World

Events in the Middle East continue to move
rapidly. First there was the visit to Washing-
ton by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir
during which he proposed a form of limited
elections for West Bank and Gaza. This was
quickly followed by a visit to France last week
by Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine
Liberation Organization. The Tribune spoke
with the PLO representative to Ottawa,
Abdullah Abdullah who provided this analy-
Sis:

Chairman Arafat’s visit to France was
extremely historic and important at this
stage. It will certainly contribute to the
advancement to the cause of peace and will
pave the way for the convening of the inter-
national peace conference — especially
since (French) President Francois Mitte-
rand and (Soviet) General Secretary Mik-
hail Gorbachev, some three years ago,
agreed on forming a preparatory committee
to convene the international peace confer-
ence. This visit undoubtedly contribute to
the advancement of this initiative.

During his visit to France, Arafat was
asked by the media about the Charter or
Covenant of the Palestine National Council
where in some articles it referred to the
destruction of Israel. However, our Charter
never dealt with the destruction of Israel,
but it did call for the elimination of Zionism
as a political ideology that has caused all the
disasters for our people. ,

Chairman Arafat said, however, that the
resolutions which were adopted by the
Palestine National Council last November
at least superseded two articles in the Char-
ter. Since we have accepted the partition,
the article calling the 1947 partition plan
illegal is superseded. Also, in the Charter we
considered the Balfour Declaration and all
that stems from it, including the creation of
Israel as null and void. But now, in our
resolutions. adopted last November, we

CPSU changes echo ‘perestroika from below’

MOSCOW — Almost exactly four years
after the famous “April plenum” that
initiated the perestroika revolution, another
Central Committee meeting of the Com-
munist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU)
last month has caught everyone by surprise
with sudden, bold and sweeping change.

The April 25 plenum produced, as eve-
ryone knows by now, mass resignations of
party leaders, involving almost one-third of
the members of the- Central Committee.
This staggering precedent was accompanied

FROM
MOSCOW

by tough debate and harsh assessments of
the state of affairs in the country.

Not surprisingly, the event is being
viewed in the West mostly in traditional
terms, as “another Gorbachev triumph” in
which he has “further consolidated his per-
sonal power’ within the party organs.
Words like “purge” and even “putsch”
have been bandied about.

But perhaps it’s time to lay aside the
sterile precepts of cold war Sovietology —
which interpreted virtually all Soviet histor-
ical phenomena in terms of the ideology,
psychology and manoeuvrings of party
leaders — and recognize the extent to
which perestroika is being powered from
below. The significant shifts which are tak-
ing place within the structure and practice

8 e Pacific Tribune, May 15, 1989

Vote must be UN-supervised, says PLO

‘Before an election is held, Israel must
withdraw its military forces from the
occupied territories ... and we expect
international supervision to ensure that
the election process is duly respected.

— Abdullah Abdullah

agreed to the establishment of an independ-
ent Palestinian state alongside the Israeli
state.

In addition, the Charter describes the
armed struggle as the only means for the
liberation of Palestine. But by supporting
moves to convene an international peace
conference and supporting the negotiating
process as an acceptable means of achieving
peace in the Middle East, we certainly
superseded that article in the charter on
armed struggle.

In fact, Chairman Arafat’s comments in
Paris last week were in line with the resolu-
tions of the Palestine National Council. But
coming directly from him at this stage in
these clear terms, gives added importance to
what before was left to the readers of the

resolutions to interpret. He clearly outlined -

how we view these resolutions and the scope
of what they mean.

Concerning Israeli Prime Minister Sham-
ir’s proposals for elections: here we have
procedural problems with his proposals
because our experience with Israeli elections

have not been good. Our experience from °

the last election, held in April, 1976, was
that, out of 116 officials elected, 96 were
PLO supporters. Secondly, the Israeli
government deposed all of them before
their term expired, with the exception of the

of the CPSU are not the result of Gorba-
chev brainwaves or any simple struggle for
power: they are responses to, and an inte-
gral part of, an immense social upheaval, a
revolution which is already well advanced.

As recently as last July’s 19th party con-
ference it would have been impossible to
convince any number of Central Commit-
tee members who no longer held politically-
relevant jobs or positions that they must
resign and make way for new blood. Events
since then, however, have writ the message
so large, and so clearly, upon the wall, that
even the most myopic cannot fail to read it.

Above all, the general elections demon-
strated that the Soviet people want pro-
found and sweeping change, without delay.
It is just impossible to misinterpret that
vote: people want bureaucrats, careerists
and bumblers out; they want competent
reformers and hard-working doers in. They
presented the party with one of history’s
most unambiguous mandates for action.

As Gorbachev put it in his closing
remarks to the plenum, the elections dem-
onstrated that “the vast majority of Soviet
people do not imagine their country’s future
without perestroika, without recovery and
renewal based on socialist values. This is the
main political result of the elections, as well
as of all the past four years of intense work.”

There is a set of very serious challenges
facing the country, from the repeated out-
breaks of national unrest in several regions
to a persistent economic malaise. The
CPSU’s Central Committee responded to
that late last month by trimming its own
deadwood and streamlining its decision-
making process.

Nor is this likely to be the end of it. Over
the months and years to come, the party will
be facing tough restructuring and redefining
of itself as it seeks to draw in and accom-
modate new social forces, and to creatively

mayor of Bethlehem. Many were jailed,
others were deported and still others were
subjected to assassination attempts. The
mayor of Nablus, for example, had both his
legs blown off in a car bombing. As you can
see, our experience isn’t very positive when
it comes to Israeli-supervised voting.

