘bury him alive’’. Her criticism delayed a visit to Paris by the three most senior Palestinian officials: Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei, interim PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas and Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath—all three associates of Arafat for more than 30 years. Suha Arafat has sided with the PLO’s old guard, which opposed peace accords with Israel and is now led by Farouk Kadoumi, the PLO politburo chief. On other side are Qurei, Abbas and Shaath, who have sought to end the Palestinian uprising, but often found themselves thwarted by Arafat’s refusal to cede authority. Fatah, too, is divided. Its central committee is dominated by the old guard, while another faction is led by a younger generation including Marwan Barghouti, who remains one of the most popular figures in the West Bank despite his serving a life sentence in an Israeli prison. ‘‘There is tremendous tension between the insiders and the outsiders, between the revolutionaries and the people who staked their careers on the Palestinian Authority,’’ said Hillel Frisch of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, and an expert on Palestinian politics. ‘‘This is the fight that is going to emerge over Arafat’s succession,’’ he said. ‘‘It is the end result of the way Arafat ruled—playing all sides in a perennial game.’’ On paper, PLO formulates overall policies; the Palestinian Authority includes an elected parliament responsible for making law; Fatah remains the dominant political party. As head of all three, Arafat could control nearly all their decisions. According to Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya television, Kadoumi says Arafat at some recent time, appointed him as successor, a claim denied by Palestinian officials. In the event of Arafat’s death, the speaker of the parliament, the little known Rawhi Fattouh, would become caretaker president for 60 days until elections are held. But officials may try to sidestep Fattouh and postpone elections. Qurei and Abbas so far have the backing of two key former security chiefs: Mohammed Dahlan in Gaza, and Jibril Rajoub in the West Bank. —LAT-WP
