In fact, he’s at a funeral: a procession bearing the corpse of a young Palestinian shot the day before has just ended nearby. Now, older mourners and local politicians, handkerchiefs over their noses because of the tear gas, are paying their respects to the 41-year-old Barghouti. They go to him for advice because he runs a group of Fatah militias, guerrillas the Israelis call Tanzim–the shock troops of the Palestinian uprising in the West Bank. One of the mourners, a gray-haired man cringing at the noise of guns, asks with deference just when the dying might end. “We are at the start of this intifada,” Barghouti declares, not a tear in his eye. “It has only been two months.”
Only two months, but it must seem like eons to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. The uprising led by new warlords like Barghouti essentially toppled Barak’s government last week. Facing overwhelming opposition within Israel’s Knesset, the prime minister was forced to call new elections–opening a campaign season that promises to be ruthless. Now he has perhaps six months to produce the kind of peacemaking results he can win on. To do that, Barak will need to appease not just Yasir Arafat and the familiar old PLO sycophants who surround him. He’ll also have to find common ground with a younger generation of Palestinian street leaders who, like Barghouti, have emerged to lead the bloody fight against Israeli occupation. These are men in their 40s, mostly, who were previously in the shadow of the traditional PLO leadership. They are the someday successors to Arafat, and even now it is not altogether clear whether they are following his orders or he is following their lead.
Barghouti saw Barak’s election gambit last week as one more proof of the uprising’s success. By his own count, more than 280 Palestinians have been killed and as many as 12,000 injured. But already, Barghouti said, “there have been more Israeli casualties in Palestine in two months than there were in Lebanon in a year.” Just as Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in June, this reasoning goes, eventually it will learn to leave the Palestinian territories. So Barghouti sees no reason to stop the violence–yet. “As it continues in the coming weeks and months,” he said, “Israeli politicians will start to take us seriously.”
In fact, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders are scrambling to make sense of dramatically new circumstances. Barak, who came to office with a tremendous mandate to make peace only 17 months ago, has seen his approval rating plunge. He pushed hard for an agreement with Syria earlier this year but now faces rising tensions with Damascus and on the border with Lebanon. He offered Arafat more of the West Bank and Gaza than any Israeli leader before him–although it was less than Palestinians say is their due according to U.N. resolutions–and was answered with the fury of the current uprising. Even Israel’s economy, which has grown since Barak was elected, is now heading for a violence-induced slump. “He needs one big accomplishment he can tout, otherwise he’s dead in the water,” said one Israeli analyst.
Waiting to push him under is former prime minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu, who leads Barak by at least 15 points in the polls. The current Likud leader, Ariel Sharon, would also beat Barak if elections were held today. “Even if we choose a broomstick to lead the party,” predicted Likud lawmaker Limor Livnat, “Barak will lose.” But surveys also show most Israelis want a peace deal with the Palestinians, which they’re more likely to get if Barak is at the helm rather than Netanyahu, a right-winger who vows to retain much of the occupied territories. With Parliament expected to set a May date for the new elections, Barak has got to move quickly to make peace, or break the uprising.
Yet the rising stars of the intifada are not just a threat to Barak. While they demand an end to Israeli settlements, they’re also challenging the old-line PLO leadership to clean up its act. Since Arafat’s cronies arrived on the scene seven years ago, they’ve grown rich while most Palestinians have grown poorer. Barghouti and the other warlords are senior officials in the Fatah faction Arafat founded, and proclaim eternal fealty to the old man. But the current uprising “changed the rules of the game,” Barghouti told NEWSWEEK. “What the leadership must do is adapt to the new rules.”
Hussam Khader, an organizer of Fatah militias around the West Bank city of Nablus, goes further. He openly accused 50 members of the Palestinian Authority of taking their money and their families out of the country during the uprising. “Arafat is the umbrella for these corrupt people, but he still leads the national party,” says Khader. “If Arafat didn’t exist, this intifada would have been against the Palestinian Authority. And if this intifada fails to reorganize the Palestinian house, then I would consider this intifada failed.”
