Threat: Palestinian Political Prisoners in Israel

Part I

Analyses

1

The Centrality of the Prisoners’ Movement to the Palestinian Struggle against the Israeli Occupation: A Historical Perspective

Maya Rosenfeld

INTRODUCTION: A PERSISTENT ISRAELI POLICY OF MASS IMPRISONMENT

By the latter months of 2009, approximately 7,000 Palestinian prisoners, residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), were being held in Israeli jails, detention compounds and interrogation facilities. Some 5,000 of them (approx. 70 percent) had been sentenced to various imprisonment terms, around 1,500 (approx. 20 percent) were detainees awaiting their sentence and slightly less than 300 were administrative detainees (held without trial).¹ Nearly 85 percent of the prisoners were residents of the West Bank; Gaza residents comprised some 10 percent of the total and East Jerusalemites the remaining 5 percent.²

In comparison with most recent years, 2009 saw a decline in the number of prisoners, which ranged between 7,952 and 8,595 during 2008, and between 8,441 and 9,344 during 2007, and which reached a peak of around 9,600 in October 2006.³

Nonetheless, as is clearly evident from the above and additional figures, the post-Oslo era, which started with the outbreak of the second Intifada in late September 2000, was and remains marked by an especially high incidence of detentions of Palestinians by the Israeli army, police, and GSS (General Security Service) on the grounds of what is referred to as security offences.⁴ Indeed, it was recently estimated by the former statistician of the Palestinian National Authority’s (PNA) Ministry of Prisoners and former Prisoners’ Affairs that approximately 69,000 Palestinians were detained between October 2000 and November 2009, among them 7,800 children (youths under the age of 18) and 850 women.⁵

Yet, when placed within the broader perspective—that of 43 years of Israeli military occupation over the Palestinian territories—the figures on prisoners and detentions in the post-Oslo era appear as part of a continuum, evidently a striking one: According to another estimate by the Ministry of Prisoners and former Prisoners’ Affairs, approximately 650,000 Palestinians had been arrested in the course of four decades of Israeli military control (between June 1967 and April 2006),⁶ this with respect to a population that numbered around 1 million in 1967 and around 3.8 million in 2006. While this approximation is most probably far from accurate due to inadequate counting methods and to the lack of distinction between hours-long arrests and long-term imprisonment, it is nevertheless very important. No matter what the number of incidents that would be subtracted following the necessary adjustments, the final figure will remain extremely high by all standards.

The statistics are indicative, therefore, of the persistence of an Israeli policy of mass imprisonment in reaction to the varying manifestations of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s military occupation. One main exception to this generalization is traced to the Oslo period (1994–October 2000), which opened with a mass release of political prisoners and continued with a marked decline (albeit not a complete cessation) in the scope of detentions and imprisonment.⁷ A second major exception pertains to Palestinian women, who despite the noticeable role they have played in the ranks of all the political organizations and their widespread participation in grassroots anti-occupation activism, did not become subjected to mass imprisonment at any stage.⁸

Taking the persistence of an Israeli policy of wide-scale imprisonment as an overriding structural factor, then, the current chapter seeks to examine the effect that this condition has exerted upon the Palestinian struggle against the Israeli occupation from the time of its inception in the aftermath of the 1967 War to the second Intifada.

THE PERVASIVENESS OF THE PRISON EXPERIENCE: SOME SOCIAL MANIFESTATIONS

That mass imprisonment has had a fundamental impact on Palestinian society in the OPT is amply manifest in a range of spheres and areas. To start with, it is rare to find a family in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip that has not experienced the incarceration (even if short-term) of at least one of its male members and many a family has faced the imprisonment of two or more members. In a survey that I conducted in 1993 among hundreds of households in the Dheisheh refugee camp, I found that 47.8 percent of the men who then belonged to the generation aged 25–40 had experienced some form of imprisonment for periods ranging from several weeks to 15 years; nearly 85 percent of the families of origin of these young men experienced the imprisonment of at least one male member and 58 percent of the families faced the imprisonment of two or more of their male members.⁹

