Bosnian and Afghan refugees could do it. Iraqi refugees will do it this month. Yet Palestinian refugees were denied the vote last Sunday, writes James Bowen
Western politicians frequently lecture the Palestinians on democracy. While the condescension in these sermons is remarkable, the really stunning thing is what has not been mentioned.
The elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about is the disenfranchisement of the Palestinian refugees in the diaspora outside the borders of pre-1948 Palestine. These people, who constitute the majority of the Palestinians, were not allowed to vote in Sunday's election.
According to PASSIA, a well-respected independent Palestinian research institution in East Jerusalem, the worldwide Palestinian population in mid-2001 was 8.8 million. Of these, one million were Palestinian citizens of Israel, 3.3 million were living in the West Bank and Gaza and 4.5 million were refugees in the diaspora.
Since the Palestinian population has one of the highest growth rates in the world, 4.5 per cent per annum, the corresponding figures in January 2005 are higher but it is reasonable to assume that the relative proportions are similar.
Of the millions of Palestinians who are not Israeli citizens, 58 per cent are in the diaspora and only 42 per cent live in the West Bank and Gaza. However, only the latter were allowed to vote on Sunday. While nobody should complain about these people electing someone who will administer their local taxes and services, the problem is that the Palestinian Authority is actually expected to negotiate a treaty which will determine the future of the disenfranchised refugees.
The Israelis want the PA to sign an agreement abdicating the right of the refugees to return to the homes from which they were ethnically cleansed by Israeli troops in 1948.
The right of refugees to return to their homes is enshrined in international law. Palestinian refugees share it with those who fled the conflicts in East Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. The right is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which states that "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country." The fact that this right applies to the Palestinian refugees was underlined by the United Nations General Assembly on December 11th, 1948 in Resolution 194.
The right of return is an individual right. It cannot be given up by the PA on behalf of individual Palestinian refugees. However, if the PA were to sign a treaty which appeared to do so, that very fact would make it even more difficult for the refugees to implement the right that has been denied them for more than 56 years.
There would be some logistical difficulty in enabling the Palestinian diaspora to vote for a body that would be truly representative of the Palestinian people. But precedents show it could be overcome.
Since 1996, the International Organisation for Migration has conducted OCV (out of country voting) programmes for refugees from Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor. A few months ago, the IOM organised the largest refugee OCV programme ever held, giving 850,000 Afghans living in Pakistan and Iran the opportunity to take part in the 2004 election in Afghanistan.
On November 11th, the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq authorised the IOM to conduct an OCV programme that will enable four million Iraqi refugees living in 14 countries to participate in the election scheduled to take place on January 30th.
So, the international community has developed a mechanism which could have been used to give a voice to the Palestinian diaspora in last Sunday's election? Why was it not used?
The primary reason is hypocrisy on the part of an international community which, since 1948, has paid lip service to the Palestinian refugees, but refused to apply sanctions to force Israel to comply with international law. (Contrast this with the fact that, in 1999, NATO went to war against Slobodan Milosevic with the declared rationale of forcing him to allow the Kosovar refugees to return.)
A secondary reason is the misguided policies of the PLO, whose negotiators (prominent among them the recently-elected Mahmoud Abbas), worn down by years of Western hypocrisy and battered by the aftermath of Arafat's disastrous pronouncements on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, accepted the Oslo Agreement in 1993.
As Palestinian academic Joseph Massad has put it: "The Oslo process brought about ... the de facto transformation, indeed the ultimate corruption, of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, from a liberation movement representing the entire Palestinian people, into a vassal regime called the Palestinian Authority (PA), representing only one third of the Palestinian people.
"What is quite insidious in this process is how the PA, conscious of this transformation, continues to speak of the 'Palestinian people', which had been reduced through the Oslo Accords to those West Bank and Gaza Palestinians it now represents. Diaspora Palestinians are simply referred to, in accordance with US and Israeli parlance, as 'refugees', and Israeli Palestinians are referred to by Israeli diktat as 'Israeli Arabs'.
"In doing so, not only has the scope of the Palestinian leadership and its representative status of the whole Palestinian people (achieved in international fora in 1974 after a strenuous struggle) been substantially reduced, but the Palestinian people themselves were diminished demographically by the PA's appropriation of the designation 'Palestinian people' to refer to a mere third of Palestinians."
Sunday's election was a sham, aided and abetted by Western diplomacy. As with apartheid, Western citizens must, by imposing a popular boycott on Israel, lead our governments to a better policy.