We see Shamir’s proposal as a gimmick
to buy time to try to suppress the intifada.
We do not oppose elections in principle, but
we do oppose Shamir’s plan which calls for
Israel, as an occupying power, to conduct
the vote according to its own rules and on its
own terms.

The PLO’s response to Shamir’s plan is
that certain conditions must be met in order
to make these elections viable, and that they
might contribute to the peace process. Elec-
tions should not be seen as an end in them-
selvés, they must be a means to achieving
peace and stability in that part of the world.

This means that before an election is
held, Israel must withdraw its military for-
ces from the occupied territories. Second,
we expect international supervision to
ensure that the election process is duly
respected and that the vote is conducted in a
free and democratic way. This includes:
who will participate in the elections, who
will run as candidates, what issues are to be
debated, and under what circumstances will

absorb the tremendous energies that peres-
troika has unleashed.

It is becoming risky and foolish to make
any sort of statement these days about “the
limits of glasnost” or about sacrosanct top-
ics in Soviet history or politics that no jour-
nalist or citizen would dare to touch. The
barrier is likely to be falling even as the
pundit speaks.

This may eventually drive a great many
of our Western journalists to accept the
need for radically new methods of work in
their coverage of the USSR. Over the past
four years or so, as they ever-so-slowly
began to recognize the genuineness of glas-
nost, the big media has almost exclusively
obsessed itself with defining limits rather
than documenting and describing the pro-
cess in its own right. It is usually clear that
things have changed, again, when we see
that the goalposts have been shifted.

During the five weeks I spent on a speak-
ing tour across Canada recently, I found
myself continually being asked about such
limits, and could only respond that I believe
the process of glasnost, in principle, is to
open up all things for scrutiny, debate and
discussion, but that in practice this cannot
happen overnight or without struggle.

One person, a professor of Russian his-
tory, confidently told me that despite the
many ‘‘amazements” of the past few years,
it is not thinkable that the present Soviet
leadership will ever permit anything by
Alexander Solzhenitsyn to be published in
the USSR, at least while the author still
lives, since that would constitute “too
much” even for Gorbachev. Well, upon my
desk is sitting the February 1989 issue of the
Soviet Peace Committee’s magazine, 20th
Century and Peace, containing Solzhenit-

syn’s story, “To live without lies,” and word

is that the journal Novy Mir — despite
admitted resistance from some authorities

“from the U.S., perhaps to try and show hi

‘again?

the campaign be conducted so that these
urgent issues can be freely debated.
Here we would suggest that the United
Nations, which is doing precisely this in
Namibia, might assist in guaranteeing free ~
elections in the Israeli-occupied territories.
As we know, in Namibia it was necessary
for the South African forces to be with-
drawn and for the UN to act as supervisors
to ensure any free election process. We
would like to borrow this same example —
that the United Nations supervise the elec-
tions and call in Israel to withdraw its
occupation forces as was done in Namibia.
We know that the Palestinians have
already made it clear that the PLO is their
representative. In the 450-seat Palestine
National Council, there are 180 seats
reserved for the Palestinians in West Bank —
and Gaza Strip. And since Israel does not
allow these seats to be filled or for West —
Bank and Gaza to participate in the sessions —
of the National Council, we would welcome ~
such an opportunity to have elections and ~
to elect these representatives so they can —
take their seats in the PNC and proceed
with the peace process toward achieving —
peace between Israel and Palestine. +
Asked about the heroic resistance, nowin —
its second year, the PLO representative rep-
lied; “As long as the occupation continues.
the intifada will go on. The intifada is
response to the occupation, it is a cry for —
freedom. Should the occupation end, the —
intifada will automatically end. But we see
an increase in military repressive measure. —
“Even before Shamir returned home

resolve to end the intifada by force, we again
see a massacre of Palestinians by Israel for:
ces in a village near Bethlehem. Our people ©
must continue to respond to Israeli efforts
to suppress them and prevent them from
expressing their opposition to occupation.”

— will shortly be printing the novel Cancer
Ward. ie

I was frequently asked: what about
Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing —
Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in ~

1956? That’s still an unexploded bombshell, ~

-when are they going to publish it? “Gee, I

dunno,” I had to answer. Now I find it’s”
already done: the new CPSU publication,
the Central Committee Herald, did that in
its March, 1989 edition. :
Oh yes, you can say anything you like —
about Stalin these days, but you’re not
allowed to criticize Lenin, are you? That
particular restriction apparently didn’t
occur to the editors of the journal, Nauk I
Zhizn, who have just finished publishing a
four-part series of articles by philosopher
Alexander Tsipko, which argue that the ~
original Bolsheviks bear a heavy responsi-
bility for Stalinist historical outcomes.
Then what about Trotsky, the traditional
bete noire of Soviet politics? Surely he’s still _
untouchable? Actually, Trotsky has been
making a gradual historical comeback for
almost two years now, appearing again,
without heavy polemical overlay, in text-_
books, encyclopedias and documentary —
films. His undoubted role as revolutionary —
leader, founder of the Red Army and anti- —
Stalinist opposition figure has been recog-
nized in a variety of ways. Now the journal,
Gorizont, is planning to print some of -
Trotsky’s memoirs this summer. And, last
April 24, the highly popular television even-
ing news-and-views program, Tiatoe Koleso,
— whichis like a cross between 60 Minutes,
The Journal, and the Donahue Show, only —

- intellectually much sharper — ran a special

feature on Trotsky, noting his contribu-
tions, blaming Stalin for his murder, and -
calling for his rehabilitation.

Oops, I lost them. Where are those limits _