MIDDLE EAST: In the latest example of growing anarchy in areas supposedly under the control of the Palestinian Authority, a group of about 20 gunmen brought a halt to a meeting of politicians and officials from Yasser Arafat's Fatah faction in the West Bank town of Nablus yesterday, bursting into the hall and firing into the ceiling.
The gunmen, from a group called the Al-Awda Brigades, were apparently bent on defending Mr Arafat who last week promised to institute a series of reforms, including delegating more authority to his Prime Minister, Mr Ahmed Qurie.
One of the gunmen indicated they had halted the meeting because participants were demanding accelerated reform. Delegates had drafted a letter to Mr Arafat pleading for "a revolution" within Fatah to prevent anarchy in Palestinian territories and root out PA corruption.
"President Arafat," it stated, "this might be the last chance for reforming our situation before reaching the end."
Challenges to Mr Arafat are becoming dramatically more frequent and more brazen - and, tellingly, they have now spread from Gaza to the West Bank. In Nablus on Saturday, an Irishman, a Briton and an American, church volunteers, were briefly kidnapped - with the gunmen demanding funding from the PA for their release. In Jenin on the same day members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades set fire to the local PA's governor's office. Yesterday in Jenin, masked gunmen from the same group, which pledges loyalty to Mr Arafat, marched in opposition to the new governor, himself, of course, an Arafat loyalist.
Perhaps most significantly, Mr Arafat's former Gaza security chief, Mr Mohammad Dahlan, escalated his opposition to the PA leader at the weekend. In interviews with Arab newspapers, Mr Dahlan, while also claiming loyalty to Mr Arafat, blamed his policies for the "ruin" of Palestinians' lives, and complained that billions of dollars in foreign funding for the PA "have gone down the drain, and we don't know to where". If real reforms were not carried out within 10 days, Mr Dahlan vowed, 30,000 Palestinians would demonstrate in Gaza.
The Palestinians, he said, would not put up "with any more corruption". In one instance of such alleged corruption, the PA's attorney-general is examining suspicions that senior PA officials and ministers have made millions of dollars selling concrete to Israel for the construction of the West Bank security barrier.