Palestinian Arab President Wins Support From Olmert, Blair

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The embattled Palestinian Arab leader, Mahmoud Abbas, won crucial support from both Prime Ministers Blair of Britain and Olmert of Israel yesterday as he struggled to head off civil war in the Palestinian Arab territories and push forward peace negotiations.

After meeting Mr. Abbas in his presidential compound in Ramallah, the de facto capital of the West Bank, Mr. Blair threw his support behind Mr. Abbas’s plan to hold early elections in the Palestinian Arab territories.

Later, Mr. Olmert said he was preparing to set up a committee with the Palestinian Arabs to discuss the crucial issue of prisoner releases. Both sides have been working through Egyptian mediators on a possible prisoner swap for months, weighing the idea of freeing several hundred Palestinian Arab prisoners in exchange for a captured Israeli soldier being held in Gaza since June.

Mr. Abbas, who is president of the Palestinian National Authority and leads the Fatah faction that is sliding toward civil war with its rival Hamas movement, presented his plan for early elections as a way to break the deadlock between his presidency and the Parliament controlled by Hamas, the Islamist political movement.

By supporting the Mr. Abbas’s strategy of circumventing the democratically elected Hamas government, Mr. Blair signaled that his Middle East policy had changed from the time when he saw democracy as the panacea for all regional problems.

Legal experts said Mr. Abbas’s initiative was in clear breach of the constitution, which provides no loophole for Parliament’s four-year term to be shortened.

Mr. Blair’s policy of promoting democracy throughout the region was one of the main reasons behind his decision to send British troops to end Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq three years ago. Asked if he was taking a “pick and choose” approach, Mr. Blair ducked the question saying the office held by Mr. Abbas was an elected one.

“We respect any democratic mandate, but the presidency also has a democratic mandate,” Mr. Blair said. “He is the elected president of the Palestinian people.”

The problem for the Palestinian Arab people is that their constitution divides power between Parliament and president and does not readily allow for each to be controlled by a rival political party.

Importantly, the constitution gives no power to the president to call early elections, according to Nathan Brown, a constitutional expert from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

“The president has no authority to end the term of the legislative council early,” he wrote recently in a paper entitled What Can Abu Mazen Do? Abu Mazen is the name used by most Palestinian Arabs for Mr. Abbas.

Yesterday, members of Hamas vowed to boycott the plan. Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of the movement who lives in Damascus, said Hamas would use peaceful street protests to stop the election from taking place.

In Gaza, Ahmed Yousef, the senior political adviser to Prime Minister Haniyeh of Hamas said: “Hamas, the government, and the people will challenge the election plan in court and, if necessary, our people will take to the streets.”

Political violence continued in the Gaza Strip in spite of a cease-fire agreed by both sides. In the worst incident, a Fatah member was killed and another kidnapped for a few hours in the Jabalya refugee camp, north of Gaza City.


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