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Abbas Breaks Up Anti-Negotiations Meeting in Ramallah
(Los Angeles Times) Maher Abukhater - Crowds had started to arrive at the Protestant church hall in downtown Ramallah in the West Bank on Wednesday to attend an anti-negotiations conference called by local Palestinian leaders opposed to plans by PA President Mahmoud Abbas to start direct negotiations with Israel, when dozens of young Palestinians, believed to be members of Abbas' Fatah movement and his security forces, moved in waving pictures of Abbas and chanting his name, disrupting the meeting even before it had started. Their purpose was to make sure the conference would not be held. When the organizers, mainly leaders of left-wing Palestinian factions, realized that it would be impossible to proceed with their conference, they took to the streets of Ramallah in a protest march. Palestinian police then intervened to stop the march, charging that the protestors did not have a permit. The organizers of the conference, some of them members of the PLO Executive Committee, then held a news conference at a local TV station where they accused the PA of preventing freedom of expression and called for a commission to investigate what had happened. Abbas quickly agreed.