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News :: Israel / Palestine |
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Building the Wall with the Palestinian's Concrete? |
Current rating: 0 |
by haaretz via gehrig
(No verified email address) |
10 Feb 2004
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"Israel's Channel 10 TV also reported that the Al-Quds Cement Company - owned by Qureia's family - has been providing the materials to help build a contentious West Bank barrier, allegations Palestinian officials denied." |
w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m
Last update - 23:19 10/02/2004
PA checking whether Qureia selling concrete for settlements
By The Associated Press
JERUSALEM - A Palestinian parliamentary committee is investigating whether a cement company owned by Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia's family has been selling concrete to Jewish settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian officials said Tuesday.
Israel's Channel 10 TV also reported that the Al-Quds Cement Company - owned by Qureia's family - has been providing the materials to help build a contentious West Bank barrier, allegations Palestinian officials denied.
The TV report said Qureia was providing the cement to build the concrete slabs right outside his house in Abu Dis, a town near Jerusalem divided by an 8-meter wall.
The Palestinian premier was on a trip to Ireland and was unavailable for comment.
Later Qureia traveled to Rome, where he met with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi. Both men made brief statements after their talks but did not take questions from reporters.
Television footage showed cement mixers leaving the Al-Quds company and driving to the Jewish settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim, just a few kilometers away.
A Palestinian lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was "evidence" that Qureia was selling cement to Ma'aleh Adumim. He said Qureia transferred ownership of the company to another member of his family just a few months ago.
The lawmaker said this strengthened suspicions that Qureia was involved in improper activities.
Qureia is one of the most vocal opponents of Jewish settlements and the barrier, and he is leading a Palestinian effort to garner global support for the Palestinian position.
Israel says the barrier is needed to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering the country, but the structure dips into the West Bank in some areas, leading Palestinians to condemn it as a land grab.
Palestinian efforts have led the UN General Assembly to ask the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, to hand down an advisory opinion on the barrier's legality. The court is to begin its hearings at the end of the month.
Palestinian lawmaker Jamal Shati, a member of a parliamentary committee that is going to Jordan and Egypt on Thursday to investigate whether Palestinian cement companies are providing Israel with material for the barrier, denied Qureia was part of the investigation.
"But when we open the issue of the concrete it will include everything, not only the barrier but also the settlements, because building the settlements is the same as building the barrier. There is no difference," Shati told The Associated Press. "This is a very dangerous national issue. This is something that belongs to the core of the Palestinian cause."
Lawmaker Hassan Khreishe, who is also on the inquiry committee, denied the team was investigating Qureia.
Khreishe told the AP the committee was investigating allegations - which originated in an Egyptian newspaper report published in November - that three Palestinian cement companies had illegally imported concrete from Egypt and sold it to an Israeli businessmen.
"We want to know if this cement was used to build the barrier or any other Israeli needs. This is the information we are investigating," Khreishe said. "There are several names mentioned, but for sure, the name of Abu Ala (Qureia) is not mentioned in this issue."
Palestinian Cabinet minister Jamil Tarifi is among those being investigated, said Palestinian officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
© 2004, The Associated Press
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Copyright by the author. All rights reserved. |
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Re: Building the Wall with the Palestinian's Concrete? |
by gehrig
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Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2004
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w w w . h a a r e t z d a i l y . c o m
Last update - 16:29 11/02/2004
Background / Graft, cement and Arafat's crumbling empire
By Bradley Burstonon, Haaretz Correspondent
Fatah, Yasser Arafat's revolutionary movement for Palestinian nationalism, is crumbling all around him.
The reasons for its downward spiral are many. Fatah has been the target of Israeli military onslaughts since the beginning of the intifada in late 2000, ripped to shreds by infighting among its disgruntled leadership, and eclipsed by the discipline, social welfare services, religious fervor and murderous prowess of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas.
Among the clearest signs of Fatah's current free fall are tantilizing news reports aimed at the mainstream Palestinian movement's most vulnerable side: charges of corruption, the revelations of which stem in many cases from within the organization itself.
The graft issue is one of extreme sensitivity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Generations of poverty and the perceived lack of general peace dividends from the Oslo years have focused glaring light on the lifestyles of officials in the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority.
Anger over the issue exacerbated a number of other social rifts in the territories, among them native-born resentment of the PA old guard, the longtime Arafat cronies who lived well in Tunisian exile and returned to the West Bank and Gaza only this decade to take nearly complete control over Palestinian institutions in territories Oslo placed under PA rule.
Palestinian analysts have stated that a primary reason the intifada erupted when it did, and with such titanic force, was grass-roots fury at old-guard corruption.
This week, new tales of corruption emerged, one after the other - apparently leaked by the intra-Fatah rivals of the story's allegedly crooked protagonists.
In a story that Israelis, weary of graft at home, found irresistable, it emerged that a Palestinian parliamentary committee had launched a probe into the Al Quds Cement Company, owned by the family of Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia.
The firm has been accused of supplying concrete to build settlements outside Jerusalem, as well as the monolithic plates that are butted together to form parts of the West Bank separation fence.
Qureia has staked his political legacy to strident opposition to construction of settlements and the fence.
