Palestinian Authority Broke and In Disarray

Official Calls Collapse 'A Real Possibility'

By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 1, 2004; Page A11

RAMALLAH, West Bank -- Three years and five months after Palestinians began their second uprising against Israel, the Palestinian Authority is broke, politically fractured, riddled with corruption, unable to provide security for its own people and seemingly unwilling to crack down on terrorist attacks against Israel, according to Palestinian, Israeli and international officials.

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Edward G. Abington, a former State Department official who is now a Washington consultant to the Palestinian Authority, said he told Arafat during a meeting at the Palestinian leader's bombed-out compound here recently that the governing body was in danger of collapse.

"Let it collapse," Arafat said, according to Abington. "It will be the fault of Israel and the Americans."

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French prosecutors recently revealed that they were investigating whether Arafat's wife, Suha Arafat, who resides in Paris, improperly received more than $10 million in authority funds. The International Monetary Fund said in a report issued last fall that more than $900 million in public funds were "diverted" to Israeli private bank accounts controlled by Arafat and his financial adviser or to other uses for which the IMF said it could find no full accounting.