This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1412

Truth in Politics: Jailed killer Barghouti head of new terrorist party 'campaigning' in elections of non existent country

Arafat criticised for urging suicide bombings which caused bad PR
December 15, 2005

Seen in this combination of three separate photos are from left to right, the former West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub, in an Aug. 1997 photo, jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti, in an Oct. 2002 photo,and Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan in an April, 2002 photo. Young activists in the ruling Fatah Party have broken off to form their own faction, dealing a bitter blow to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas ahead of January parliamentary elections and possibly boosting the electoral prospects of Hamas militants. Marwan Barghouti, serving five life terms in an Israeli prison for involvement in deadly attacks, has emerged as the most popular Fatah leader in West Bank primary elections. Former West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub and Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan joined Barghouti in his new party, Fatah leaders said, adding weight to the list. (AP Photo)

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=1408714

Young Fatah Activists Form Own Faction

Young Fatah Activists Break From Party to Form Own Faction, a Blow for Palestinian Leader Abbas

By MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH

The Associated Press

RAMALLAH, West Bank - Young activists in the ruling Fatah Party have broken off to form their own faction, dealing a bitter blow to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas ahead of January parliamentary elections and possibly boosting the electoral prospects of Hamas militants.

Fatah officials were negotiating feverishly with the new faction's leader, jailed uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, and his associates Thursday in an effort to keep them in the party.

Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Fatah list would be reworked to put young activists in top spots where chances of election are best.

But Barghouti supporters said he was determined to contest the Jan. 25 vote on a separate slate after Abbas stacked the top of the Fatah list with corruption-tainted old-timers, largely disregarding the results of recent primaries that young activists won.

"It's too late," said Kadoura Fares, a leader of the young activists. "We approved primary elections to choose our candidates, but the president did not abide by that. They went with the old system of masters and slaves, and now we are more determined to go ahead with our list."

Local elections were being held Thursday in 42 West Bank towns, including the cities of Nablus and Ramallah. The results were likely to give an indication of the split's effect on next month's election. The Islamic militant group Hamas is hoping to capitalize on the disarray in Fatah.

Barghouti, serving five life terms in an Israeli prison for involvement in deadly attacks, has emerged as the most popular Fatah leader in West Bank primary elections. Former West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub and Gaza strongman Mohammed Dahlan joined Barghouti in his new party, Fatah leaders said, adding weight to the list.

Barghouti's wife, Fadwa, submitted the breakaway slate of candidates, under the name, "The Future," to Palestinian election officials just before a midnight deadline Wednesday for parties to register candidates.

Fatah, the party of the late leader Yasser Arafat, has ruled Palestinian politics for four decades, gaining a reputation for corruption and nepotism along the way.

The "old guard" returned from exile with Arafat in the mid-1990s, while many of the young activists were in the West Bank and Gaza through the years, struggling against Israeli occupation.

Many Palestinians voting Thursday in Nablus said the split was likely to hurt Fatah in the local elections because it reinforced the impression of a party in disarray.

The political drama played out against a backdrop of violence.

Israel carried out three airstrikes Wednesday and early Thursday, killing four militants from the small Popular Resistance Committees in the first attack. Israel said the militants were on their way to attack the crossing in an explosives-laden car.

The second strike slightly wounded Khader Habib, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, the group that carried out a suicide bombing that killed five Israelis last week.

Early Thursday, an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at the house of a Popular Resistance leader in northern Gaza, wounding one of his relatives, residents said. The military said the target was a weapons storehouse.

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http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level.php?cat=Politics&loid=8.0.240163936&par=0

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Marwan Barghouti in an Israel court

MIDDLE EAST: BARAGHOUTI QUITS FATAH AHEAD OF PALESTINIAN VOTE








Tel Aviv, 15 Dec. (AKI) - Jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti together with some leading Fatah officials will be running against the party in Palestinian legislative elections scheduled for January 25. Joining Barghouti on the new list are Palestinians Civil Affairs Minister Mohammed Dahlan and senior Palestinian security advisor Jibril Rajoub.



Barghouti, who rose to prominence as leader in the intifada uprising and is serving five life terms in an Israeli prison, is highly popular with many young Palestinians. He appears to have fallen out with Fatah - the main Palestinian faction headed by Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas - because of attempts to insert old guard figures on the group's election candidate list ahead of the younger leaders.

Late on Wednesday a number of Barghouti associates, including his wife Fadwa, Palestinian parliament member Kadoura Fares, Dahlan and senior Fatah official in Gaza Samir Masharawi arrived at the Ramallah election headquarters and submitted a list of candidates, just one hour before the election deadline.

"We have registered an independent list under the name, 'The Future,' headed by Marwan Barghouti," Saeb Nimr, Barghouti's campaign manager, told reporters.

