The Palestinian Authority has decided to postpone the announcement of the final results pending an investigation into allegations of irregularities and fraud.
At least seven Fatah leaders have quit since preliminary results published over the weekend showed that Hamas had won the elections in big cities. Muhammad Khalayleh, a senior Fatah official in the Hebron area, was the latest official to submit his resignation. The move came after Khalayleh's Fatah list won only five out of 13 seats on the Samou council village. The remaining seats went to Hamas candidates. Khalayleh said the results of the elections reflected widespread resentment at corruption in the PA. "The people punished Fatah because of corruption, lawlessness and nepotism in the Palestinian leadership," he said.
Earlier, Fatah leaders in Hebron, Kalkilya, Rafah, al-Bureij, Bethlehem and Beit Lahia announced their resignations, citing their party's failure in the elections as the main reason. The resignations are seen as a blow to PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who is also the leader of Fatah. All the Fatah officials who quit belong to the young guard in the party and have long been involved in a power struggle with representatives of the old guard who returned with Yasser Arafat from exile in 1994.
The young guard leaders have blamed the veteran officials for the defeat in the elections, saying their refusal to endorse reforms and combat corruption had driven away many supporters. "We are now paying the price for the continued hegemony of the old guard leaders of Fatah," a young Fatah legislator told The Jerusalem Post. "These elections indicate that a growing number of people are unhappy with the way Fatah has been running their affairs." The Hamas victories in the Gaza Strip have stunned many Fatah operatives, who claim that Hamas activists used fraudulent methods to win the vote – an argument that has been vehemently denied by Hamas leaders.
There is an important point to be made about the dynamics between the young Fatah members and the old guard. This is not your typical intergenerational dialectic. The old guard Fatah members represent Palestinian Arabs whose families fled during the 1948-1949 conflict and settled in refugee camps in other Arab nations. These are the people who returned with Arafat. The young Fatah guard came from families that never fled the Territories even during the height of the fighting in 1967 or in 1973. They are the authors of the first Intifada. One of the consequences of the first Intifada was that it motivated the Israeli’s into entering secret negotiations with the PLO which ultimately lead to the signing of the Oslo Accord. The young guard cheered Arafat’s return and was rewarded for their loyalty with disenfranchisement, poverty, and a yoke. I would go further and suggest that rise and success of organizations like Hamas was the direct result of the utter political and moral bankruptcies of the PLO towards the rights of the people that they postured to represent and allegedly fought for.
In a sign of growing tensions between the two sides, Fatah gunmen have announced that they would use force to prevent Hamas nominees from taking over the municipalities of Rafah, Beit Lahia and al-Bureij. The gunmen have also raided the offices of the PA's Central Elections Committee in several areas in the Gaza Strip to protest the results. Jamal Shobaki, chairman of the elections committee, announced on Monday that the final results were being held until a court looked into allegations of fraud and cheating during the vote. He said that an initial investigation had shown that there had been some "irregularities" in certain areas, but refused to elaborate.
Shobaki's announcement has worried Hamas leaders, who fear that Fatah will try to change the results of the elections in its favor by using the fraud allegations as an excuse. "Hamas has appealed to Egypt to interfere with Fatah to stop provocations against our members in the wake of the elections," said a Hamas official in Gaza City. He pointed out that Fatah gunmen in Beit Lahia had occupied the offices of the local municipality in an attempt to prevent Hamas from taking over.
Talal Okal, a political analyst is quoted making one more pertinent point in this article concerning Fatah’s cries of Hamas vote fixing; “how absurd is it that a ruling political party should accuse the opposition of fixing elections?” I can only hope that the Liberal Party of Canada will conscientiously decide not to take a leaf out of Fatah’s political play book and they will concede that they have lost the confidence of the house to govern.
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