PALESTINE: Younger guard jostles for position against veteran leaders, writes Nuala Haughey, in Ramallah
Ahead of January's Palestinian parliamentary elections, the ruling Fatah movement is finding that its stiffest competition is coming from within its own ranks.
Jostling for position by rival factions took a sinister turn this week when Fatah gunmen stormed several polling stations in Gaza and set ballot boxes ablaze, claiming fraud and irregularities in party primaries.
The violence led Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to suspend voting in Gaza in what are Fatah's first ever grassroots polls of party activists to choose candidates for elections to the 132-seat parliament.
In West Bank and East Jerusalem primaries, held before voting was halted in Gaza, Fatah's younger generation made sweeping gains, victories seen as a sign of dissatisfaction with veteran leaders widely regarded as corrupt.
When Palestinians elected their first ever parliament in January 1996, Yasser Arafat personally picked all Fatah's candidates and continued until his death last year to impose his authoritarian leadership on legislators, many of whom the public came increasingly to view as crooked and ineffective.
"The Fatah primaries are a good idea, because the current leadership has been in place for about 50 years and we need to elect new ones," said Mahmoud Al Duhdar in the West Bank city of Ramallah this week. "The new generation is more aware of the issues of the people."
A Fatah member for 20 years, Al Duhdar (37) said he voted in last week's Ramallah primaries for Marwan Barghouti, a charismatic Fatah militia leader who is serving multiple life sentences in an Israeli prison for murder. Barghouti (46) won some 30,000 votes, by far the highest of any candidate.
Considered the leader of Fatah's so-called "young guard," Barghouti is an icon for the generation of Palestinians who grew up in the territories. He took part in two intifadas against Israeli occupation, and learned about democratic norms by running for elections in universities or Israeli prisons.
His cohort has been struggling for years to wrest control from Fatah's "old guard" who have dominated the movement and its governing committees since they returned from exile along with Arafat in 1994 at the start of the Oslo process with Israel.
Qadura Fares (45), a parliamentarian and close friend of Barghouti, said only if Fatah runs "clean" candidates will it fend off the electoral challenge from its rival, the militant Islamic organisation Hamas which made gains at Fatah's expense in recent municipal elections and will field parliamentary candidates for the first time next January.
"If we have clean names on our list, it means that our agenda is reform, not corruption. Hamas is now worried, because it would be useful for them to have dirty names on our list," he said.
Fatah's final parliamentary candidate list will be determined in the coming weeks by a "committee of the wise" drawn from Fatah's old guard-dominated central committee and chaired by Mr Abbas. This committee can substitute its candidates from among those who failed to secure a sufficiently high place in the primaries, effectively giving the "old guard" a veto on the final lists.
Mr Fares, who came second behind Barghouti in the Ramallah primaries, said any attempts by Fatah's elders to ignore the results of the primaries would be resisted. "If they try to make appointments and cancel the winners, then me, Marwan and others will go ahead and nominate a new list within Fatah."
The characterisation of Fatah's in-fighting as a face-off between young would-be modernisers and old corrupt establishment figures is rejected by political analyst Ali Jarbawi as an over-simplification. "What we have inside Fatah is a tribal war between individuals to win a seat in the elections. That's all," he said. "It's nothing to do with modernising the party and age doesn't have anything to do with it. I am not defending the rotten establishment of Fatah. My point is that the new generation is not better than the old."
For the moment, further violence over the conduct of the primaries seems inevitable. Yesterday, dozens of armed Fatah-affiliated militants burst into a government office in Gaza demanding the resumption of the polls there.
"The Fatah grassroots should decide who they want to represent them in the parliament," a spokesman for the group said. "We are against appointments."