Barghouti seeks the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, but says violence is justified to drive Israel out of the West Bank.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article333464.ece

Dramatic split in Fatah blamed on Arafat's 'follied' PA leadership

By Donald Macintyre in Nablus

Published: 16 December 2005

When Nasser Juma says Yasser Arafat led his people to "disaster" in the last years of his life, he speaks with authority. For as he puts it bluntly: "We are the generation that was most connected with the base of the Palestinian people. We were active in the first and second intifadas; we were active in the resistance. To whatever extent we believed in it, we were part of it."

It is this street credibility which makes Nasser Juma a typical member of the group that staged a dramatic breakaway from Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian faction, under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti late on Wednesday night. Mr Juma, 39, is already eighth on the list of the new faction "the Future", formed from Mr Barghouti's prison cell and splitting the organisation founded by Arafat and Abu Jihad in Kuwait in 1959.

Less than a year ago, Mr Juma was high on Israel's wanted list as one of the key Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade leaders in the West Bank. Mr Juma, now no longer on the run, topped the primary poll to select the Fatah candidates running for Nablus in next month's Palestinian Legislative Council elections. He did so as part of the "new guard" generation of Fatah activists seeking to supplant what he sees as the corrupt old leadership of the national movement that was installed in control of the Palestinian Authority by Arafat.

The crisis brings to a head weeks in which Fatah, under electoral pressure from Hamas, has been fighting over who should represent it in the PLC, the Palestinian parliament. Primaries in Gaza and the West Bank have been marred by gunfire in the street between rival gangs. On Wednesday, the Central Election Commission offices in Gaza and the West Bank closed after masked Fatah gunmen ransacked them.

In most primaries Mr Juma's generation won. In Ramallah, Mr Barghouti, the highly popular former Fatah secretary general in the West Bank, currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli jail after being convicted of involvement in attacks that killed five people during the intifada, spectacularly topped the poll.

Mr Juma is convinced that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, also " wants to send the old guard away. He is suffering from the old guard." Mr Abbas may himself be part of the older generation. But he personally insisted on putting Mr Barghouti top of the official Fatah candidates' list.

The appeal of men such as Mr Barghouti and Mr Juma could help him in the all-important task ­ certainly if he is ever going to persuade the US to promote peace talks ­ of winning a majority over Hamas. And as avowed reformists, the Barghouti faction's sizeable presence in the PLC may help him rehabilitate the PA's sclerotic apparatus.

But Mr Abbas was also obliged by the powerful Fatah central committee to accept Ahmad Qureia, his unpopular and unhelpful Prime Minister, in second place, along with several others of the committee and their henchmen. This triggered the breakaway ­ one from which Mr Abbas spent three hours on the telephone on Wednesday night to Mr Barghouti's prison cell trying to dissuade him.

Mr Juma, who in the Nineties was severely tortured in a Palestinian jail on the orders of Yasser Arafat, as well as having spent eight years in Israeli prisons, does not exempt Israel from blame for inflaming tensions by its targeted operations against militants, and calls on it to withdraw from West Bank cities. But he has condemned the recent suicide bombing in Netanya and blames Iran for being behind other Islamic Jihad attacks. More strikingly, he believes that the intifada, or at least its form, played into the hands of the Israeli right, and to Ariel Sharon's goal of taking as much territory as was compatible with the demographic need to have an Israel with a Jewish majority.

"It was clear that the Israelis closed the door on us, but also ­ let me be frank ­ the Palestinian leadership under Arafat was folly, mistaken. They should have made a clear assessment of the question of who benefited from the intifada and that was Sharon." He is certainly not renouncing armed militancy in principle. But the leadership also wholly failed, in Mr Juma's view, to take account of the huge impact of 11 September, on international opinion.

"The resistance after 11 September should have kept itself far away from terrorism. Israel took advantage of 11 September to say that the Palestinians were terrorists. They besieged the cities, prevented people from moving between cities, used every technology against us. We are the people in the right, but we ... should behave more wisely."

Hamas's strategy of suicide bombing, which helped to "drag" the Fatah factions into suicide attacks on Israeli civilians, was, he believes, a catastrophe. "The leadership led by Arafat took us to disaster ... This is the fact." Many of these "pragmatic" ­ in Mr Juma's own word ­ criticisms of the intifada echo those made by President Abbas. But if Ariel Sharon wins the Israeli election and then, as Mr Juma and many others predict, seeks unilaterally to impose a new border that will annex East Jerusalem as well as significant tracts of the West Bank ­ while maintaining a large measure of external control over what is left to the Palestinians, that will be no more acceptable to the Barghouti generation than it would have been to Arafat.

While he says "the most effective weapon is peace", the Juma formulation leaves the options for what may be a struggle "over many generations". Mr Juma doesn't say so, but they could include passive resistance, a refusal to accept an "interim" agreement based on such a border, and an international campaign against an "apartheid" division and perhaps a resumption of attacks on soldiers and settlers on the Palestinian side of the pre-1967 Green Line.