The pervasiveness of imprisonment, including that of administrative detention, was particularly high during the first Intifada (December 1987 through 1992), during which time it significantly surpassed the current (post-October 2000 through 2009) incidence of the phenomenon. Cases wherein three and even four brothers were held simultaneously in Israeli jails (at times in the same prison) were not uncommon; I recall the words of a Dheisheian father to four sons, then in their early, mid and late twenties, all of whom had spent time in jail when they were in high school or at university, and all of whom were detained again during the first Intifada and held under administrative detention: Just as it was clear to me that every living creature eventually dies, it became evident that every Palestinian man would eventually be taken to prison.¹⁰ The lengthy—at times decades-long—active participation of the prisoner’s family members, especially that of female members, in caring for their prisoners and their needs and the fact that similar experiences, toils and hardship were shared by the majority of families were grounds for profound socialization and politicization processes; this gave rise to novel social formations on the community and regional levels, first and foremost of which was the solidarity networks of prisoners’ families.¹¹

For the tens of thousands of families whose male members spent years behind bars, the imprisonment experience also implied an economic setback as a result of the prolonged absence of the imprisoned husband/son/brother and the subsequent loss of the latter’s contribution to the household income. Such disruption commonly gave rise to a new, alternative division of labor in the family, often based on female primary providers, that is, the prisoner’s wife, mother and/or sister. To this one should add the detrimental impact of the interrupted high school or college education of many a prisoner, and the enormous difficulties of finding employment encountered by former prisoners. Indeed, up until the establishment of the PNA and the subsequent mass recruitment of former prisoners into its security forces and to various other branches of its public sector, the overwhelming majority of former prisoners faced lengthy unemployment that often rendered them economically dependent on their families of origin (in the case of the unmarried) and/or on their wives (in the case of married ex-prisoners).¹²

Turning to the public political sphere, the impact of mass imprisonment is most directly discernible in the biographies of entire strata of political officials, public figures and community leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. The centrality of the imprisonment experience to their ascent became exposed to the Israeli public, albeit on a rather superficial level, during the Oslo years, when the media zoomed in on a rank of prominent political figures, most of them members of the middle and younger generation of al-Fatah movement, who grew up and came of age in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: Jibril Rajoub, Kedura Fares, Marwan Barghuthi, Sufian Abu Zaida, Hisham Abd al-Razeq and Hussein al-Sheikh are just a few examples of the more well-known names. The common denominator for all included seniority in Israeli prisons (some had served prison terms of over 15 years), a most impressive command of Hebrew, remarkable familiarity with the dynamics of Israeli politics, and an unequivocal support of Palestinian participation in what was then the peace process, in line with the political program of the PLO. The conspicuousness of the prison years in the life stories of this generation of leaders ran parallel, more or less, with the salience of events and episodes such as Black September (aylul al aswad), the Beirut years (ayyam Beirut) and the Lebanon War (1982) in the biographies of their peers, members of the military, political and administrative apparatus of the PLO, who returned to the OPT in the wake of the Oslo Accords after decades of exile.

THE FORMATIVE NATURE OF THE PRISON YEARS

As emerged unambiguously from the many dozens of interviews that I conducted with former political prisoners in Dheisheh, the formative nature of the prison years in terms of the contribution to the political education and maturation of the individual was not merely a derivative of the long time periods that activists spent in Israeli jails, although the latter factor was undoubtedly a weighty one. Rather, it is traced back to the process by which Palestinian prisoners succeeded in organizing themselves inside Israeli prisons and building what they referred to as an internal order/organization/regime (nitham dakhili), which countered the imposed prison order and challenged it. While the roots of organizing in prison go back to the early years of the Occupation (the late 1960s and early 1970s), the prisoners’ organization, or as it is alternatively named, the prisoners’ movement, gained ground in the second decade of the occupation and possibly reached its peak in the mid- and late 1980s and the very early (pre-Oslo) 1990s.¹³ What made the counter-order especially powerful was its all-inclusive, indeed total nature, embodied in the attempt and more so in the ability to encompass and address all spheres of the prisoner’s daily life, starting from the material conditions and basic facilities in the prison cell and from the fundamental necessities of those confined to it, continuing with education (formal, non-formal, political), and culminating in the prisoner’s ongoing (daily) participation in political discussion and democratic decision making.¹⁴

