The unliberated PLO

Proudly, justly, Palestinians have long insisted that once they were free of Israeli occupation they intended to construct a polity different from the police states surrounding them in the Arab world.

Yasser Arafat himself commonly boasted that his people were being prepared for life in a pluralist society by what he called the democracy of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Some Palestinian intellectuals even explained, with relish for the implied paradox, that oppression at the hands of Israeli democracy had instilled in their community the hunger for a similarly open society.

So there is something desolating about the arrest of a Palestinian newspaper editor for not placing a flattering article about Arafat on Page 1.

Maher al-Alami, editor of the most-read Palestinian paper, Al-Quds, was summoned to Arafat's headquarters in Jericho by the boss of Arafat's security service, Jibril Rajoub, because a story about Arafat's audience with the Greek Orthodox patriarch had appeared on an inside page. Arafat's office had originally called the paper to order publication of the article on the front page.

``But by mistake and because the first page was loaded with Arafat news, the report was published inside,'' a colleague of Alami told Reuters. According to his staff, the editor was arrested in Jericho. Pleas for his release have thus far been ignored.

The pettiness of this attempt to bully the Palestinian press into the subservient posture of a propaganda organ for Arafat's cult of personality belies earlier hopes and promises. Sadly, it has become part of a pattern of authoritarian governance. But the Palestinian people do not want political tyranny to become the price for national independence.

Too many Palestinians know about the Lebanese journalist who had his hand dipped in a vat of acid for writing something displeasing to Syrian ruler Hafez Assad. They know that journalists in Iraq are nothing but shills for Saddam Hussein's own cult of personality.

This was not what they had in mind during their long struggle for liberation.

This story ran on page 14 of the Boston Globe on 12/28/95.