Arafat's police turn guns on own people

By PHIL REEVES

JERUSALEM - Yasser Arafat's security forces shot at demonstrators in the Gaza Strip yesterday killing at least three, including a 12-year-old boy, as the cruise missiles fired at Afghanistan blew open the perilous rift between the Palestinian authorities and "the street".

The spectacle of protesters being shot dead by their own police - as opposed to Israeli troops - caused an explosion of popular anger and precipitated the Palestinian President's most serious internal crisis for six years.

Unrest continued for hours afterwards, with gunfire echoing through the strip's overcrowded streets as darkness fell.

Angry mobs destroyed police kiosks, overturned cars, set fires, smashed the windows of a Palestinian airline office, and trashed a police station in a Gaza City refugee camp. At least 50 people were injured, including some policemen.

The scenes - which were precisely what the United States and its allies had feared - began when the police attempted to stop thousands of students from Gaza's Islamic University, a Hamas stronghold, from taking a demonstration against the US-British attacks on Afghanistan into the streets outside their campus.

The police were under orders from the Palestinian Authority to clamp down on demonstrations, especially if they expressed support for Osama bin Laden.

An authority spokesman said that the student demonstration had not received an official permit to leave the campus.

Palestinian security forces banned TV cameramen from filming the protests, even detaining some, and later barred foreign correspondents from entering Gaza from Israel. But some footage did escape the censorship. It showed demonstrators brandishing pictures of bin Laden. Spectators said they saw posters saying "Hamas supports bin Laden".

The media ban, crudely applied and self-defeating, was a reflection of the authority's desperate desire to distance itself from the Saudi dissident, for fear that the Palestinians will be accused of condoning the atrocities in America, and branded in the West as supporters of terrorism.

The US atrocities have been strongly condemned by Arafat and his officials, along with the majority of Palestinians who, although highly critical of America's unwavering support for Israel, were horrified by the massacres.

But Israel has tried tirelessly to link the Palestinians, with whom they are fighting a territorial conflict, with the outrages in the US.

The authority's task was made harder by bin Laden's comments on a videotape broadcast on the Arabic language al-Jazeera TV station on Monday, in which he strongly linked his cause with the Palestinians'.

"We don't want crimes committed in the name of Palestine," said the Palestinian Information Minister, Yasser Abed Rabbo, afterwards.

Israel and the US have long been pressing Arafat to confront and arrest Islamic militants, who are especially popular in the impoverished Gaza Strip, as one of the key conditions of a ceasefire.

But with yesterday's blundering attempts to snuff out militant protests, he paid the price. It was the worst incident since May 1995 when the Palestinian police opened fired on a Hamas march in Gaza City, killing 15.

Before the intifada, Arafat and the Palestinian Authority were widely seen in Gaza as corrupt and inept, and willing to sell out the national cause to Israel during the Oslo talks.

Resentment abounded within Hamas - which surveys now show with about 20 per cent support in Gaza - and the smaller Islamic Jihad, especially after their members began to be thrown in jail. The authority's reputation has improved during the intifada.

But the shootings, and Arafat's decision to support the US coalition-building efforts is certain to increase the opposition. He has so far delayed releasing any official public statement on the missile strikes.

The dead included 12-year-old Abdullah Franji and Anwar Akal, 20, a student.

The precise circumstances of the shootings were unclear. Several Palestinian officials claimed that they were committed by masked men, and that the police had only been firing in the air. There were other reports suggesting that gunmen had fired at the police, setting off the shooting. But witnesses at the scene said that the police fired into the crowds who had been throwing stones.

Yesterday's scenes also show what happens when an ill-trained police force, armed with Kalashnikovs, confronts an emotional crowd which is convinced that Islam itself is now under attack.

The latter view appears widespread, even among those Palestinians who condemn the US atrocities and who have no particular fondness for bin Laden.

The missile strikes are also seen by many as an attack on civilians.

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