Middle East Grief and Anger in Nablus

By William E. Smith

Bobbing and dipping above the heads of the crowd of 50,000, the plain wooden coffin was borne through the narrow streets of Nablus, the largest town in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. At the front of the funeral procession, among mourners with drums and cymbals, fluttered the black, white, green and red flag of the Palestinians. Groups of youths, their faces hidden by kaffiyehs, flashed the V sign. Here and there among the hundreds of black-bordered portraits of the dead man were pictures of Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The deceased: Zafer al Masri, 44, the slain mayor of Nablus, who was buried early last week in a highly charged atmosphere of grief and anger.

Al Masri, who was appointed mayor only last November by the Israelis, was shot on the morning of March 2 outside the Nablus municipal building. Though he was a Palestinian moderate with close ties to Jordan, his funeral turned into the largest show of public support for the outlawed P.L.O. that has been seen in the West Bank since the territory was occupied by Israel in 1967. The mourners also displayed their displeasure with Jordan's King Hussein, who last month announced that he had broken off political ties with Arafat following the failure of the two men to find a common approach to the Middle East peace process. "Hussein, you pig, your hands should be tied!" they shouted. "No Hussein! No Assad! Only the P.L.O.!" After winding through the town for nearly two hours, the procession approached the blue-domed Haj Mazuz al Masri mosque, which had been built by the slain mayor's uncle. There, the body was removed from its coffin, passed overhead from hand to hand into the courtyard of the mosque, and buried in a stone tomb covered with a marble slab.

So far, Israeli authorities have detained as many as 20 Palestinians in connection with the shooting, but have apparently made little progress in solving the murder. Prime Minister Shimon Peres told the Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee that the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or the notorious Abu Nidal group was "probably" responsible for the killing. Both Syrian-backed, anti-Arafat groups accused al Masri of being an Israeli collaborator, and Abu Nidal also called the assassination "a warning" to Arafat and Hussein. Some Israeli sources, however, did not rule out Arafat's own Fatah organization as the culprit. Had the mainstream P.L.O. wanted to hit back at Hussein, Mayor al Masri would have been a logical target. Not only had his appointment received Jordan's tacit approval, but his family is part of the Jordanian Establishment. His elder brother Hikmat is deputy speaker of the Jordanian upper house, and his nephew Taher is Hussein's Foreign Minister.

^ Whoever was responsible, the assassination was a setback for what little is left of the peace process that has evolved from the 1978 Camp David accords (see box). It undermined King Hussein's hopes of finding partners among moderate West Bank Palestinians to replace the recalcitrant P.L.O. Equally, it was a serious blow to Prime Minister Peres' plans for returning the administration of the major towns to moderate Palestinians after three years of direct military control. And it was a savage tragedy for a distinguished family that has taken a lead in trying to improve the quality of life on the West Bank. In the wake of al Masri's assassination, three other moderate mayoral candidates all announced that they were unavailable because they did not want to "discredit the leadership of the P.L.O." The likelihood is that they simply feared for their lives.

Throughout the Middle East, it was a bad week for the forces of moderation. In Beirut, four French television crewmen were kidnaped on Saturday by unknown gunmen. Earlier, the shadowy Islamic Jihad, believed to be the umbrella organization that includes Shi'ite Fundamentalist groups like the Iranian-backed Hizballah (Party of God), announced that it had killed French Researcher Michel Seurat, 37, one of the four other Frenchmen kidnaped in the Lebanese capital during the past two years. Six Americans and one Briton are still missing. The reasons for the alleged murder: retaliation against the French for their pro-Iraq policy in the gulf war and for the recent expulsion from France of two opponents of the Baghdad government, who were sent back to Iraq and possibly executed. At week's end the report of Seurat's death, which is what brought the four TV journalists to Beirut, had not been confirmed.

In Egypt, Cairenes were slowly recovering from the effects of rioting by 17,000 security policemen. The official toll: 107 killed and 719 injured, roughly three times the number originally reported. The riots' apparent cause: discontent of police conscripts, angry over poor pay and living conditions, who were soon joined by Fundamentalist agitators. The mutiny was quickly put down. In the short term, the government of President Hosni Mubarak was not seriously damaged by the ordeal. But with the country's economy a shambles, any new government austerity measures could provoke another explosion of rioting by the urban poor that not even the disciplined and professional Egyptian army would be able to contain.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Cairo and Roland Flamini/Jerusalem