Israel’s expectation of Arafat has always been that he’d keep order, come what may. No longer: “The way it looks right now, the situation is fast going toward a state of anarchy,” a senior Israeli Defense official told reporters last week. He cited six different, and often competing, security organizations operating in the West Bank and Gaza. In fact, Arafat’s two Preventive Security chiefs, who are supposed to control Palestinian violence in the interests of the peace process, have been increasingly reluctant to act against their own people. The West Bank operative, Jibril Rajoub, has tried to avert potential clashes: last Friday he posted his men inside the Al Aqsa Mosque on the sacred mount claimed by both Muslims and Jews when it was opened to tens of thousands of worshipers, and the prayers remained quiet. But Mohammed Dahlan, security chief in Gaza, says he is “fed up” with trying to protect Israelis–especially after they rocketed his new headquarters in October. He told NEWSWEEK he has no interest in investigating who was behind a recent bombing inside Israel that killed two Israelis and wounded more than 50. “It’s not my business,” said Dahlan. “It used to be my business. Understand?”
The tone is menacing, to be sure. But the emerging warlords of Palestine are also pragmatic. They were born under Israeli rule, grew up in camps and slums patrolled by Israeli soldiers, learned Hebrew in Israeli jails. They have a ferocious familiarity with the occupiers that older Palestinians, who spent decades in exile, could never begin to have. Yet none of them embraces the apocalyptic rhetoric of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, which would erase Israel from the map. All of them accept its right to exist. What they say they reject is the kind of peace that Barak has been offering, which they see as a continuation of occupation in a different guise.
“We want to save our blood and their blood,” says Dahlan. “But going back to negotiations under the old rules, that’s bull—-. Enough. Do you think a Palestinian state can ever be established without Jerusalem? A state full of settlements? A state surrounded by the Israeli military? What kind of a state is that?” “We are not against any negotiations,” says Barghouti. “But according to our experience, over seven years [since the Oslo accords] there is no result without pressure on the ground, without resistance to the occupation. For negotiations to succeed, we have to continue the intifada.”
Beyond the bravado, it’s not at all clear that these new street fighters can really achieve much against the region’s most powerful military. So a key question for Israelis and American mediators concerns the role of Arafat now. Has he lost control or are these really his boys, doing his bidding? One Arab intelligence source who knows him well insists that the aging guerrilla is content to see the violence continue. Since the latest uprising began, he has been treated as a hero by the rest of the Arab world, and promised more lavish funding from them than he has seen in years: as much as $1 billion. “Arafat is looking for ways to keep the fire warm while drawing money from the Arabs,” said this source. Before, almost any deal he signed would have been condemned by Islamic leaders. “Now, with this so-called Independence War, he is covering his a– from anyone who would call him a traitor.”
Ever the survivor, Arafat could conceivably be strengthened by the recent mayhem. Grim as the violence has been, over the long run it could serve to prepare an exhausted public on both sides for practical concessions on territory, settlements, foreign observers, even a division of Jerusalem. Khader, in Nablus, describes the new uprising as “a sort of surgery performed to fix the malfunctions of the peace process.” But there is also the risk that between the bluster of Israeli elections and the brutal brinkmanship of Arafat and his proteges, the chances of peace will be dimmed for years to come.
title: “War On Two Fronts” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-16” author: “Lisa Seeman”
Nearly two months of hard negotiation later, the United States is close to securing permission to deploy an invasion force of roughly 47,000 troops in Turkey. But NEWSWEEK has learned that Turkey has considerably raised its price. Ankara now says it will let U.S. troops pass through its territory only if an even larger number of Turkish troops, between 60,000 and 80,000, go in as well–and not just within a relatively narrow border zone. The new mission, according to sources close to the Turkish military, is to occupy “strategic positions” within a “security arc” reaching as far as 220 to 270 kilometers into Iraq. That’s nearly the whole of Iraqi Kurdistan.
If so, this could spell serious trouble for the United States. Kurdish groups that have enjoyed de facto independence from Saddam’s rule in northern Iraq strenuously oppose any Turkish military presence in the region. If it happens, in fact, Kurdish separatist groups inside Turkey are already threatening to resume the terrorist campaign they waged in the early ’90s, killing 30,000 people. This poses an acute dilemma for Washington. Pressed by its timetable for war, the United States is inclined to agree to Turkish demands. If it does not, there may be no northern front. But the price will be the extra headache of trying to defuse tensions between the Turks and the Iraqi Kurds. Failing could mean a Turkish-Kurdish war breaking out behind U.S. lines.
