Fatah leaders: Results of voting in Fatah congress rigged

Fatah leaders: Results of voting in Fatah congress rigged

[ 12/08/2009 - 10:23 AM ]

GAZA, (PIC)-- Two prominent Fatah leaders from Gaza Strip accused officials in the Fatah’s sixth congress in Bethlehem city of forging results of the elections for the faction’s central committee, urging Mahmoud Abbas not to announce the official results till the issue is resolved.

Ahmad Nasr, who contested the elections for the central committee but failed, asserted that the results were forged and did not reflect true opinion of the participants in the conference.

“What had happened is indeed a catastrophe that would lead to a new stage of political degradation that the entire Palestinian people would pay the price for” underlined Nasr in a statement he issued in this regard.

He added, “Simply, I want to say that those who were declared as winners weren’t the real winners, and results of the elections express only the personal will of those who have money and political influence”.

“It is not Fatah only that would be buried but the entire Palestinian issue if those fabricated results were endorsed and ratified, and I urge the honorable people in Fatah to profoundly read the results and to take decisive decisions on what had happened”, Nasr underscored.

Another comrade of Nasr, Ibrahim Abul Naja decried deliberate marginalizing of a broad sector of Fatah leaders in the Gaza Strip, explaining that the congress ignored votes of most of Fatah leaders in the Strip.

He said that Fatah leaders in the Gaza Strip weren’t given an equal chance to vote as their peers in Bethlehem did although they were full-fledged members of the congress and registered with the conference’s preparatory committee.

Abul Naja, who had also run for the central committee post but failed, claimed that the congress failed to contact many Fatah members in the Strip to cast their votes, and that those members were still waiting their turn to vote.

At least 14 of the 18 unofficially proclaimed winners of the central committee were “new faces”, including the disgraced Fatah leader Mohammed Dahalan who was accused by Farouk Kaddomi, the veteran Fatah leader, of assassinating the late Fatah legend Yasser Arafat along with Mahmoud Abbas who was elected to the highest post in the central committee.