Fayyad's state: dream or reality?

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, has announced his government's determination to unilaterally proclaim the independent state of Palestine by early 2011, a move that seems more like a dream that will be hard to achieve on the ground, wrote Fayez Rashid in the Qatari daily Al Sharq.     What is important here is the announcement of the establishment of an independent state, but how will this translate in terms of geography, economy, politics and effective authority over the territory?

The Palestinians lived a similar experience in 1988, when the Palestinian National Council proclaimed the creation of the Palestinian state in Algeria. Yet, nothing has changed on the ground. The Oslo Agreements gave the Palestinians an authority, but it is limited to the daily life issues of the population in the occupied territories. Instead of moving towards a state as promised by the Oslo sponsors, this authority, with initially limited prerogatives, is shrinking by the day.

More than 130 countries have recognised the existence of Palestine and have established bilateral diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority since its creation. However, if the planned proclamation of the independent state by Fayyad's government does not rely on the resistance and on historic and geographic facts, it will remain but a dream and a mirage.

The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation - Nato - is acting like a neighbourhood bully, but on an international level, wrote Reda Mohammed Lari in an opinion piece run by the Saudi Arabian daily Al Riyadh. It did so in Serbia and imposed the will of the United States. In Afghanistan, Nato forces conducted a raid against two fuel tankers and killed 90 people, including 40 civilians. The victims were gathered around the trucks to pump free fuel after the two tankers were hijacked by Taliban fighters in the province of Kunduz. International forces in Afghanistan have been repeatedly accused during recent months of conducting arbitrary strikes that caused the deaths of many civilians.

Strangely enough, Nato has practically ceased to have any role at all since the collapse of the Soviet Union back in 1991, which put an end to the division of the world into two blocs - a western one led by the US and an eastern one led by the USSR. The Warsaw alliance disappeared, but Nato remained and even expanded and transformed itself with no legal basis into an international deterrence force at the hands of the US.

The United Nations has ordered an expanded investigation into the raids that claimed civilian lives in Afghanistan and announced the dispatch of a mission that will look into the circumstances of the incident.

Khaled Mishaal, who is a Palestinian leader and a head of state in the Gaza Strip, has only one concern and a single mission: to be ever-ready to defend Iran, wrote Saleh al Qallab in the Kuwaiti Arabic newspaper Al Jarida. According to the columnist, the Hamas leader has become an advocate of the Islamic Republic to the detriment of the Palestinian people's cause.   During a press conference with the Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa, he did not seem to have a single thought about the Palestinian issue and instead jumped to comments on how the US current moves in the region are only an attempt to form a coalition against Iran.

If he did not consider defending Iran a priority, he would have normally in a press meeting like this, urged the US to exert more pressure on Israel to stop all forms of settlements and to respond to international demands. The issue that should be discussed with the US is not Iran, which has multiple channels to talk to the Americans, and no Palestinian leader should have any other concerns but the Palestinian cause, especially in this highly critical period.

Mishaal seems to ignore that Iranians now have a new slogan: "If there is only one lantern, it is better to have it at home than in the mosque." In other words, Iranian money should go to the Iranian poor, rather than to Hamas or the Palestinians.

The Algerian president, Abdelaziz Boutefleka, was scheduled to visit Paris immediately after the Libyan leader, Muammar Qaddafi, and before the Algerian presidential election, but the visit has since been repeatedly postponed, wrote Abdelhamid Benhamla in the Algerian newspaper Al Khabar. The trip was called off because of "deep and central differences" between the two countries. Diplomats in both capitals are trying to minimise the impact of these differences, but the reality is that they have become the prevailing aspect of the relations between France and Algeria. Periods of concord have become circumstantial, commensurate to the importance of economic and commercial opportunities that arise.   Issues of conflict are multiple and the demand by Algiers for an official French apology for crimes committed during the war of liberation is only one of them. In this regard, Paris believes that the French president Nicolas Sarkozy's statements in Algiers and Constantine during his last state visit should have relieved the tension between the two parties.

For Algiers, the demand remains legitimate and of paramount importance. * Digest compiled by Mohamed Naji mnaji@thenational.ae

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