The Turks’ concerns are equally clear. It’s not just a flood of refugees that scares them–half a million in 1991. More, they want to prevent Iraq’s Kurds from taking advantage of a U.S. invasion to declare independence from Baghdad and possibly seize the nearby Iraqi oilfields of Kirkuk and Mosul. Ankara also seeks to ensure that the rights of ethnic Turkomans living in Kurdistan are respected in a post-Saddam Iraq. “If you want to prevent massacres and the division of Iraq,” says Prime Minister Abdullah Gul, “you have to take some precautions.”
Iraq’s Kurds don’t see it that way, however. Sabah Mustafa Mohammed, a Kurdish peshmerga, or irregular soldier, fought Saddam and is now ready to fight the Turks, if ordered. A small Turkish military contingent has already been sent to Iraq, chiefly to keep an eye on suspected terrorists. One of the Turkish bases lies inside Iraqi territory not far from Mohammed’s home village of Zewa, a sleepy, snowy one-road town with no electricity and a single dry-goods shop 25 kilometers south of the border. “These Turks should go home,” he says, decked out in a black and white checked kaffiyeh and camouflage jacket. “For us, the Turks and Saddam are the same. They are both enemies of the Kurds.”
For now, Iraqi Kurd leaders are being a little more diplomatic–but only a little. “We will refuse [Turkish intervention],” says Sami Abdul Rahman, 70, the deputy prime minister of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, which controls northern Kurdistan. The party’s representative in Washington, Farhad Barzani, is no less categorical. “We have told them: the Americans comes as liberators,” he says. “But Turkish troops will be seen as invaders.”
Attempting to head off any clashes, U.S. envoy Zalmay Khalilzad told Kurdish leaders in Ankara last week that they should stand down their 50,000 peshmerga troops and not resist Turkish forces. There’s also an understanding between the Pentagon and Turkey’s military that U.S. forces will occupy Kirkuk and Mosul and handle all the frontline fighting, while the Turks secure the rear. Turkish troops will surround but not enter the major Kurdish cities of Erbil and Suleymaniye and keep a generally low profile to prevent clashes. Abdullah Gul has also promised that “our troops will withdraw when peace is restored.”
That’s the theory. In practice, Kurdish leaders fear that Ankara wants to lay its own claim to oil reserves in Kirkuk and Mosul, and that it intends to strangle the Kurdish ambition of creating an autonomous region within a federal Iraq. They are particularly suspicious of Turkey’s efforts to promote such radical Turkoman leaders as Sanan Ahmet Aga, leader of the Iraqi Turkoman Front. Ahmet Aga wants the Turkomans to be given an autonomous area of their own, covering much of the area of the current Kurdish region, and claims that there are 2 million Turkomans in Iraq–rivaling the nation’s 3.5 million Kurds. Western observers put the number of ethnic Turkomans at fewer than 500,000.
The fault lines are already widening. Aga’s Turkoman party has its own armed militia of roughly 3,000 men; at the party’s cultural center in Erbil, purportedly used mainly for wedding and birthday parties, armed guards walk the surrounding walls. The Turkomans have reason to be nervous. Last week Amir Azad, the party’s defense minister, was arrested at the Chwar Chra hotel in central Erbil by security officials from the Kurdistan Democratic Party. Turkomans quickly took that as evidence of persecution to come–as did the Turkish press, which has begun comparing the plight of the Turkomans to that of Turkish Cypriots, in whose defense Ankara invaded the northern third of Cyprus in 1974 and never left. “We don’t want the Turkomans becoming a Trojan horse for Turkish control,” says a Kurdish official present at last week’s meeting in Ankara.
Such are the challenges facing the United States as it prepares for invasion. One White House official told NEWSWEEK last week that all these issues have been thought through and were not a problem. The bigger issue may be time. Pentagon officials acknowledge frustration with Turkey’s bargaining. But if occupation is the price for Turkey’s cooperation, the United States may have little choice but to go along. Moreover, at Ankara’s insistence, Turkish forces in Iraq will apparently not be under the U.S. command. Instead, they will “coordinate” through a joint headquarters in Diyarbakir, one of the Turkish air bases the United States will use.
Ironically, this is not at all what Turkey wants. Opinion polls show that 94 percent of Turks are against war, up from 88 percent last month. Former foreign minister Ilter Turkmen reflects the fears of many when he warns that Turkish troops could get “bogged down in a swamp” and the conflict could cause problems with Turkey’s application to join the European Union. Not to mention problems closer to home. As Sabah Mohammed in the mountain village of Zewa puts it, “We need only the U.S. Army if there is war with Saddam. Let them bring any other army along with them–except the Turks.”
