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Fatah Sources Says Palestinian PM to Top Candidates List for Elections

Posted on: Tuesday, 13 December 2005, 12:00 CST

Excerpt from report by Fathi Sabbah in Gaza headlined "Quray and not Al-Barghuthi to top Fatah's list for elections because he is from Jerusalem and first Legislative Council Speaker", published by London-based newspaper Al-Hayat website on 13 December

Informed Fatah sources have informed Al-Hayat that a change has been made to the movement's list for the forthcoming legislative elections which will be held on 25 January under which incumbent Prime Minister Ahmad Quray heads the list instead of prisoner Marwan al-Barghuthi.

Al-Barghuthi came second to Quray who did not nominate himself for the preliminary elections (the primaries) in Fatah while Al- Barghuthi did and topped the list of election results in Ramallah.

Sources in the movement's Revolutionary Council told Al-Hayat that a number of Fatah leaders demanded Quray be placed at the top of the list of 132 members for the forthcoming elections, split equally between districts and lists. They attributed this to several reasons, one of them being that he is from occupied Jerusalem, in addition to his being the first Speaker of the current Legislative Council whose mandate has expired and being the incumbent prime minister.

They added that the present Speaker Rawhi Fattuh and Ibrahim Abu- al-Naja, the former deputy speaker and secretary-general of the Higher National and Islamic Forces' Follow-up Committee, would occupy a high place on the list, probably the third and fourth, and pointed out that Central Committee members Hakam Bal'awi and Intisar al-Wazir (Umm-Jihad) would be on the list. Other sources said the deputy prime minister and information minister and Central Committee member Nabil Sha'th and Central Committee member Abbas Zaki would be at the top of the list. But Al-Hayat sources said no-one in Fatah would accept the inclusion in the list of Central Committee members who were not candidates in the internal elections apart from Quray whose nomination at the top of the list is at the request of Fatah leaders. Bal'awi and Al-Wazir contested the preliminary elections, the first in Tulkarm and the second in Gaza. The sources added that nominating Central Committee members who were not candidates in the primaries would create many problems inside the movement which would not accept having "someone parachuted on to the list".

The list includes prominent faces, among them the deputy secretary-general of the movement's Revolutionary Council and youth minister, Sakhr Busaysu and the two women activists Maryam al- Atrash and Niray Busaysu. The list will also include the first winner in the preliminary elections in every district where they are held. [Passage omitted]

Source: BBC Monitoring Middle East

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