The report, which broke on Israel's Channel 10 television, said the firm was even supplying the cement needed to build the concrete slabs planted adjacent to Qureia's house in Abu Dis, the East Jerusalem town cleft by a cement curtain 25 feet in height.
Qureia, currently visiting Rome, flatly rejected the allegations Wednesday. "At base, this is a report that is not even worth the ink it was written with," he told reporters.
In Paris, meanwhile, French prosecutors confirmed press reports that they had opened an investigation into bank transfers of $11.5 million sent from a Swiss-based financial instituion to two separate accounts held by Arafat's wife Suha in Paris between July 2002 and July 2003.
Depending on how it is viewed, Yasser Arafat's personal wealth is either immense or nonexistent. He has long conducted his life in a manner of ostentatious modesty. His more than two years of IDF-enforced confinement to ruined Ramallah headquarters facility has only reinforced his image of spartan simplicity.
Beyond the personal, however, Arafat's fortunes are inextricably intertwined with the forbidable resources of the Palestine Liberation Organization, of which Fatah is the central component group.
Long before the emergence of the Palestinian Authority, the PLO - as the designated representative of the Palestinian people and thus the client ally of oil-rich Arab states - was the recipient of enormous sums in liquid cash and property, as well as arms and other less negotiable assets.
More recently, an International Monetary Fund report on PA accounts confirmed Palestinian doubts that the Authority hadn't disbursed all its funds within the territories, including funds supplied by donor nations specifically for needy residents of the West Bank and Gaza.
According to the IMF, PA officials diverted some $900 million in funds to accounts overseas between 1997 and 2003.
The sums credited to Suha Arafat are said to have come from these transfers. She reportedly drew on hundreds of thousands of dollars for her personal use, with the remainder staying in the two accounts in her name.
The IMF also found that a total of $74 million was earmarked for Yasser Arafat's office. It could not be determined for what or for whom the money was intended.
For some time, allegations of corruption have swirled around close associates of Yasser Arafat, in particular economic advisor Mohammad Rashid and Hanni al-Hassan, who has served Arafat as interior minister and security chief.
Arafat himself, as icon and living martyr, is considered above suspicion and beyond criticism.
In fact, some of the reports may actually help to shore up Arafat's position in the public eye, which views Hamas as especially virtuous for devoting its funds solely to its twin aims of social welfare and deadly attacks on Israelis.
Captured documents recently examined and authenticated by investigators from the European Union anti-fraud office suggest that Arafat ordered that a portion of funds received from European donors be used to fund the terror-oriented operations of Fatah's armed offshoot, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.
Another factor is the reality that Palestinians have more pressing problems to address. On Wednesday alone, a dozen Palestinians were killed by IDF troops in gun battles in Gaza City, and a thirteenth was shot dead in the Gaza city of Rafah.
Among the dead was Mohammed Hilles, 18, the son of Ahmed Hilles, a top Fatah leader in the Strip.
A third factor, perhaps the most significant, is the timing of the reports, and the fact that, for many Palestinians, they are nothing new.
"The timing is what is important here, because it is driven by internal power struggles," says Haaretz commentator Danny Rubinstein. "All of it comes on the background of the unravelling of Fatah, and mutual recriminations within the organization."
Charges and counter-charges of corruption have become part and parcel of the disintegration of the movement, he continues. "The corruption stands in very sharp contrast to Hamas, whose leaders are viewed as the 'clean ones.'" Hamas, there is reason to believe, also takes part in passing along the charges of graft leveled at Fatah veterans.
Recently, a group of 400 Fatah activists publicly announced their resignation from the movement, citing corruption as one main cause and condemning in a broadside "the Kurd that plays around with the funds of the Palestinian people" - a reference to Rashid.
"The fact that there are people who take funds from over here and send them over there, or that Abu Ala [Qureia] may have a financial interest in the cement firm, or that Suha receives moneys, and in the past acted as a broker in various financial dealings - these are all matters that have long been known," Rubinstein says.
Within Fatah, the figures with the clearest vested interest in leaking a story like that of Suha Arafat's millions are the young guard, principally former Gaza Strip Preventative Security Services chief and ex-peace negotiator Mohammed Dahlan, Rubinstein says.
That group, which also includes jailed West Bank Fatah Tanzim leader Marwan Barghouti, "constantly casts blame on Arafat's associates," says Rubinstein. "But no one can accuse Arafat, as a person who never spends any money on himself."
An Egyptian newspaper last month published an article by Dahlan on the "lobby of the corrupt" surrounding - but not involving - Arafat.
Dahlan, still stewing over being shunted from position of key authority, also has an interest in reports casting Qureia in a poor light.
The dispute has also spilled over into violence, with overt street fighting between men loyal to Dahlan and others loyal to rival security official Ghazi Jibali and others of the old guard.
"Dahlan was ousted from the cabinet," says Rubinstein. "He returned to Gaza with nothing left to him, and ever since then, every time there's a flare-up there, his name his mentioned, rightly or wrongly."
In the end, none of the leaders are the main beneficiary of the ever-escalating infighting, Rubinstein concludes. "The one that profits from all of this, of course, is Hamas."
(c) 2004, Haaretz
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Re: Building the Wall with the Palestinian's Concrete? |
by gehrig
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Current rating: 0
11 Feb 2004
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In short, Arafat and Sharon have colluded to hand the game to Hamas.
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