Arafat Under Fire

By Matt Rees and Jamil Hamad

After months of bitter complaining in conference rooms over thick coffee and cigarettes, Yasser Arafat's critics within his own Fatah Party burst into the open last week. As riots rocked Gaza, parliamentarians threatened a hunger strike unless Arafat agreed to reform his corrupt administration and hand over control of the military to a new Prime Minister to replace Ahmed Qurei, who wants to resign. But so far Arafat has remained defiant, refusing to accept Qurei's resignation, accusing opponents of a conspiracy to shove him aside and denying that he will give up any power. "I'm not going to surrender," Arafat said in a meeting with Qurei, sources who were there told TIME. "I do what I want, and I know how to protect the Palestinian interests better than anyone else."

After four years of violence that shows no signs of ending, opposition to Arafat is spreading to the street. A leading Arafat critic, former Minister Nabil Amr, was shot in the leg by a gunman last week; reformers took it as at least a warning from Arafat loyalists. In Gaza, Arafat's Fatah faction issued a stream of leaflets accusing his henchmen of corruption and violence. Most of the vitriol was aimed at Arafat's cousin Moussa, whom he named this month to head the National Security Forces. The leaflets also accused Arafat of siphoning off public money to his wife, who lives in Paris--a rare personal attack on the Palestinian leader.

The man behind the Fatah protests in Gaza is Mohammed Dahlan, the former head of Arafat's Preventive Security Service there. He is taking advantage of a long-simmering perception among Fatah chiefs that Arafat has no intention of getting the Palestinians out of their present diplomatic dead end, even as the prospects for a Palestinian state seem ever more distant. "We warned Arafat two years ago to clean his house," says a senior Fatah official. The official says Arafat is in no immediate danger of being ousted, but the escalating campaign against him could be laying the foundation for someone to edge him aside. --By Matt Rees and Jamil Hamad