Enough is enough

This morning, 3rd April 1996, in the wake of the raid on An-Najah university last week and 18 detentions of Birzeit students - both measures by the Palestinian Authority - around one thousand Birzeit students planned a demonstration in Ramallah to protest. The feeling on campus after the An-Najah raid, which had left several of their students injured by police gunfire, on top of the detention of students from all universities, was that enough was enough. Today in Ramallah, the first actual business meeting of the elected Palestinian Council (Majles Falisteeni) was scheduled to take place and the students wanted to register their discontent. They had ordered buses from nearby Birzeit village but discovered that other Birzeit students - working with security agencies in the Palestinian Authority - were allegedly prepared to threaten the owners of the bus company if the students were transported to "demonstrate against the PNA" in Ramallah. A second attempt to hire buses from a different company similarly failed after similar intervention.

Above right: After two unsuccessful attempts to hire buses, students, holding then student council president Ibrahim Khreishi aloft, set out for Ramallah at 10am.

Student Council President Ibrahim Khreishi, a longtime Fateh (Arafat's faction) activist, had organised the demonstration in coalition with the other campus factions - not to protest against the Palestinian Authority, but against the recent measures taken by the PA. This is an important distiction to make. The students who tried to stop him were part of the same faction - Fateh - but worked for the PA and seemed to think that this demonstration was somehow high treason. Democracy? There could have been 2,000 students or more on the demonstration, but the rather agressively drawn line between loyalty or reality made many want to keep out of what students assumed was to be going to be a bloodbath in Ramallah.

So, the students set off, around 10am, to try to see Arafat. Neither myself and the rest of the Public Relations team knew what was going to happen and to be frank were apprehensive, so we decided to tag along with the students to observe and document the day's events...

Left above: Students marching along the road from Birzeit to Ramallah, carrying banners calling for democracy.

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