Much evidence appears to support the generalization that none of the organizations and movements that gained ground in the OPT during the 1970s and 1980s, not even the most progressive, socialist-oriented factions of the Palestinian left, was able to implant and sustain equally comprehensive programs and institutions as those that were upheld by the prisoners’ organization.¹⁵ This unique nature of the prisoners’ organization received ample manifestation in the accounts of former prisoners, which attributed clear transformative qualities to their participation in the prisoners’ order and in the organized studies program in particular. Indeed, dozens of my interviewees underscored similar aspects of the change they underwent and often employed similar expressions and metaphors when they evaluated the differences between before and after (the prison experience). For example:

Before being in prison, I was connected emotionally to the national struggle, but in jail I became connected to it intellectually and ideologically. It was in prison that I read the theory. Love of the homeland became more rooted, for two reasons: my discussions with other people and my reading pamphlets and books ….¹⁶

Given the pervasiveness of the prison experience in the life histories of generations of Palestinian activists and given the seminal impact that it bore for individuals and families, the main part of this chapter attempts to draw an outline for the analysis of the interrelationship between the development of the organization/movement of Palestinian political prisoners inside Israeli prisons and between the development of the national-political struggle against the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.

THE INTERRELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE PRISONERS’ MOVEMENT AND THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL MOVEMENT IN THE OPT UP TO OSLO

The first general observation that I elaborate on is that, when put in historical perspective, the growth and consolidation of the prisoners’ movement in the OPT coincided with the gradual transformation of local resistance to the Israeli occupation into a full-blown, mass-based, decentralized movement; a distinct yet indivisible branch of the Palestinian national movement and, as such, affiliated with the PLO. One should bear in mind that when Israel took over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the 1967 War, the two territories were ruled and administered by different regimes: the West Bank had been officially annexed to the Hashemite Kingdom in 1950, and the Gaza Strip was under Egyptian military rule. By that time, various shades of Palestinian nationalism had struck root in both territories, mainly through the influence and under the banners of three movements, all of which had been outlawed by the two regimes: the Movement of Arab Nationalists, which promoted Arab nationalism and upheld the ideal of Arab unity; the Fatah movement, then still in its infancy, which espoused particular Palestinian nationalism and an independent Palestinian struggle, and the Communists (the Jordanian Communist Party in the West Bank and the Palestinian Communist Organization in Gaza; both originating from the Palestine Communist Party), which continued to endorse the partition plan (the two-state solution) throughout. Activism in the two territories took place separately, however, and was largely shaped and determined by local circumstances; by no means was there, at the time, a unified, cross-country platform of Palestinian national action.

The immediate aftermath of the 1967 War saw a steep decline in the popularity of Arab nationalism among Palestinians in Palestine and the Diaspora and a corresponding upsurge among them in the appeal of distinct Palestinian nationalism. Influenced by the anti-colonial, revolutionary struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, and elsewhere the emergent independent Palestinian organizations— including the by-then senior al-Fatah and the nascent PFLP and DFLP—adopted guerrilla warfare as a core element in their strategies of national liberation. Yet the attempt by al-Fatah and others to build and sustain an infrastructure of armed struggle in the West Bank and Gaza was aborted, before long, by the Israeli army and intelligence, and thousands of young men who took part in this endeavor were quick to find themselves in prison.¹⁷

Alongside the latter group of aborted fighters, the first generation of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, those imprisoned between 1967 and 1975, also included thousands of youths who had been apprehended by the Israeli army on grounds of their association with locally based and often locally initiated clandestine formations that engaged in sporadic, most often uncoordinated acts of violence against the army, and yet others, much fewer in number, who were involved in terrorist action against Israeli civilians. The great majority of these prisoners were very young and inexperienced, lacked military and political training, and exhibited only a loose affiliation with the factions of the Palestinian resistance movement.¹⁸ In prison, they met with a particularly harsh regime that denied them the most basic human needs and rights; extremely over-crowded, cramped rooms, lacking, or rather, absent facilities, unhygienic conditions, insufficient and bad-quality food, a prohibition on books and on writing utensils, the excessive use of violence and physical punishment on a regular basis, were among the most common features.¹⁹ On top of this, they were denied official recognition as political prisoners and were dealt with instead by the Israel Prison Service (IPS) as security prisoners, more commonly referred to as terrorists. As emerged from the accounts of veteran former prisoners, the attempts to build a prisoners’ organization/counter-order during these early years centered mainly on the struggle to improve prison conditions. The following excerpt from the panoramic testimony of Noah Salameh, a former prisoner who entered prison in 1970 at the age of 17 and was released in 1985, is revealing:

