Palestinians Say Israeli Aim Was to Destroy Framework
By SERGE SCHMEMANN
The New York Times
April 16, 2002
RAMALLAH, West Bank — In one room of the Palestinian Ministry of Education, the litter of papers, glass, paper clips and periodicals was ankle-deep. The filing cabinets had been ransacked, and some toppled. Personal computers sat on the desks, their hard drives ripped out.
In another room, the Israeli soldiers had blasted open the safe. The explosion brought down the suspended ceiling there and in adjoining rooms, leaving a mess. Dr. Naim Abu Hommos, the deputy minister of education, said the safe had been used to keep all school test records since 1960. All were gone, he said, along with 40,000 shekels — about $8,500 — that had been kept there for petty cash.
That was the Ministry of Education. The neighboring Palestinian Legislative Council meeting hall was torn apart, and officials said the video archives of its sessions were gone. At the Ministry of Agriculture, the door had been blasted open by an explosion that also took out all the windows, and a neighbor said Israeli soldiers had filled two armored personnel carriers with boxes, presumably of records. It was the same at the Ministry of Industry.
At the Ministry of Health, visitors were blocked today by Israeli soldiers packing duffel bags and boxes of food into two armored personnel carriers. They had apparently stayed in the building, perhaps using it as a position for observation and sniping. An officer said the visitors could come back in an hour, but today's five-hour lifting of the curfew had almost run out.
Similar reports came from all across Ramallah — offices in ruins, files and hard drives gone. The Ministry of Civil Affairs, the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Ministry of Finance, the Land Registry, the municipal administration buildings of Ramallah and neighboring Al-Bireh, including its library, had all been raided.
Many private institutions had been similarly invaded. The windows of the elegant Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center were smashed, the records of the Palestinian Insurance Company were gone, and there were many more examples.
With only a few hours to circulate in the streets while the Israeli Army lifted the curfew on a city still under siege, and with Israeli tanks or barriers forcing many unexpected and inexplicable detours, a quick inspection tour by officials of the World Bank and the United Nations could give no more than a preliminary overview of the damage and the losses.
But even an abridged tour showed signs of a systematic effort by the Israeli Army to strip institutions of the Palestinian Authority of as much data as possible, with some apparent pillaging on the side. Officials at afflicted ministries and institutions said money was missing, as well as laptop computers, RAM modules, pocket organizers, video players and other items.
"What they are doing, and what is not being noticed enough, is that they are destroying all the records, all the archives, all the files, of the Palestinian Authority," said Yasir Abed Rabbo, the Palestinian minister of information. "This is an administrative massacre, and this will lead to chaos."
An Israeli military officer said the reason for seizing documents from the ministries was the same as for seizing them from Yasir Arafat's compound in Ramallah, namely, "to see what's going on there."
"That's the idea," the officer said. "A lot of these places turn up unexpected things, by accident. Documents have a very important value."
But the officer said it was not Israel's intention to have the Palestinian Authority collapse.
Officials of the various international organizations that have been trying to build Palestinian institutions for self-rule said the damage to Palestinian records and data was a very high price to pay for the possibility of finding some incriminating information. They said the Israelis seemed not to have made a distinction between the political leadership and the civil service.
Nigel Roberts, the World Bank country director for the Palestinian areas, who toured Ramallah today for a preliminary assessment of the damage, said the Israeli actions represented a serious setback for international donors. "What is ironic here is that the donors have been building these institutions, inter alia, at the request of the state of Israel," he said.
The damage to the ministries is only a fraction of the destruction up and down the West Bank from the Israeli incursion. But in contrast to the physical damage, the loss of data could create long-term complications. At the Finance Ministry, officials said all payroll data for the Palestinian Authority seemed to be gone, so paying salaries, benefits and insurance to teachers, hospital workers, civil servants and police officers would pose a serious problem.
Salah Soubani, director of the information department at the Ministry of Education, said the Israelis had searched the ministry twice. He said that in the first raid, tanks and armored personnel carriers smashed through the iron gate, and that the soldiers made him open doors in case of booby traps.
He said he tried to argue that the ministry served children, that it was protected by Unesco. "The soldier just smiled and told me to go outside," he said. "I waited six hours in the rain."
Dr. Hommos, the deputy minister of education, said the immediate priority was reopening schools, many of which had been used by the Israeli Army for barracks or temporary detention facilities. "I think we have to raise the question of giving Palestinian children the right to go back to school," he said, adding that with curfews and restrictions through the West Bank, it would not be easy.
"This is the Israeli people searching for peace," he said sadly. "This is how you put peace in our minds, and in our children?"
nytimes.com |
