Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, asserted in a recent op-ed in The New York Times that the PLO leader had become the Palestinians' president through "a democratic election in the West Bank and Gaza which was well organized, open, and fair."
Such a conclusion, however, would have to stand on more than the observation that an election was held in the West Bank and Gaza in January 1996 in which Arafat received nearly 90 percent of the votes. After all, plenty of dictators do that well in elections aimed principally at reinforcing their rule, and this phenomenon is particularly widespread in the Middle East.
A real look at the question of Arafat's legitimacy, therefore, has to involve a more serious examination of the origins of his rule in the wake of the 1993 Oslo accords-and particularly the crucial two-year period in which he established the Palestinian Authority and paved the way for himself and his loyalists to win a landslide victory at the polls. Such an accounting reveals a disturbing picture, of a PLO leadership that-after having been brought in from Tunis amid widespread jubilation-used every means at its disposal to ensure that the Palestinian voter would have only one viable option as to which political party would represent him, and only one real candidate to vote for as president. Under these conditions, Arafat's landslide victory was not an expression of democratic will, but rather a testament to the success of the measures he employed.
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