A Palestinian civil rights group on Sunday said Palestinian President Yasser Arafat's administration is ignoring a rising tide of lawlessness, including illegal arrests and torture carried out by its own security forces.
Presenting its report for last year at a news conference in Ramallah, the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights (PICCR) said Arafat's Palestinian Authority appeared to be losing its grip on security in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"It is clear that within the Palestinian Authority there is a shortage in decision making," PICCR chairman Mamdouh Aker told reporters. "They are disabled and incapable of enforcing law and order."
Commission director Said Zaydani said that while there were 48 domestic murders in the Palestinian areas last year, police had not only failed to arrest any suspects but had not launched serious investigations.
Palestinians put some of the blame on Israel. During the first part of the current conflict, Israeli forces destroyed numerous Palestinian police installations, charging that the forces were involved in terrorism. Now the police say they are short of facilities.
Aker said the police also turned a blind eye to car theft and failure to license and insure vehicles, while court orders often went unenforced, leading to a danger that vigilante groups would arise to take the law into their own hands.
"When killings and other violations of law take place, and the Palestinian Authority doesn't take serious measures to confront them, the people will not trust the law," he said.
For some time Palestinian analysts and Israeli intelligence officials have warned of a growing wave of anarchy in the West Bank and Gaza, with the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority losing ground to armed militia groups in several areas, while authorities are unwilling to confront them directly for fear of sparking civil war.
"The phenomenon of people taking the law into their own hands is not new in the Palestinian Authority, but it is lately on the rise," Zaydani said.
Tens of thousands of Filipino Catholics yesterday twirled white cloths and chanted “Viva, viva,” as a centuries-old statue of Jesus Christ was paraded through the streets of Manila in the nation’s biggest annual religious event. The day-long procession began before dawn, with barefoot volunteers pulling the heavy carriage through narrow streets where the devout waited in hopes of touching the icon, believed to hold miraculous powers. Thousands of police were deployed to manage crowds that officials believe could number in the millions by the time the statue reaches its home in central Manila’s Quiapo church around midnight. More than 800 people had sought
DENIAL: Pyongyang said a South Korean drone filmed unspecified areas in a North Korean border town, but Seoul said it did not operate drones on the dates it cited North Korea’s military accused South Korea of flying drones across the border between the nations this week, yesterday warning that the South would face consequences for its “unpardonable hysteria.” Seoul quickly denied the accusation, but the development is likely to further dim prospects for its efforts to restore ties with Pyongyang. North Korean forces used special electronic warfare assets on Sunday to bring down a South Korean drone flying over North Korea’s border town. The drone was equipped with two cameras that filmed unspecified areas, the General Staff of the North Korean People’s Army said in a statement. South Korea infiltrated another drone
COMMUNIST ALIGNMENT: To Lam wants to combine party chief and state presidency roles, with the decision resting on the election of 200 new party delegates next week Communist Party of Vietnam General Secretary To Lam is seeking to combine his party role with the state presidency, officials said, in a move that would align Vietnam’s political structure more closely to China’s, where President Xi Jinping (習近平) heads the party and state. Next week about 1,600 delegates are to gather in Hanoi to commence a week-long communist party congress, held every five years to select new leaders and set policy goals for the single-party state. Lam, 68, bade for both top positions at a party meeting last month, seeking initial party approval ahead of the congress, three people briefed by
Cambodia’s government on Wednesday said that it had arrested and extradited to China a tycoon who has been accused of running a huge online scam operation. The Cambodian Ministry of the Interior said that Prince Holding Group chairman Chen Zhi (陳志) and two other Chinese citizens were arrested and extradited on Tuesday at the request of Chinese authorities. Chen formerly had dual nationality, but his Cambodian citizenship was revoked last month, the ministry said. US prosecutors in October last year brought conspiracy charges against Chen, alleging that he had been the mastermind behind a multinational cyberfraud network, used his other businesses to launder
RSS