Dahlan: Some militant groups have gone too far (ex-security minister slams tactics of intifada)

Dahlan: Some militant groups have gone too far
Former security minister slams tactics of Al-Aqsa intifada

BEIRUT: The Palestinians might not have had another option, but to take up arms in their independence war. But according to a top security lieutenant, Mohammed Dahlan, some groups went too far, dealing a severe blow to the Palestinian image abroad.

“Resorting to armed violence in certain phases of the Palestinian intifada the way it was done in the past three years proved to be detrimental for our national struggle,” Dahlan, former minister of state for security affairs in Mahmoud Abbas’s Cabinet, said.

“We had hoped that the various Palestinian factions would understand the new world that emerged after the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and learn from their outcome,” he told The Daily Star in an e-mail interview.

“We always argued in favor of the Palestinian uprising the way it was carried out between 1987 and 1993. In that uprising, all sectors of the Palestinian people participated and they managed to win the acknowledgment and the support of the world public opinion,” Dahlan said.

“Unfortunately, many elements in the Palestinian arena failed to adhere to the overall national political program, which their own organizations had accepted. This failure led to a situation where some elements succeeded … to impose their own agenda on the entire Palestinian nation.”

A renowned pragmatist, who maintained channels of contact with the Israelis and the US even when out of office, Dahlan defended the pursuit of peace with the Israelis.

“Each era of national struggle has its own characteristics and means. What is positive at a certain time might be counter-productive in other times,” he said.

“What is crucially important is to have a plan, a political agenda, which guides the resistance throughout all its stages,” Dahlan said.

When the first uprising was launched in 1987, there was never an intention to target Israelis civilians. “It was never meant to give an excuse to our enemies to brand our resistance as a form of terrorism. This is why the previous intifada succeeded in obtaining international support, unlike the present one.”

Born in Gaza in 1961, Dahlan joined the ranks of the Palestinian revolution at an early age and was jailed 10 times by Israel between 1981 and 1986. After the first intifada broke out in 1987, Dahlan became one of the uprising’s youngest leaders. But he was quickly arrested and deported to Jordan.

He finally landed in Tunisia, where the Palestine Liberation Organization was then based.

But more recently, his relations with Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian president’s Fatah movement have turned sour.

Dahlan lashed out at Fatah’s Central Committee, which he accused of discrediting Mahmoud Abbas and of sowing discord between Arafat and the resigned prime minister.

“There are those from within President Arafat’s (inner) circle who have made every effort to disrupt the good relations he had with Abbas in order to serve their own narrow and personal interests,” Dahlan charged.

He accused a member of Fatah’s Central Committee, whom he did not name, of sending a written message in Dahlan’s name to Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz describing Arafat as an obstacle to peace and asking for his intervention to remove him from power.

Only Israel, he said, stood to gain from a political vacuum in the Palestinian territories.

“Time will come for our people to know every detail on the negative and even destructive role those figures played throughout the past few years,” Dahlan said. “For many of them, the current siege of President Arafat and the continued Israeli threats to deport him are the best they can dream of.

“One does not have to be a genius to understand that such a move will blow up the whole region and will certainly detonate a much more violent cycle of fighting,” he replied.

Asked about the possible release of Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti in an impending prisoner swap between Hizbullah and Israel, Dahlan referred to Mofaz’s statement that the deal would not include the jailed Palestinian activist, who is often touted as Arafat’s possible successor.

But, he said, “I think Hizbullah is not likely to agree to a deal that would not secure the release of Barghouti. For our people, the release of Marwan Barghouti and other prisoners … will be the mother of all deals.”

Dahlan’s good relations with Israel and the US have been viewed with deep suspicion by some Palestinians.

The US has reportedly been exerting pressure on Prime Minister-designate Ahmed Qorei to include Dahlan in the next Cabinet.

“It was neither the US pressure nor the Israeli one that brought me to the Internal Security Ministry,” Dahlan said. “To say that I became minister as a result of American or Israeli pressure is not only nonsense but is also misleading.”

He said Israel has proved its hypocrisy by praising the government of Abbas on one hand and not giving in to any of its demands on the other.

Asked whether he would be included in the new government, Dahlan said as long as the conditions that led to the resignation of Abu Mazen’s government continue to exist, “I do not see any reason for me to join the new government.”

“The reasons for Abu Mazen’s resignation are clear. Foremost of them is the fact that he could not secure from Israel a single achievement on the ground for our people,” he said. Another factor was that the government was not given sufficient time to achieve its goals.

Qorei has been meeting with political parties, hoping to convince Hamas and Islamic Jihad to join his government.

“Some of these factions have their own political platforms that do not necessarily go hand in glove with the platform of the Palestinian National Authority. This has been proven to be the case over the past 10 years,” he said.

Palestinian Official Laments 'Intefadeh'

By IBRAHIM BARZAK
Associated Press Writer

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- The Palestinians were better off before they launched their uprising against Israel, the ousted Palestinian security chief said Monday, as thousands marched to mark the three-year anniversary of the revolt.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Mohammed Dahlan also said the Palestinians misread the dramatic changes brought by the Sept. 11 terror attacks on the United States, and that hurt their aspirations of statehood.

It is rare for Palestinians to openly criticize the "intefadeh" despite growing misgivings among some, especially those whose lives have been severely disrupted by Israeli travel bans and military raids aimed keeping suicide bombers and gunmen out of Israel.

