PLO Parliament in Exile Meets to Bury the Hatchet

ALGIERS, Algeria — The Palestine National Council, the “parliament in exile” of the Palestine Liberation Organization, convened in Algiers on Monday to debate and approve an agreement ending the bitter policy disputes that have deeply divided the organization for the last four years.

Among those attending was George Habash, leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the largest and most important of the radical dissident factions that split with PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat in 1983 over what they saw as his conciliatory policies toward Israel.

The radicals set up the rival Palestine National Salvation Front in Syria. The Syrian government, under President Hafez Assad, has sought to oust Arafat as leader of the PLO in a feud dating back to the mid-1970s.

Habash told a news conference that he hopes it will be possible to “re-bridge” the PLO’s relations with Syria, which opposed the reconciliation with Arafat, but he added that “the coming days should clarify this.”

The unity accord, reached Sunday after a week of intensive negotiations in Algiers among the representatives of eight Palestinian guerrilla factions, climaxes months of reconciliation efforts mediated, at various stages, by Algeria, Libya and the Soviet Union.

PLO sources said Arafat is expected to visit Moscow after the council session ends later this week.

One of the most radical groups taking part in the talks, the Revolutionary Council of Fatah, led by Abu Nidal and considered outside the PLO, left Algiers shortly before the conference opened. Palestinian sources described this as a face-saving maneuver adopted after it became clear that the other factions would not admit Abu Nidal, who has been blamed for the assassinations of a number of more moderate PLO officials, back into their ranks.

Radical Groups Don’t Attend

Several other Damascus-based radical groups, among them the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command led by Ahmed Jibril and a breakaway faction of Fatah led by Abu Moussa, did not take part in the reconciliation talks. But Palestinian sources predicted that at least some of these smaller splinter groups will rejoin the PLO, now that the “Big Three” factions--Arafat’s Fatah, Habash’s PFLP and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by Nayef Hawatmeh--have agreed to close ranks.

Details of the unity accord, which must now go through the motions of being debated and passed by the rubber-stamp council, have not been announced. But its salient points, according to Palestinian officials, include a significant stiffening of the PLO’s position toward peace negotiations with Israel and an agreement to broaden the PLO leadership and to abide by its consensus.

That could prove difficult, however, since the unity accords, a patchwork of compromises, look less like a genuine reconciliation than an agreement to disagree forged from weakness on both sides, analysts said.

Shunned by Arab radicals and faced with attempts by Jordan’s King Hussein to sidestep the PLO in peace talks with Israel, Arafat badly needed the unity accord to bolster his increasingly isolated position in the Arab world, the analysts said.

The radicals, for their part, have been increasingly alarmed by Syrian attempts to control them and to eliminate the PLO’s armed presence in Lebanon.

Concession by Arafat

Arafat’s key concession to the radicals was to abrogate the 1985 Amman Accord, in which he and King Hussein adopted a joint position toward peace talks with Israel.

Under the accord, Arafat agreed to joint Jordanian-Palestinian representation at future peace talks, with the aim of negotiating for the establishment of a Jordanian-Palestinian confederation on the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

On Sunday, shortly before the Palestinian council convened at a heavily guarded conference site outside Algiers, the PLO Executive Committee declared that the PLO will attend an international peace conference only as a full and independent participant, not as part of a joint delegation.

In abrogating the accord, however, the Executive Committee’s statement was careful not to blame Hussein for the collapse of the initiative, and it pledged that the PLO will search for “a new basis of work with Jordan.”

This was a considerably milder statement than the one originally sought by the Habash-led radicals and reflected Arafat’s desire to “keep the bridges open to Jordan,” a PLO official said.

Habash also compromised with Arafat on another of the radicals’ key demands--severance of the PLO’s relations with Egypt.

A resolution to be adopted by the council will state that relations with Egypt henceforth will be based on the resolutions passed at previous Arab summit meetings, which called for Egypt’s isolation after its signing of the 1978 Camp David Accords with Israel.

The agreement, however, leaves it up to the PLO leadership to decide how and when to sever its ties with Egypt, a deliberate vagueness that PLO sources predicted will allow Arafat to keep open the Cairo connection.