One can say that our struggle was conducted hour by hour and day by day around every right and every subject. We paid a high price for the notebook, the book, the mattress, the blanket, the shower and for food and health care. It is important to remember that conditions differed from one prison to another, and this too was a deliberate policy adopted by the authorities. You found that something that you had fought for in one prison for months was a recognized right in another prison.²⁰

Starting in the latter part of the 1970s and increasingly so in the 1980s, the population of Palestinian prisoners underwent some noticeable changes, reflecting the broader transformations and developments that affected the political arena in the OPT at the time. Most conspicuous among the latter were the rise of the PLO to prominence as the widely recognized, legitimate representative of the national aspirations of the Palestinians; the emergence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip of public political formations, specifically the Palestinian National Front (PNF) and the National Guidance Committee (NGC), which openly accepted the leadership of the PLO, rallied on a day-to-day basis against the military occupation and supported (in the 1970s) a platform for a political settlement along the lines of the two-state solution; and the subsequent demilitarization, decentralization and diversification of the resistance to the occupation, which was led by all factions of the Palestinian national movement from the early 1980s onwards, and which found expression in the proliferation of popular committees and unionist formations, among students, women, workers, local communities and so forth.²¹

In contrast with his predecessors from the late 1960s and early 1970s, then, the prisoner of the 1980s was most unlikely to have taken part in an attempt to launch a guerrilla attack (as such attempts had been all but liquidated by 1970) and neither was he likely to have been engaged in clandestine armed activity or terrorist action. Rather, he was prone to have been imprisoned on the grounds of affiliation with al-Fatah, the PFLP, DFLP, or the Communist Party (all of which had been banned), and of activism in the network of associations and institutions that were set up by each of the factions. Among the most dynamic and appealing of these were the committees of high school students and the unions of university students, which had taken root in the early 1980s and were behind much of the popular protest action at the time. The decentralization of the national movement and the diversification of its spheres of action implied, therefore, that the prisoners of the 1980s came from all sectors of society and from all geographic locations and boasted a high representation of secondary school students and a considerable representation of university students and graduates. These interrelated changes in the background of imprisonment and in the composition of the prisoners’ population empowered the internal organization inside prison; the youngest, least experienced and least educated among the prisoners directly benefited from the presence of the more veteran activists and especially of those with higher levels of education. The latter now contributed significantly to the education programs that were developed and run in prison: they taught languages, history, economics, and even natural sciences and mathematics to their fellow cell and ward-mates and they usually played an instructive role in the political education programs of the organizations with which they were affiliated.

However, and this is the second observation I propose, while the prisoners’ movement was certainly affected by the affairs and factors that shaped the national movement at large, its course of development was determined to a no lesser degree by internal affairs, namely, by the day-to-day struggle of the prisoners to maintain a united and effective organization and to pursue the fight for basic rights in the face of the prison order and the IPS. This struggle was in many respects autonomous of the movement outside, because it was conducted under the extreme conditions of the prison cell, the prison ward and the prison regime, because it centered around the material and intellectual survival of those who sustained it, and because it demanded and depended on an especially high level of discipline and commitment. As already mentioned above, perhaps the most unique achievement, the flagship of the prisoners’ movement at the time, was in the sphere of education. Education programs, including general studies (history, languages, sciences) and studies of political theory and ideology, were introduced in prison through the fostering, and indeed through the enforcement, of daily schedules that allocated special time-slots for individual studies, instructed reading, group discussions of study materials, political meetings for the discussion of current (external and internal) affairs, and so forth. Political meetings, as well as studies of political ideology, were conducted separately on the basis of organizational (factional) affiliation, whereas participation in the study of general academic subjects was voluntary and open to all (cross-factional) and organized on the level of the cell or section. The building and upholding of the education enterprise inside Israeli prisons rested, therefore, on three pillars. First, a very tight, union-like, cooperation between the political factions that comprised the prisoners’ movement ran all the way through, from cell and ward level to that of cross-prison coordination. Secondly, within each faction, a highly animated, highly compelling group life centered around ongoing discussion, debate and democratic decision making. Third, foremost priority was accorded not merely to educational attainments but rather to the educational process itself (the enlightening impact of knowledge building) and to the resultant transformation of consciousness.²² It was the sustenance of the education venture as part and parcel of the all-embracing internal order that enabled a powerful prisoners’ collective to be forged and that continuously gave rise to highly esteemed leaders and leaderships from within its ranks.

