Adloyada

The Palestinian Authority: farce rewritten as tragedy

It's no joke living under a corrupt and sometimes murderous regime, and one can only feel compassion for those who have to. However, even in the worst days of the Soviet regime, its millions of citizens sustained themselves with sardonic humour and self-mockery, through jokes and satirical songs.

 

Reading this account of the doings of the Palestinian authority one response is to feel horrified. But the sheer grotesquery in this account of what's going on, particularly the elaborately absurd subterfuges by which the Fatah and Hamas regimes handle the shared adminstration they're forced to engage in, reminds me of the Keystone Cops films. 

There's that old quote from Marx about history repeating itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Only here, I think it's the other way round. The farcical setup which allowed an openly terrorist group, Hamas, to stand for election in a supposed democracy, alongside a nominally democratic group, Fatah, which kept a semi-detached force of terrorists in case of need, seems to have produced a situation like this:

A close friend who recently moved from Gaza City to Ramallah with his wife and two young children told me that the cost of each passport for a Gazan citizen is almost NIS 1,200, as opposed to NIS 235 prior to the Hamas takeover - just one of the consequences of the political disputes between the governments of Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in Ramallah.

After the takeover, several administrative offices had been formed in Gaza whose duties included the distribution of passports to civilians. I can't fathom how these offices transfer the passport requests from Gaza to Ramallah. I do not rule out the possibility that they are in fact smuggled through the tunnels and sent via Egyptian mail to Ramallah.

Today there is a serious passport shortage in the Gaza Strip. The PA, to help remedy that problem, is supposed to pass out about 5,000 new passports every month to citizens in the Gaza Strip. Hamas uses passports by selectively distributing them to the people within its government instead of making them available to anyone applying for them. The lack of passports in Gaza has brought a major increase in demand and even 10,000 new passports issued a month would not be enough to relieve the deficit.

But here's where the farce descends into near slapstick. For the article from which the extract was taken was written by the brother of one of the PA's ministers.  He's the long-serving head of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitorying Group, which investigates and documents Human Rights abuses by both the Palestinian and the Israeli authorities. And here's his take on his brother's experience at the hands of the government in which he's a minister:

My brother, Hatem Abdulqader, was appointed 40 days ago to be the Minister of Jerusalem Affairs in the Salaam Fayad government. However, his new employer wasn't able to provide him with an office. No one in the government was able to tell my brother to his face that every minister needs a chair, a table and coffee utensils to serve the people who come to his office to congratulate him. When I heard about this, I lent my brother NIS 10,000 to find an office.

Eventually, he had to build one for himself. He had approached the Ministry of Finance many times requesting an office, a chair and a desk, but was told time again that the PA's cash register was empty.

This episode enraged me. Why is it necessity to appoint so many ministers to form a government? Why is the PA in need of $100 million each month for salaries? Where does all this money go? What do all these ministers do for their people?

In the television broadcast showing my brother being sworn in as minister, he raised his hand and swore by the Koran to be loyal to his people and country. If I were him, I would refuse to take this vow in front of Abbas or Fayad. I would be willing to take the oath only when the people standing in front of me are responsible enough to uphold this vow themselves.

The Fayad government actually wanted to use my brother to commit perjury, to swear in front of the entire Palestinian nation in the name of a useless government.

Well, yes, where does the money go? The US and EU may be withholding aid from the Hamas regime, but they're certainly pouring it into the PA's coffers.

But back to tragedy rather than farce. If you fall foul of either the PA or Hamas, you're much more likely to end up with a bullet in your back or blown to pieces in a car bomb than you are with a custard pie in your face.

Iranian regime goes after Arash, just like he said they would

The Iranian regime has announced that it's using its police apparatus and Interpol to go after Dr Arash Hejazi. 

Why? 

He spoke out on the BBC about his experience of witnessing the murder of Neda Aga-Soltan at close quarters, and trying in vain to use his medical skills to save her. What's more he spoke of seeing the outraged crowd of protesters capture the Basiji thug who fired the shot, the Basiji's cries that he "didn't mean to kill her", and the crowd's having disarmed him and let him go.

Arash Hejazi's dramatic interview includes his fears of how the Iranian regime will respond to his testimony. "They will put all sorts of things on me," he says--it's about seven minutes into this clip. He knows he is now a marked man.

Of course, there are at least two versions of every story, so let's look at today's line from Iran's Chief of Police, helpfully and uncritically reported in The Guardian:

Iran's police chief, Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi-Moghaddam, said 1,032 people had been arrested since the 12 June election, but he claimed that most had since been released.
"Those who are still in detention were referred to the public and revolutionary courts in Tehran," Fars News Agency quoted him as saying, according to Reuters.
Ahmadi-Moghaddam said 20 "rioters" had been killed during the unrest and more than 500 police had been injured.
He also asked Interpol to arrest Arash Hejazi, the doctor who was filmed coming to the aid of Neda Soltan after she was shot in the widely seen video of her death.

Hejazi fled to London after the incident and suggested that a Basij militiaman on a motorbike was responsible for her killing.
"Her killing was a planned scenario and had no relation with the riots in Tehran," Ahmadi-Moghaddam said.

You don't have to look far to work out what story the Iranian regime is going to try and lay on Arash Hejazi. Here's Ahmadinejad's version of what happened as put out on the Iranian propaganda tool, Press TV:

The massive propaganda of the foreign media, as well as other evidence, proves the interference of the enemies of the Iranian nation who want to take political advantage and darken the pure face of the Islamic republic," he said in a letter to Shahroudi, according to the news agency.

The letter comes a day after Iran's government-backed Press TV said Agha-Soltan did not die the way the opposition claims.

Two people told Press TV there were no security forces in the area when she was killed. 
And the network said the type of bullet that killed her is not used by Iranian security forces.

A man who told the network that he had helped take her to a hospital said, "There were no security forces or any member of the Basij" paramilitary present when she was killed.

The Guardian's version makes it look as if Dr Arash Hejazi ran away. In fact, Arash Hejazi is currently based in England in order to pursue a postgraduate degree at the Oxford Brookes University in publishing; he was on a visit to Tehran when, like Neda Soltan, he landed up on the scene of the shooting during the course of one of the biggest street protests against the declaration of the faked results of the Iranian election.

The Guardian also fails to tell its readers about Arash Hejazi's background as an award-winning writer and publisher. I would have linked you to his excellent website, which documents his own writings and his publication of democracy activists both in and beyond Iran. But it was based on an Iranian ISP, and in the last few days, it's been taken down. What a surprise.

But you can still find a good account of Arash's extraordinary and impressive achievements on his Wikipedia page.  There's a telling account by him of the impact of the Iranian regime's censorship methods here.

It's a shame that the Wikipedia page doesn't carry the information which was on his now vanished website about the last time he was in trouble with the Iranian regime. One of his publishing ventures was shut down after he published a story by Primo Levi. Now, I wonder why the Iranian regime would have wanted to do that?

I hope that Interpol and the British government will respond with the contempt the Iranian regime deserves to any requests to turn over Arash Hejazi to them.