Arafat promised strong opposition

THE Palestinian president elect, Mr Yasser Arafat, faces an invigorated opposition in the 88 member Palestinian Council, elected at the weekend and announced yesterday.

Dr Haidar Abdel Shafi, of the opposition National Democratic Coalition, said that Mr Arafat and his Fatah Party, with control of 61 seats, would face a stiff challenge from the 27 seats won by independents, Islamists and others.

Dr Abdel Shafi, who headed the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid peace conference, secured the largest number of votes in Gaza City. He intends to press Mr Arafat hard to share power and to respect human rights.

Dr Hanan Ashrawi of Jerusalem, the only candidate to run a western style political campaign, can also be expected to do so.

There are also a number of independents who have their own agendas for social and political reform.

The candidate who won on a grand scale in the little town of Bethlehem, Mr Salah Ta'amari, is such a man. A member of the local Ta'amari Bedouin tribe, he rose to the rank of colonel in the military wing of the Fatah movement, was captured by the Israelis during their 1982 invasion of Lebanon and held in prison for three years. He later married the divorced wife of Jordan's King Hussein and became active in the struggle for women's rights. He was denied an official Fatah ticket because of his opposition to Mr Arafat.

The list in the Ramallah District, adjacent to Jerusalem, was topped by two other militant independents. They are Mr Abdel Jawad Saleh, the deported Mayor of Al Bireh who served on the PLO Executive and the Palestinan National Council (its parliament in exile), and Mr Qadoura Faris, who spent 14 years in Israeli prisons as a Fatah militant but was removed from its list after he was promoted by Intifada activists.

The credibility of the first Palestinian general elections has been dented for some by the fact that it took the election commission 48 hours to count the votes and announce the final results.

"People are saying that something strange is happening," Dr Sari Nusseibeh, a former member of the Palestinian peace team, said. "How can it be that 60 ballot boxes disappear in the Hebron district and suddenly reappear?"

He was critical of the European Union and international observers for abandoning the count after the first hours, thus permitting possible tampering with the results.

"They gave us a clean bill of health and left before the process was complete," he said.

Dr Ashrawi, the former PLO spokeswoman, who came top of the poll in Jerusalem, has asked for an investigation of the count as her rival, Mr Ahmad Qurei, a close associate of Mr Arafat, suddenly acquired 2,000 votes".

. Tunisia confirmed late last night that it had agreed with Israel to open an "interest section" in TelAviv, with Israel doing the same in Tunis, as announced earlier by their foreign ministers in Washington.