Building on this premise, I maintain further, and this is a third observation, that during a critical time period in the history of the Palestinian struggle against the Occupation, starting in the mid 1980s and culminating with the first Intifada, the prisoners’ movement enjoyed a prominent position within the OPT-based branch of the Palestinian national movement and in the public at large. In the backdrop of this ascent stood the relocation of the central arena of the Palestinian resistance movement in the aftermath of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, from exile to the OPT. To recall, between the end of the 1960s and the invasion of 1982, the central leadership, the bureaucracy, the military apparatus and the intricate network of institutions of the PLO and of each of its constituting organizations were allowed to operate on Lebanese soil, in accordance with the Cairo Agreement.²³ This Palestinian enterprise was brought to an end in the wake of the mass destruction that was wrought by the Israeli aggression and the concomitant expulsion of the PLO, rank and file. Thereafter, Palestinian institution building and popular resistance became confined mainly to the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Here, the coupling of the omni-presence of the Israeli military throughout the territory with the weakened position of the exiled PLO leadership pushed the local leaderships away from armed struggle and in the direction of further reliance on mass-based structures, of setting up broad coalitions, and of articulating a joint political agenda that accorded major priority to ending the occupation and achieving independence.²⁴

The culmination of this trend of development is epitomized by two of the formations that were most commonly identified with the first Intifada: the United National Leadership of the Uprising (UNLU, al qiyada al wataniya al-muwahada, known by the initials QWM) and the popular committees. The UNLU, which comprised prominent representatives of all the OPT-based factions of the PLO, directed and scheduled the day-to-day program of the Intifada by means of bi-weekly communiqués and formulated the political message of the revolt. Locale, region and sector-based popular committees had already proliferated in the mid 1980s as the grassroots branches of the political organizations. Following the eruption of the Intifada, the number of locally based committees multiplied sevenfold and they assumed the major role in running the day-to-day affairs of communities in the face of Israeli military measures such as prolonged curfews, denial of utilities and services, army raids, mass arrests, school closures, and so forth, as well as in organizing community-based protest activities, such as demonstrations, processions, commemorations, etc; hence the committees constituted both the building-blocks and the backbone of the uprising.²⁵

Returning to the prisoners’ movement in light of all the above, it appears justified to review it as both a forerunner and an extension of the Intifada-related structures: a tight and effective cross-factional cooperation underscored the leadership and the rank and file of the prisoners’ organization from its very early days, years before cross-factional coalitions materialized at large and decades before the emergence of the UNLU. Similarly, the operation of a network of committees that covered all affairs of the prisoners constituted the nuts and bolts of the prisoners’ internal order more than a decade before popular committees appeared on the horizons of West Bank and Gaza Strip activism. In this respect, both the underlying features of the leadership and the organizational structure of the prisoners’ movement served as a model for the development of the major formations that enabled the uprising and led it. At the same time, however, the prisoners’ movement was constantly being fed by the growth and spread of the popular committees, especially after the latter were officially declared illegal in a decree that the Israeli military government issued in August 1988, eight months into the Intifada.²⁶ In the wake of this Israeli policy, thousands of activists, very young, young and older, who had joined the ranks of the committees ended up in prison, where they were soon absorbed in the existing prisoners’ organization or in the establishment of similar structures in the newly erected detention compounds, such as the Ketziot prison that had been set up in the midst of the Negev Desert especially to accommodate the inflow of Intifada detainees. In this latter respect, then, the prisoner’s movement constituted an extension of the struggle against the occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. To conclude, then, there existed an empowering dialectical relationship, wherein the organization that Palestinian political prisoners set up inside Israeli prisons was pivotal to the formation of the key structures that led and sustained the popular struggle against the Israeli occupation, and where, at the same time, the mass imprisonment of grassroots activists eventually led to the reinforcement of the prisoners’ organization.

