Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with Kuwait Emir H H Sheikh Sabah Al Ahmad Al Jaber Al Sabah in Kuwait, yesterday. Abbas made the first visit of a Palestinian leader to Kuwait for more than two decades.
RAMALLAH: President Mahmoud Abbas must form a government aimed at Palestinian national reconciliation after the resignation of premier Salam Fayyad, a high-ranking member of his party said yesterday.
“The president must hold consultations with Palestinian movements to form a national unity government and set a date for elections,” Azzam Al Ahmed, a leader of Abbas’ Fatah party, told the official Voice of Palestine radio. The secular Fatah, which controls the West Bank, has been at odds for years with its bitter rival the Islamist Hamas that governs the Gaza Strip, partly over a disagreement on Fayyad as prime minister.
Hamas never recognised his authority, continuing instead to recognise its own premier, Ismail Haniyah. The Palestinian elections commission said on Friday it was “ready to carry out elections if the order is issued by the presidency,” after releasing the results of what it called a successful drive to register more voters in the West Bank and Gaza. More than 1.86 million Palestinians, or 82.1 percent of the electorate, are now registered, it said.
The timing of the announcement — followed a day later by Fayyad’s resignation — was “favourable to discussions on forming a national unity government,” said Ahmed, who is in charge of reconciliation with Hamas.
Fatah and Hamas signed a reconciliation deal in Cairo in 2011, pledging to set up an interim consensus government of independents that would pave the way for legislative and presidential elections within 12 months.
But implementation of the accord stalled over the make-up of the interim government, and a February 2012 deal signed by Abbas and Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal in Doha intended to overcome outstanding differences was opposed by Hamas members in Gaza.
The United Nations yesterday praised Fayyad for being a “valuable partner for the international community,” in a statement from its Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Robert Serry. Serry “recognises that Fayyad had to contend with circumstances that kept constraining the success of the state-building agenda he led together with Abbas and which is now — in the absence of a credible political horizon — at serious risk.”
Reports says Mahmoud Abbas is likely to keep Prime Minister Salam Fayyad in office for the next few weeks while the United States tries to revive Middle East peace talks. Abbas accepted the resignation of Fayyad on Saturday, adding a layer of uncertainty to local politics just when Washington had resumed efforts to end the generations-old conflict between Palestinians and Israelis.
However, officials close to Abbas said they expected Fayyad, who is widely respected in the West but much less so among his own people, would carry on in a caretaker capacity until it became clear if anything would come from the US drive. US Secretary of State John Kerry met both Abbas and Fayyad last week and is expected to return to the region before the summer to continue his consultations aimed at reviving negotiations that collapsed in 2010.
“It looks like the president will wait to see the result of the two months that Kerry has asked for before he nominates a new prime minister,” said a senior official close to Abbas who declined to be named. Palestinian law stipulates that Abbas should appoint a successor within two weeks. However, the president himself has overstayed his own mandate by four years and parliament has not met for six, indicating flexibility in the rulebook. The Palestine Liberation Organisation, of which Abbas is the chairman, is due to meet on Thursday to discuss the situation.
The outcome of Kerry’s mission could determine the replacement for Fayyad, who has been prime minister since 2007 and is credited in the West with developing Palestinian institutions primed for independence.
Should Kerry fail to overcome the many hurdles blocking the route to talks, then Abbas might decide to pursue reconciliation with his rivals in the Islamist Hamas movement, which rules the Gaza Strip, and seek to form a national unity government.
Abbas might seek a technocrat candidate, whose presence in government would not be perceived as an obvious threat to Hamas, such as Mohammed Mustafa, the head of the Palestinian Investment Fund. But if reconciliation remains stymied by mutual recrimination, Abbas might decide to hand the premier’s job to an ally within his own party, Fatah, giving back to it all the levers of power within the Western-backed Palestinian Authority.
Fahmy Al Zaarir, a senior Fatah official, wrote on his official Facebook page that there were two options for a replacement for Fayyad: “Either a government headed by the president as a substantial step towards concluding reconciliation ..., or a national government in the West Bank that should be led by a member of Fatah’s Central committee,” he wrote.AFP/Reuters