The Western diplomats who see the "new guard" as Fatah's best hope know it will not agree to anything short of a genuinely viable Palestinian state. But they believe its commitment to reform is essential to injecting urgently needed efficiency and transparency to the Palestinian Authority.

Such an outcome could make the US readier to press a third Sharon government to go further towards a final settlement. But that is far from certain. While Mr Juma says the decision to break away is fixed, Mr Abbas will lead efforts to fuse the two slates. In any case Mr Juma says Mr Abbas should nominate Mr Barghouti as prime minister, to increase leverage on Israel to release him. Mr Abbas would prefer Salam Fayed, who won international respect as Finance Minister and is standing with Hanan Ashrawi on an independent ticket.

Khalil Shikaki, the leading Palestinian analyst, points out that the methods of the "young guard" have hardly been above reproach and are anyway split between those like Barghouti and Juma, and others who do not accept either Barghouti's leadership or the de facto ceasefire. (One of those, Zacharia Zubeidi, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' leader in Jenin, even applauded this month's suicide bombing.) Initial results last night showing handsome Hamas local election victories suggest there are serious dangers in a Fatah split; they could yet persuade the two Fatah groups to compromise.

But the fact that ambitious politicians such as Mohammed Dahlan and Jibril Rajoub, hardly new faces, have joined the New Guard ticket is highly suggestive. This new generation of Palestinian leaders, however they stand, will probably make significant gains in elections next month. In the long run it could even be they, and perhaps Amir Peretz, the new Labour leader, who achieve the lasting peace to which they are publicly committed.

When Nasser Juma says Yasser Arafat led his people to "disaster" in the last years of his life, he speaks with authority. For as he puts it bluntly: "We are the generation that was most connected with the base of the Palestinian people. We were active in the first and second intifadas; we were active in the resistance. To whatever extent we believed in it, we were part of it."

It is this street credibility which makes Nasser Juma a typical member of the group that staged a dramatic breakaway from Fatah, the mainstream Palestinian faction, under the leadership of Marwan Barghouti late on Wednesday night. Mr Juma, 39, is already eighth on the list of the new faction "the Future", formed from Mr Barghouti's prison cell and splitting the organisation founded by Arafat and Abu Jihad in Kuwait in 1959.

Less than a year ago, Mr Juma was high on Israel's wanted list as one of the key Fatah-linked Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade leaders in the West Bank. Mr Juma, now no longer on the run, topped the primary poll to select the Fatah candidates running for Nablus in next month's Palestinian Legislative Council elections. He did so as part of the "new guard" generation of Fatah activists seeking to supplant what he sees as the corrupt old leadership of the national movement that was installed in control of the Palestinian Authority by Arafat.

The crisis brings to a head weeks in which Fatah, under electoral pressure from Hamas, has been fighting over who should represent it in the PLC, the Palestinian parliament. Primaries in Gaza and the West Bank have been marred by gunfire in the street between rival gangs. On Wednesday, the Central Election Commission offices in Gaza and the West Bank closed after masked Fatah gunmen ransacked them.

In most primaries Mr Juma's generation won. In Ramallah, Mr Barghouti, the highly popular former Fatah secretary general in the West Bank, currently serving a life sentence in an Israeli jail after being convicted of involvement in attacks that killed five people during the intifada, spectacularly topped the poll.

Mr Juma is convinced that Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, also " wants to send the old guard away. He is suffering from the old guard." Mr Abbas may himself be part of the older generation. But he personally insisted on putting Mr Barghouti top of the official Fatah candidates' list.

The appeal of men such as Mr Barghouti and Mr Juma could help him in the all-important task ­ certainly if he is ever going to persuade the US to promote peace talks ­ of winning a majority over Hamas. And as avowed reformists, the Barghouti faction's sizeable presence in the PLC may help him rehabilitate the PA's sclerotic apparatus.

But Mr Abbas was also obliged by the powerful Fatah central committee to accept Ahmad Qureia, his unpopular and unhelpful Prime Minister, in second place, along with several others of the committee and their henchmen. This triggered the breakaway ­ one from which Mr Abbas spent three hours on the telephone on Wednesday night to Mr Barghouti's prison cell trying to dissuade him.

Mr Juma, who in the Nineties was severely tortured in a Palestinian jail on the orders of Yasser Arafat, as well as having spent eight years in Israeli prisons, does not exempt Israel from blame for inflaming tensions by its targeted operations against militants, and calls on it to withdraw from West Bank cities. But he has condemned the recent suicide bombing in Netanya and blames Iran for being behind other Islamic Jihad attacks. More strikingly, he believes that the intifada, or at least its form, played into the hands of the Israeli right, and to Ariel Sharon's goal of taking as much territory as was compatible with the demographic need to have an Israel with a Jewish majority.


This item is available on the Militant Islam Monitor website, at http://www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/1412