A complementary factor that continuously enhanced the position of the prisoners’ movement in the Palestinian public sphere was the ongoing interaction between prisoners and their families back home. Contact was facilitated mainly through the relatives’ visiting days at the prison sites, which took place on a regular, bi-weekly basis, albeit under a host of restrictions.²⁷ Tens of thousands of visitors from all regions and locales of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, consisting mainly of female family members of the prisoners, took part in these bi-weekly journeys to the prison and detention compounds on a continuous, durable basis. In the great majority of cases, family visits developed over the course of time into junctures of transmission, wherein a measure of the prisoners’ culture and ethos was passed on to the regular visitors, in particular their mothers, sisters and wives. Whatever had been captured by visitors in the moments of union and exchange with their loved ones, be it a description of the deteriorating imprisonment conditions, a hint about a possible hunger strike, the story of an ill mate that had been denied proper medical treatment, or the title of a recommended book, was eventually rendered subject for further discussion or action either in the circle of the family and kin group or in the wider support networks that were set up in solidarity with the prisoners and in concern over their needs.²⁸ Consequently, the prisoners’ issues and cause were being relentlessly addressed, constantly acted upon, so to say, by a significant and, at the time, an ever growing portion of Palestinian society.

A good indication of just how elevated was the status of the prisoner’s movement in the years under review can be obtained from the scope of the public reaction to prisoners’ related affairs and events. To take the most salient case, prisoners’ strikes, especially hunger strikes—the ultimate manifestation of the organized struggle of political prisoners—seldom remained an internal matter confined within the prison’s boundaries. Rather, no sooner did a strike successfully cross the initial days of trial and gain some momentum then the public began to mobilize in solidarity with the striking prisoners and their demands: the political factions would call out for protest action; committees in each and every town, village and refugee camp would organize daily rallies, demonstrations and processions in support of the strikers, events which were regularly met with violent reaction on the part of the Israeli military, including the use of live ammunition, and which ended, at times, with fatalities. An illuminating example of the stimulating, indeed galvanizing, impact of the prisoners’ movement is that of the hunger strike initiated by the central leadership of the prisoners’ organization in September 1992, which lasted for 15 days (September 27 through October 12). It was estimated that more than 12,000 prisoners were held in Israeli prisons at that time, but the Intifada was long past its peak and popular action of the form that characterized the first two years of the uprising had almost died out. Yet news of the hunger strike and the fact that it was observed simultaneously in all the prisons and detention centers sufficed to bring back to life the by-then dormant popular structures. Most spectacular, perhaps, in the chain of the prisoner-centered activities were the sit-in solidarity hunger strikes of prisoners’ mothers, which took place in front of the International Red Cross offices in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nablus and Gaza City. The cross-country solidarity campaign accompanied the hunger strike for more than two weeks until its successful conclusion with the acceptance of a majority of the prisoners’ demands by the Israeli authorities.²⁹

IN THE WAKE OF THE OSLO ACCORDS: MASS RELEASE OF PRISONERS, INCORPORATION INTO THE PNA APPARATUS, AND DISINTEGRATION OF THE MASS-BASED POPULAR STRUCTURES

If the mass mobilization that followed the prisoners’ strike of October 1992 signaled a revitalization of the empowering interaction between the prisoners’ movement and the OPT-based branch of the Palestinian national movement, then this revival did not last for long, as both constituent components of the interrelationship were soon to undergo far-reaching changes. In September 1993, the until then secret channel of Israeli-Palestinian negotiation that took place in Oslo culminated in the signing of the Declaration of Principals (DoP) between the government of Israel and the PLO, which was subsequently followed by a series of interim agreements between the parties. And while the Oslo Accords did not bring about an end to Israel’s military control over the West Bank and Gaza, the Accords nevertheless gave rise to two major developments that critically affected both the national movement at large and the prisoners’ movement, namely, the establishment of the PNA and the mass release of political prisoners. This, then, is my fourth observation, on which I elaborate below.

The founding of the PNA in 1994 set in motion three contradictory processes that directly bore on the national movement, and which can only