[Mb-civic] Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast - Washington Post

[William Swiggard]

Hamas Sweeps Palestinian Elections, Complicating Peace Efforts in Mideast

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, January 27, 2006; A01

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jan. 26 -- The radical Islamic movement Hamas won a 
large majority in the new Palestinian parliament, according to official 
election results announced Thursday, trouncing the governing Fatah party 
in a contest that could dramatically reshape the Palestinians' relations 
with Israel and the rest of the world.

In Wednesday's voting, Hamas claimed 76 of the 132 parliamentary seats, 
giving the party at war with Israel the right to form the next cabinet 
under the Palestinian Authority's president, Mahmoud Abbas, the leader 
of Fatah.

Fatah, which has dominated the legislature since the previous elections 
a decade ago and the Palestinian cause for far longer, won 43 seats. A 
collection of nationalist, leftist and independent parties claimed the rest.

Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, another Fatah leader, resigned his post 
along with his cabinet early Thursday, as reports of Hamas's victory 
began to circulate. Although the cabinet would have been required to 
step aside even if Fatah had retained its majority, Qureia acknowledged 
in submitting his resignation that Hamas had earned the right to form 
the next cabinet.

"This is the choice of the people," Qureia, a member of the party's 
discredited old guard who did not run for reelection, told reporters 
here. "It should be respected."

Abbas, on the other hand, will continue to serve the four-year 
presidential term he won in an election a year ago, shortly after the 
death of his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, the founder of Fatah. Abbas 
will maintain the broad power to create national policy and control the 
security services, though he needs parliamentary approval for his budget 
and legislative proposals. He will also shape peace policy with Israel 
as head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, which does not include 
Hamas.

The arrival of Hamas, formally known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, 
in the Palestinian Authority as a nearly equal partner will severely 
complicate Abbas's efforts to begin negotiations with Israel under the 
U.S.-backed peace plan known as the "road map." Hamas, which emerged in 
1987 during the first Palestinian uprising as an offshoot of Egypt's 
Muslim Brotherhood, favors the creation of a Palestinian nation on land 
that now includes Israel rather than the road map's two-state solution.

The election results stunned U.S. and Israeli officials, who have 
repeatedly stated that they would not work with a Palestinian Authority 
that included Hamas, which both countries and the European Union have 
designated as a terrorist organization. In Washington, Secretary of 
State Condoleezza Rice said that a party could not "have one foot in 
politics and the other in terror. Our position on Hamas has therefore 
not changed."

Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, said in a 
statement that the Palestinian people had "voted democratically and 
peacefully." But, he added, "these results may confront us with an 
entirely new situation which will need to be analyzed" at a meeting of 
European foreign ministers next week.

Jubilant Hamas leaders reiterated Thursday that they had no plans to 
pursue peace talks or disarm the party's armed wing, a condition Israel 
has set for beginning negotiations under the road map. The plan, which 
calls for the creation of an independent Palestinian state by the end of 
2005, has been frozen during recent years of violence.

Here in Ramallah, a Fatah stronghold where Hamas won every parliamentary 
seat except the one reserved for a Christian, dozens of activists from 
both parties clashed in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council, as 
the parliament is formally known.

The dispute started when a Hamas supporter hung the party's 
emerald-green banner above the entrance in place of the national flag. 
Fatah activists arrived and tore down the banner, which bears the 
Islamic axiom, "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is his prophet." 
The fight that ensued was broken up by police officers, who fired 
warning shots into the air.

"What they did offended not only Hamas but the Islamic nation," said 
Saleh Mikdad, 40, a print shop employee from the Amari refugee camp 
here. "But now we are all brothers."

In the past, the Fatah-dominated parliament approved the initiatives of 
Abbas and Arafat without much debate. But that could change with Hamas 
controlling the legislature, which will have the power to bring down 
cabinets if it does not agree with policy and would likely have to 
approve the terms of a final peace agreement with Israel.

In proceeding with elections despite Hamas's strong showing in last 
year's municipal races, Abbas gambled that it would be easier to disarm 
the group and modulate its policies, which include adopting Islamic law 
in the territories, with its members inside the Palestinian Authority. 
But Hamas's showing was far stronger than predicted by anyone in Fatah 
-- or by Palestinian pollsters who severely underestimated the 
movement's performance in its first national elections.

Hamas leaders must now decide how to form a cabinet whose ministers will 
run a Palestinian Authority bureaucracy dominated by Fatah supporters. 
Several Fatah officials said the party would probably decline any 
invitation to join the next cabinet so that Hamas, its sharpest critic 
for years, would get a sense of the difficulties involved in governing 
an angry electorate living under military occupation.

"They want to see how Hamas will act once it's responsible for running 
the government," said Bassem Barhum, a spokesman for the Palestinian 
Legislative Council. "They want to show the public that this is what 
they got. This is Hamas."

Barhum said rules required Abbas, who has threatened to resign if Hamas 
blocks his political program, to invite the largest party in parliament 
to form the next cabinet. Although it has the votes in parliament to 
name any cabinet it chooses, Hamas could be hampered by its lack of 
experience if it chooses to govern without a partner.

Party leaders chose candidates with backgrounds in medicine, education, 
computer sciences and other fields so that Hamas would have the 
expertise to run the various ministries. But Mahmoud Zahar, a victorious 
Hamas candidate from Gaza, said before the vote that the party favored a 
coalition government if it won.

One possibility is that Hamas will choose the leader of a third party to 
be prime minister while its own members grow accustomed to their new 
roles. One likely candidate for the job is Salam Fayyad, a former 
finance minister who won a parliamentary seat as the head of the 
anti-corruption Third Way party.

"My hunch is that they do not want to form a government on their own and 
would prefer a coalition with Fatah," said Ali Jarbawi, a political 
science professor at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank. "If this is 
not possible, I think they'll support a government of technocrats."

The Fatah Central Committee convened Thursday evening to begin 
discussing whether to join a Hamas-led cabinet, if invited to do so. 
Abbas Zaki, a committee member, said the decision would "depend on the 
program."

"If it is only Hamas, then it will be very hard to join," Zaki said. 
"And it is also necessary for us to understand what happened. We need to 
study this so we can make a recovery."

Some angry Fatah activists called for Abbas, who is commonly known as 
Abu Mazen, to step down.

"Abu Mazen led us to this catastrophe," said Shukri Radaideh, a Fatah 
leader in the Bethlehem district. "He must now resign."

Abbas postponed these parliamentary elections last July to secure a new 
election law beneficial to Fatah's prospects. One of the law's chief 
provisions allowed more members of parliament to be elected from 
parties' national candidate lists rather than from the district level, 
where Hamas's organization is strongest.

The results announced Thursday, however, showed Hamas winning three more 
seats from the national list than Fatah and nearly three times as many 
in district races. In addition to its sweep here in Ramallah, Hamas won 
all seats except those reserved for Christian candidates in such 
traditional Fatah territory as Bethlehem and Jerusalem, where the 
Israeli cabinet had prohibited Hamas candidates from campaigning.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/26/AR2006012600372.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20060127/f03d6d7e/attachment.htm