EU official: Poll shows Palestinians eager to vote in PA elections
By The Associated Press
The head of a European Union delegation of observers to Palestinian elections said Friday that voter registration ahead of a scheduled January 9 Palestinian elections poll shows that Palestinians are eager for democracy.
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Former French prime minister Michel Rocard leads an EU task force of more than 260 observers, who will be joined by others from the United States and Japan for the election to choose a successor to late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
"There is in Palestine an astonishing demand for democracy," he said in an interview with The Associated Press, citing as evidence the high rate of voter registration. "They came in quite fantastic numbers," he said.
Rocard also pointed to a round of local authority elections last week in 26 communities, where 150,000 voters chose among more than 800 candidates.
"The turnout was considerable," he said. "Greater than in many old and
respectable democracies such as Germany, Belgium, Britain or France."
The international community is looking to the election as a key test for the Palestinians after more than a decade of Arafat's autocratic rule since he returned from exile in 1994.
The death of Arafat in November has raised hopes that Israel and the Palestinians can renew peace talks after four years of fighting. The front-runner in the election campaign, Mahmoud Abbas, served as Arafat's first prime minister in 2003.
However, he resigned after just four months in power, frustrated with Israeli policy and Arafat's refusal to grant him real power.
A total of seven candidates are seeking the presidency. Abbas, who has the tacit support of Israel and the U.S., is the favorite to win, according to recent polls. Mustafa Barghouti, a physician and pro-democracy activist, is a distant second.
Rocard said the poll, to be held in territory under the control of the Israel Defense Forces, would be a unique event in political history.
"It's not the habit in the world to have democratic elections under foreign military occupation," he said.
Barghouti says he never meant to run for PA chair In another development, jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti told The Associated Press that he was never serious about running for the chairmanship, even though his brief bid earlier this month posed a serious challenge to Abbas.
Barghouti, a Fatah leader who is serving multiple life terms for deadly
attacks on Israelis, spoke in response to questions submitted by AP.
In comments dictated to one of his lawyers, Barghouti said the announcement of his candidacy had been a way to highlight the plight of the some 7,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails and to call on the Palestinians to continue the uprising, which erupted in 2000, after the collapse of peace talks.
Since then, more than 3,400 people have been killed on the Palestinian side and more than 1,000 on the Israeli side.
Barghouti, who withdrew his candidacy under pressure from Fatah activists, has since endorsed Abbas. However, Barghouti said the uprising would continue until Israel withdraws from all the lands it occupied in the 1967 Middle East war.
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