By Joel Mowbray
National Review Online
April 25, 2002, 8:45 a.m.
In a New York Times earlier this week, former President Jimmy Carter casually remarked that the 1996 Palestinian elections were "open and fair." Carter, of all people, knows better - Yasser Arafat has never been fairly elected the leader of anything, let alone the Palestinian people.
Seven years ago, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) made its grand conversion from bloody terrorist outfit to a governing body with ostensibly fair elections. Over 600 international observers, including Carter, gave the process a seal of approval, and newspapers from Berlin to Los Angeles trumpeted the triumph of democracy in the Palestinian territories.
But the Palestinian people were conned - they believed a real election had taken place, and why wouldn't they? Throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip, every wall and every street light had played host to posters with the red, green, black, and white colors of the Palestinian flag, and people walked into voting booths just like people in real democracies do.
There were over 700 candidates from a multitude of parties and slates, and politicians were pressing the flesh on every street corner. Turnout topped 70 percent, and Palestinians honestly believed that they had embarked on a path to true democracy.
But what seemed like a legitimate election was little more than an elaborate charade, a fraud perpetrated on the Palestinian people. The shenanigans started a few months before the international observers set foot in the Middle East.
Much like American primaries, Fatah held internal elections to decide the people to represent the party on the ballot for each given seat. Arafat, however, didn't like the results, so he cast them aside and created his own slate. Come Election Day, most of the "independents" who actually won council seats were Fatah members kicked off the official slate by Arafat.
Several groups, including Peace Watch, noted that Arafat and his minions had, in the months leading up to the election, intimidated political activists, arrested some political opponents, and bribed others to exit races.
Despite heavy-handedness by Arafat in the races for the 88-seat Palestinian National Council (PNC), at least there were real challengers for many of those contests. At the top of the ticket, however, Arafat only faced what could generously be described as token opposition.
The lone person to oppose Arafat on the ballot was a 72-year-old social worker, Samiha Khalil. She shocked the international press with what the New York Times labeled a "surprisingly high" number of votes. Her final, "surprisingly high" tally? 9.3 percent of the vote.
Even if a credible politician had taken on Arafat, however, he would have been unlikely to clear all the hurdles in mounting a serious challenge. Arafat had a stranglehold on the media, one he proved willing to maintain with force when necessary.
In a one-week period shortly before the election, Arafat had more than nine hours of speaking time on television, yet his opponent was never mentioned during those seven days. In response to criticism from foreign journalists, Khalil was finally granted 47 minutes on air at the eleventh hour.
When Arafat didn't have a media outlet in his pocket, he would bully and intimidate editors to get the press coverage he desired. A month before the election, Jerusalem's largest Palestinian newspaper, Al Quds, was told by the PLO to run a story about Arafat's meeting with a Greek Orthodox leader on the front page. On the same morning the story ran on page 8, PLO armed guards arrested Al Quds editor Maher al-Alami, "detaining" him for six days.
Upon his release, al-Alami, who was not the only Palestinian journalist arrested that month by the PLO, unsurprisingly had sharp words about the influence of the man then poised to win the rigged election, noting that "the Palestinian media follow his instructions out of fear."
Fear is a tactic well-known and long-employed by Arafat. "Arafat has a long history of using violence and the threat of violence to beat back perceived threats to his leadership of the PLO and now the PA," says Jim Phillips, Mideast policy expert for the Heritage Foundation.
That an older woman who could barely attract handfuls of curious onlookers at her campaign events was the only challenger at the top of the ticket should come as no surprise. Someone with an actual chance of garnering public support likely would have faced reprisals, including arrest, torture, or worse.
Former CIA director Jim Woolsey dismisses claims that Arafat was democratically elected, quipping, "Arafat was essentially elected the same way Stalin was, but not nearly as democratically as Hitler, who at least had actual opponents."
Given that potential opponents were intimidated or bribed to drop out of races, Arafat dominated television airtime, and there was only token opposition in the campaign for chairman, the natural assumption would be that the international observers would expose the election for the sham that it was. That assumption would be sadly mistaken.
While monitoring the 1996 election, former President Carter ignored all evidence of Arafat's wrongdoing, and instead zeroed in on the role of the Israeli Defense Forces patrolling Jerusalem. "There's no doubt [Israelis] are doing everything they can to intimidate Palestinians," said the former peanut farmer on the day of the election. There was credible evidence to suggest some voter intimidation by Israelis in Jerusalem, but for Carter to focus solely on that not only paints an inaccurate picture by omission, but also harms the Palestinian people in the long run, denying them the democracy they thought were getting.
The steadfast refusal of the international observers to highlight the significant PLO corruption in the months prior to the election colored the news coverage of the vote here in America.
The Sunday New York Times blared in its lead sentence, "Voting in their first general election today, Palestinians gave a broad endorsement to Yasir Arafat's leadership in building their homeland." To this day, the urban legend of Arafat being democratically elected has real consequences.
"The tragedy of this is that it allows people to create a moral equivalency between Sharon and Arafat, when in fact none exists," comments Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum.
Maybe Arafat would have won in a free and fair election, but he didn't. Propagating the myth that he was "elected" only serves to illegitimately legitimize his status as a democratic leader. Perhaps Arafat is the most popular Palestinian leader, but for all the wrong reasons. He achieved his pole position through thuggish tactics, not a democratic election.
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