U.S., Saudis Seek New Leadership to Replace PLO

DAMASCUS, Syria —  The United States, Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries are working together to recruit new Palestinian political leaders who could replace the Palestine Liberation Organization and negotiate toward peace with Israel, senior U.S. officials said Thursday.

The effort includes discussions of Saudi financial aid to Palestinian groups willing to work outside the PLO and actions by Arab governments to support moderate challengers to Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, U.S. and Arab officials said.

So far, several prominent Palestinians approached by the United States have rejected the idea of going around the PLO, but American officials say they believe that those objections will gradually weaken.

The aim of the plan, in the eyes of U.S. officials, is to find Palestinian leaders who would be acceptable negotiating partners for Israel, which has long rejected any talks with the PLO because of the organization’s links with terrorism.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Kuwait have an additional motive, Arab diplomats said: They want to overthrow Arafat for having backed Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in the Persian Gulf War.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III discussed the plan on Thursday in Cairo with Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, before flying on to Damascus for talks with Syrian President Hafez Assad, the official said.

“(The Saudis) know that they and other Arab states have a role to play in . . . helping to promote Palestinians from the territories who can engage the Israelis,” a senior official told reporters traveling on Baker’s airplane. “There are different ways to do that. There are political ways, ways designed to sort of create more of a sense of political support for Palestinians who would be stepping forward. There are financial ways, especially given the level of economic deprivation and difficulty in the territories now.”

“We’ve talked to the Saudis as well as others,” he said. “Every one of the Arab states that we’ve spoken to, we’ve talked to about this issue of how you can help ensure that there’s going to be a Palestinian track” in future Arab-Israeli negotiations.

Prince Saud “made it very clear that (the Saudis) are not funding the PLO,” the official added.

Saudi Arabia cut off its aid to Arafat’s organization last year, after the PLO leader publicly supported Hussein.

Arafat has said that, in the wake of the Gulf War, Arab aid to the PLO has plummeted from $300 million a year to only $40 million. Saudi Arabia was the organization’s biggest single donor, giving--according to some Palestinian estimates--as much as $100 million in some years.

Because of the funding cut, the PLO has had to lay off employees at its Tunis headquarters and other offices.

More important, if Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states begin funneling large amounts of aid through an alternative leadership, the new leaders would try to buy the allegiance of the 1.7 million Palestinians who live under Israeli occupation.

Three prominent Palestinians from the Gaza Strip traveled to Egypt and Saudi Arabia early this month, and Palestinian analysts described the visit to Saudi Arabia as a means of obtaining funding for economic and public projects in Gaza City. Since Saudi Arabia has announced it will not funnel money through the PLO, the visit essentially sets up a mechanism for substantial funds to flow into the city without passing through the PLO.

Israel is planning to eventually grant a form of unilateral autonomy to Gaza, an impoverished city surrounded by refugee camps. There have been reports for months that Israel wants to dispense with its responsibility for much of the Gaza Strip, which is overcrowded and full of slums, a land of open sewers, dirt roads and high unemployment. Letting Saudi money foot the bill for economic development and public works would relieve Israel of a burden it has been reluctant to carry.

In the Arab world, local politics frequently resemble old-fashioned American machine politics: The faction that controls the money hands it out to benefit old supporters and attract new ones, through both legitimate government projects and straightforward bribes.

Still, there has been no sign yet that the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip are straining to bolt from the PLO.

Faisal Husseini, the head of a Palestinian delegation that met with Baker in Jerusalem on Tuesday, gave the secretary of state a letter explicitly endorsing the PLO and rejecting any “attempt to construct an artificial alternative Palestinian leadership.”

The Saudi drive to dislodge the PLO, if carried out, would be the first real effort to reverse the action of an Arab summit meeting in 1974 that declared Arafat’s organization “the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.”

But the Saudi royal family has been furious with the PLO for supporting Hussein--whom they viewed as threatening their hold on their own kingdom--despite their years of financial support. Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, publicly derided Arafat as “a clown” and vowed that his government would cut the PLO down to size.

After meeting with the Saudi foreign minister in Cairo on Thursday morning, Baker met with the Syrian president in Damascus for more than five hours.

Times staff writer Daniel Williams, in Jerusalem, contributed to this article.

BACKGROUND

Challenge is nothing new to Yasser Arafat. Since assuming the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization in the late ‘60s, he has been challenged not only by Israel but also by a number of Arab governments as well as splinter groups within the Palestinian guerrilla movement. In 1970, King Hussein’s troops forced him from Jordan. Arafat survived. In 1982, Israeli troops drove his forces from Lebanon. Arafat survived. He chose the wrong side in the Gulf War. Still he survives.