In Tel Aviv, a prominent leader of the uprising, Marwan Barghouti, said he had no regrets about the past three years. "To die is better than living under occupation," Barghouti told an Israeli court, delivering closing arguments in his murder trial. Israel accuses him of involvement in attacks that killed 26 Israelis.

"I am proud of the intefadeh. I am proud of the resistance to the Israeli occupation," Barghouti said, addressing the judges in Hebrew.

Also Monday, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat emerged smiling from his battered West Bank compound after a bout with the flu.

Aides said Arafat, 74, sent for his personal physician, Dr. Ashraf al-Kurdi, who lives in Jordan. Arafat had been ill for three days and was unable to keep down food, said his aide, Nabil Abu Rdeneh.

Smiling at reporters after descending the steps slowly, Arafat thanked King Abdullah II of Jordan for sending al-Kurdi and three other doctors, adding, "but now the illness is over, thank God."

The Palestinian uprising broke out Sept. 28, 2000, after Israel's then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon, now prime minister, visited the hotly contested Jerusalem holy site known to Muslims as Haram as-Sharif and to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Violent clashes followed, and grew into violence marked by repeated terror attacks against Israelis and Israeli military strikes into Palestinian areas. A total of 2,477 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and 860 on the Israeli side.

Anniversary rallies on Sunday and Monday were relatively muted and small in scale compared to previous years.

On Monday, about 3,000 supporters of the Islamic militant group Hamas, which has carried out scores of suicide bombings, rallied in Gaza City. A Hamas leader, Ismail Hanieh, said the group is ready to halt attacks on Israeli civilians "if the Zionist occupation stops killing civilians."

However, Hamas founder Sheik Ahmed Yassin said last week his group is not interested in a truce deal the incoming Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, wants to negotiate with Israel.

Dahlan, who served as security chief under outgoing Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, said the Palestinians' first uprising, from 1987-1993, in which demonstrators faced soldiers with rocks and bottles, was much more effective than the current revolt. The first uprising "brought us back to our homeland," said Dahlan, who along with Arafat, returned from exile in the mid-1990s.

"We were in a better position (then) than we are now, politically and internationally," Dahlan told AP in an interview at his Gaza City office.

On Sunday, the Lebanese newspaper The Daily Star quoted Dahlan as saying that taking up arms was a mistake and harmed the Palestinians' national interest.

Dahlan said the Sept. 11 attacks were a turning point for the Palestinians. "We did not understand 9-11 in a correct and fundamental way that would have allowed us to help the national interest of our people, to bring back the international legitimacy of our (Palestinian) authority," he told AP.

Dahlan said Palestinian leaders did not respond quickly enough to the changed situation. He said he made recommendations to the leadership at the time but did not elaborate.

Other critics of the uprising have said suicide bombings and shootings weakened the Palestinians' international standing at a time when the West was becoming increasingly sensitive to the threat of terrorism.

Dahlan was security chief under Abbas, who stepped down after Arafat failed to relinquish control over security forces. Dahlan, who had the support of the United States, will not be in the Qureia government.

The new Cabinet was presented to Arafat's Fatah movement on Saturday. An Arafat loyalist, Nasser Yousef, will serve as interior minister, a job that grants him control over part of the security branches, with the rest commanded directly by Arafat, who also presides over a new 12-member National Security Council.

The composition of the Cabinet was relatively smooth, though Saeb Erekat, an Arafat stalwart, said he didn't know yet whether he would accept the job of minister of negotiations with Israel.

Qureia, who says he wants a broad Cabinet, was rebuffed by a radical PLO faction, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, or PFLP.

On Sunday, Qureia met with the group's leader, Ahmed Saadat, in a West Bank jail, where Saadat is being held under U.S. and British supervision for his alleged role in the assassination of an Israeli Cabinet minister in 2001.

Saadat told Qureia his group would not join the Cabinet, officials said.

At Barghouti's trial, judges said Monday that legal proceedings would not be completed by Nov. 10 as planned. Palestinian sources have said Barghouti tops a list of hundreds of inmates whose release the Lebanese guerrilla group Hezbollah is seeking as part of a prisoner swap with Israel. However, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other officials have said Barghouti would not be released.

Kadoura Fares, a Fatah legislator, said some 400 Palestinian prisoners would be released in a German-brokered prisoner swap between Israel and Hezbollah.

Israel and Lebanon are negotiating the release of an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers, all captured in October 2000, in exchange for Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian prisoners.

http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/ISRAEL_PALESTINIANS?SITE=GMADN&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

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Fatah names most members of new Cabinet, dumps U.S.-backed security chief (Arafat boots Dahlan) ^
			Posted by Stultis On 09/27/2003 10:45 AM CDT with 2 comments AP (via SF Chronicle) ^ \| 27 September 2003 \| LARA SUKHTIAN (09-27) 08:08 PDT (AP) -- LARA SUKHTIAN Associated Press Writer RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) -- Yasser Arafat's Fatah party on Saturday put together a new Palestinian Cabinet, replacing a U.S.-backed security chief with an Arafat loyalist and bringing in nearly a dozen new faces from Fatah and smaller factions. With the ouster of security chief Mohammed Dahlan, it appears even less likely that the Palestinian security forces will begin dismantling militant groups, as required by the U.S.-backed "road map" peace plan. Israel has said it will not move on the plan unless such action is taken. In the Gaza Strip,...