RAMALLAH, West Bank — Yasser Arafat called Wednesday for broad reform of the Palestinian Authority, but his speech met with a tepid and skeptical response from the Palestinian parliament.
The speech to parliament, which was devoid of details, came a day after Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon made reform of the Palestinian Authority a condition for resuming peace negotiations, but it appeared to bring the two sides no closer together.
“He tells the same old lies,” said Ra’anan Gissin, a spokesman for Sharon, dismissing the promise of reform.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, on the plane returning from a NATO foreign minister’s meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, said he welcomed Arafat’s speech.
“I’m encouraged that he would talk about reform in the same terms that we have talked about reform and others have talked about reform,” Powell said.
While Israel’s rejection of Arafat’s speech was unsurprising, the cool response of Palestinian legislators suggested rising dissatisfaction among his own people with corruption and the ineffectiveness of his government. The legislators offered only occasional, polite applause for the aging leader as he stumbled through his speech.
“This government has to resign and to give the opportunity to form a new government,” legislator Hanan Ashrawi, a former Arafat aide, said after the speech.
“It’s not important what he says, but the important thing is what he does on the ground,” added fellow legislator Hatem Abdul Qader, leader of Arafat’s Fatah political movement in East Jerusalem. “We want something practical; we want a very big change in the economy and in the Cabinet. We need to build security (agencies) under the law, not above the law.”
Arafat called for reforms within his single-party government and the first elections in six years, although he did not specify when they might be. Parliament Speaker Abu Ala later said he expected elections to choose leaders of unions and political factions at the local level to be held by the end of the year.
Arafat was equally vague about what sorts of reforms were needed, but described the need “to rectify the mistakes.”
“We must look into all the aspects of our lives, to rebuild our political system,” he said.
He accepted blame for controversial deals that ended Israel’s siege of his headquarters in recent weeks and the roughly six-week standoff between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli troops at Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. In those deals some Palestinians went to prison under international administration, and others were sent to Europe for exile.
“I bear all the responsibility,” Arafat said. “There are always mistakes in every movement, all over the world.”
He used language President Bush had encouraged, calling for peaceful resistance rather than attacks on Israel. Gone were the once-popular references to a million martyrs marching to Jerusalem.
Outside the Palestinian Legislative Council, where Arafat spoke, people expressed little interest in the speech.
Demonstrations that the Palestinian Authority organized to mark the establishment of Israel on the Gregorian calendar were poorly attended. The annual march to protest “al Nakba” — The Catastrophe — drew only about 100 participants, many of them school children recruited to carry flags. In past years, al Nakba protests drew tens of thousands of marchers.